As Joe approached the house from below, he murmured into his radio. Moments later, looking up from the foot of the ladder, he saw Maria open the trapdoor for him. On the level above her a door was standing slightly open inside the house, letting enough light through from the upper floors for Joe to see to climb.
'Anything new?' he asked Maria, as she closed and latched the trapdoor behind him.
'Only that this house contains about a thousand fossils, and a million Indian arrowheads and things. When you look at it closely, it's quite a museum, though I guess none of the stuff that's left here is really valuable.'
'Must have been here for decades.'
'Joe?'
'Yeah?'
Maria looked around as if to make sure that they were quite alone. 'About your brother-in-law?'
'What about him?'
'Just that I noticed both of his little fingers are missing.'
'You're observant.'
'Well, it's none of my business, of course, but I was just wondering how that happened.'
Joe gave the young woman a level, thoughtful look. 'A vampire pulled them off,' he told her at last. 'When John was sixteen.'
Maria's lip curled slightly. 'All right, Boss, just asking. I admitted it was none of my business.'
'Ask John if you don't believe me.'
Following a silent Maria back upstairs, Joe noticed a few trophy heads of big game, deer and mountain lion primarily, like those decorating the lobby at El Tovar.
In a small room on the middle level of the house they encountered another scattering of Indian artifacts, pottery and arrowheads and little figures woven of twists of bark.
Sarah joined them here. 'Well, Mr. Keogh?'
'We're watching the house, front and rear, Mrs. Tyrrell.'
'My nephew will be relieved. Now, I think, we can begin to discuss the matter of my grandniece.'
'Yes, I think we'd better.' Joe leaned against a log wall, watching the old lady carefully. 'Mrs. Tyrrell, did you leave your husband or did he leave you, back in the thirties?'
'I left him,' Sarah answered after a moment.
'Why?'
'You should ask, rather, why I stayed with him so long.'
'All right, why did you?'
'I loved him, I suppose. Do you know, Mr. Keogh, the age of the oldest rocks in the bottom of the Canyon?'
'I have no idea.'
Maria, obviously not understanding any of this, was still watching and listening carefully.
Sarah Tyrrell said: 'Some of the oldest exposed rocks on earth are down there—notably the Vishnu schist, almost two billion years old, metamorphosed from ocean sediments. That intrigued Edgar from the start, you see; something that had been made an infinity of ages before there ever was a Canyon.'
'Mrs. Tyrrell, does this have something to do with—?'
'Yes, it does, Mr. Keogh. The whole matter is a question of time, you see, and of the efforts people make to deal with time and to control it. In that Edgar is far more successful than most.'
Maria was squinting at the old woman in total incomprehension.
Sarah went on: 'Down there is also something called the Great Unconformity—not a layer of rock, but rather an absence of layers, somewhat more than half a billion years old, that might be expected to be present. In among those absent strata, somehow, is where Edgar built another house—and in that house I refused to live.'
Joe was nodding, as if he understood at least partially. 'Did you have any children?'
'What does that matter now?'
Joe stared at her a moment, and then gave up. 'I don't know. Just curious. Let's get back to Cathy. You told me you think she's in a place nearby.'
Sarah nodded.
'Where is that place, Mrs. Tyrrell?'
'To reach it, Mr. Keogh, I think you must be capable of finding it for yourself. I cannot tell you how—nor can I any longer show you. I am too old, and my heart too tired and my legs too weak for canyon trails.'
Several hours after sunset, all was quiet in the Tyrrell House and its immediate vicinity. Maria, established in a comfortable chair near one of the bedroom fireplaces, found herself having to fight to keep from nodding off after a long day.
Sarah had made no objection to Maria's sitting in that chair. From there Maria found it easy to keep an eye on Sarah while the old lady, in the next room with the door open, tried to get some sleep.
'Shall I stay in the room with you, Mrs. Tyrrell?'
'There's no need for that, girl. I'm not the one in danger.'
And Maria, on the verge of sleep, saw, or at last thought she saw, in firelight or candlelight, movement from one of Tyrrell's carvings.
The impression became a dream, a dream in which the horror was still too remote to cause her to awaken…
Joe, downstairs in the studio and looking out of a window, observed that night had by now almost completely darkened the mist-filled Canyon.
He thought to himself: No use in a breather trying to look for someone, anyone, down there tonight.
Not that he had any intention of doing that.
Chapter 5
Bill Burdon was standing just where he had been posted, close beside a gnarled juniper, just a few yards down into the Canyon from the lowest level of the Tyrrell House. In his carefully chosen position the small tree shadowed him from the moon as well as from the nearer lights up on the Rim, while a long section of the nearby trail lay exposed in moonlight for his inspection. He doubted very much that anyone approaching the Tyrrell House from below by any route would be able to see him, or get past him without being seen.
Bill, who considered himself good at this kind of thing, had no trouble remaining patient and keeping quiet. At intervals he changed position. When he went so far as to sit down, very carefully, on the ground, he congratulated himself on managing the movement without making a sound.
It looked like he was in for a long, dull night, with no reason to really expect any action. Joe had told him he'd be relieved in a few hours, but Bill was already beginning to wonder if he was going to find it a problem to keep awake.
To keep alert, Bill turned over in his mind the distinguishing features of the case. He had to admit that perhaps number one was that here was an old lady with lots of money, one of her relatives missing and another one nervous, and if she wanted to spend some of her wealth hiring detectives, it wasn't the detectives' business to discourage her.
Distinguishing feature number two might be that old Sarah Tyrrell really seemed to think that some kind of psychic connection existed between her and her grand-niece, and that young Cathy stood in some kind of occult peril. That led Bill to wonder why anyone should accept ordinary-looking Joe Keogh from Chicago as an expert in the field of solving psychic mysteries. It was more than Bill could understand. Joe didn't seem at all the type—
Bill heard a faint sound. Some thirty yards down-slope from where he sat, something of roughly human size was moving. Bill's right arm raised his dark flashlight, thumb resting on the switch that would turn it on. Presently a middle-sized mule deer came far enough out into the moonlight to let Bill see its big ears cupped in his direction. A moment later, the animal was gone down-slope again, even more quietly than it had come.
Bill lowered the light, still unused. All right, back to the case. Another of its peculiarities, at least in Bill Burdon's admittedly inexperienced opinion, was Mr. Strangeways, who certainly had something odd about him. This peculiarity was hard to define, but Bill wouldn't have especially related it to the occult. Well, Keogh had given his temporary employees fair warning that he wasn't necessarily going to tell them everything about how he ran his business. And in the business of security and investigations, Bill had already learned, you had to expect to meet odd
