Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

filtered light began to make a dull pain behind his eyes. Then he drew the drapes shut and turned away.

      Why should it bother him, irritate him so much, that the identical Christian name had been borne by two runaway girls half a millennium apart? A million other runaways down through the centuries must have borne it also, in aimless flight, great unsung migration, across Europe and America and God alone knew where.

      Apparently there had even been a certain physical resemblance between the two … also shared with more other girls than even God could count. No, he told himself sharply, stop this now. Helen, your second wife, is dead, has been for five hundred years in some unknown grave, and only on the Last Day, if then, will you see her again. Or hear her voice. Leonardo had not known how to record that.

      The voice on the phone had certainly not been one that he, Thorn, had ever heard before. He could be sure of that, at least. As sure as one in this sad, mad world could ever be of anything…

      God and damnation. He had walked into an auction room, and had simply stood there, surrounded by strangers, and looked at an old picture. And there had been tears in his eyes. In his eyes. What next?

      A reminder, anyway, that not even he was immune to change. Though he had known for some time that he was not.

      It could not have happened to Helen as it had to him. It could not. He would have known, must have known, centuries ago. After all that had been between them in his breathing days, he must, he must have been aware centuries ago of her altered but continued life. He had no reason to think that anything of the sort had happened to her. Only to one in ten million or a hundred million did such change come.

      But he was changing. Doors were opening around him, and he was trying to read the symbols on them.

      Last night he had spent hours prowling secretly inside the Seabright house. There he had slid past real doors and tried to discover real things. He had watched the occupants while unseen himself, and had listened to them while remaining unheard. In most of their private actions they were as banal as everybody else. Despite all his alertness and his new readiness to discover subtle meanings, he had been able to find out surprisingly little.

      The people had been asleep most of the time he watched them, servants and masters alike, and he had listened to their incoherent mutterings as they slept. Listened and watched carefully, though he had known for ages now that the secrets of the bedroom were for the most part very dull, like those films made by scientific researchers whose excruciatingly patient cameras dutifully record the writhings of pajamaed volunteers in semipublic sleep, the sleepers now and then twitching and generating brain waves with the onset of dreams.

      He still had dreams himself. Not many who knew his true name would have guessed that he himself, here this very afternoon in this very hotel bed, at about the time when some unknown woman was trying to reach him by telephone, had seen an infant nursing at the breast of Mary Rogers, an infant girl who had turned to look at Thorn with Helen Hunyadi’s five-hundred-year-dead eyes. And then he had seen Giulio Boccalini, suffering with sword wounds and calling himself Gliddon, had helped Mary Magdalen to carry a small wrecked aircraft down a steep and pine-grown mountainside…

      Dreams could sometimes be of real help. But Thorn had no reason to think that this afternoon’s had included anything at all veridical.

      He sat down near the phone again, waiting patiently for Joe’s call. Age taught patience, in his solitude Thorn made no effort to look like anything but what he was. His chest performed no breathing motions. His eyes stared, blank and unblinking, staring perhaps at nothing. No part of his body moved, except for the fingers of his left hand, which played gently with the worn gold ring on the third finger of his right.

      Last night, prowling alone through the Seabright mansion, Thorn had come upon a locked, plain, heavy door adjoining the subterranean art gallery. Naturally he had investigated, and had discovered beyond the door a rather extensive laboratory facility. He was no scientist, or technologist either, but had been able to identify in a general way a mass of photographic and video recording equipment. There were concealed see throughs leading to the lounge-game room, so whatever went on there could be secretly recorded. The lab held other scientific equipment also, the purpose of which Thorn could not immediately fathom. It looked vaguely medical to him. There was a small, almost cell-like anteroom to the concealed laboratory. This anteroom contained a metal cot, folded now as if for storage, a simple table and a chair. A toilet and shower were in an adjoining cubicle; neither had been used for some days.

      A large wall safe in the laboratory, concealed under a large but very minor painting, had room enough inside to contain Thorn’s whole body once he had altered form enough to let him flow in through the almost perfect sealing of its door. There was no real light inside, but enough infrared radiation to let him see essentials. The safe stored mostly cassettes of video tape, and canisters of film. He opened one of the latter and examined, as well as possible under the circumstances, the reel that it contained. He could see enough frames of film, all showing nude figures in full color grappling orgiastically, to be sure what kind of film it was.

      Well, a Seabright porn factory. That was no real surprise, after he had met Ellison. A private operation, no doubt; this family would hardly be in it for the money.

      Thorn stood outside the safe again, leaning a newly resolidified hand upon the wood frame of its concealing painting. The precautions seemed