A Question Of Time by Fred Saberhagen (8 ebook reader txt) 📕

were going so reasonably at the moment he thought he might receive an answer.

      Edgar looked at him. Then: “My work,” said the old man shortly, putting a slight emphasis on the first word.

* * *

      “Hey,” said Jake, half an hour after arriving back in the little house, about an hour after sunset. It was almost the first syllable he’d uttered since Edgar had told him he could go home for the night.

      At the moment he was standing in front of the electric refrigerator, holding the door open and looking in. A strange fact had just caught his attention, and he was wondering how he could have been so slow to notice it.

       “What?” Camilla, moving around behind Jake, was in the prosaic process of getting dinner ready.

      “Somebody went to the store, looks like.”

      Only last night Jake had become aware, without really giving the matter any intelligent thought, that the stocks of supplies in the refrigerator were starting to run short. The cabinet shelves had still been deep in canned goods; there was no prospect of actual starvation, and so he hadn’t really thought about where the eggs and ham and cheese were coming from. But this morning there had been fresh food, as there was now.

      Overnight, somehow, the refrigerator had been newly stocked. “Where’d all this stuff come from? There’s eggs, there’s beer, there’s apples—”

      “Edgar brings it. He brought stuff last night. Every week or so he goes on what he calls a shopping trip up to the Rim. The real Rim, the one where there are people. Some of the stuff he steals from El Tovar, some he gets in other places.”

      Thoughtfully Jake hefted a little wooden box of Kraft cheese. The fact of the familiar brand name on the box was heartening. It proved that the real world wasn’t entirely out of reach. “Somehow I thought he stayed down here all the time.”

      “He says he’d like to stay here all the time and work, he grumbles about having to go out. But he needs tools and other stuff. So while he’s up there he gets some breathers’ food.”

      “Huh?”

      “That’s what we are. You and me. We’re breathers. Edgar isn’t. You didn’t notice yet? Edgar doesn’t breathe.”

      Jake stared. But now he was beginning to know that here in the Deep Canyon, the stranger a thing sounded, the more likely it was to be true.

      Camilla was nodding. “That’s right. Watch him close, next chance you get. No breathing, unless he needs the air to talk.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jake, that’s what vampires are like.”

      “Vampires. You mean like in the movies.”

      “No. Not like that.” Looking back at the restocked shelves, Camilla giggled strangely. “The way he stocked up this time, it looks like he really wants to keep both of us going.”

      After a time Jake said: “He must need food for himself.”

      “He doesn’t eat like you and me. Not like breathing people.”

      “Huh?”

      “Warm blood is all that Edgar really needs. Could be my blood, or yours, or a dog’s. He sometimes catches him a wild animal, big or small, and drinks its blood.”

      Jake couldn’t answer.

      Too many things, impossible things, had forced themselves into his life, made themselves part of his vision of reality, over the last couple of days. By his own subjective reckoning, he had only been gone from the CCC camp three days. He wondered if that was, if that could be, right. He could believe Camilla now, that time, like the big river itself, ran different here in the Deep Canyon.

      He said: “I wonder what they’re doing back at camp.”

      “Ha. They might have forgotten you already. On their calendar, you might already have been gone a month.”

      Yesterday Camilla had talked casually about taking the shotgun, loading it with something lighter than what the bears required, and bringing in some rabbits. And there didn’t appear to be much trouble catching fish. Behind the house she had also started a small kitchen garden, where Jake could identify carrots and tomatoes, among some tough western weeds that were threatening to take over. A branch line from the waterpipe that came in to the house from the creek was arranged to water the garden at the turn of a spigot.

      But the old man’s foraging expeditions were much more interesting. “So, Edgar brings in all this store-bought stuff, eggs and canned goods and beer?”

      “Right. He wants us well-fed.” Again she giggled. “He’ll bring you some new clothes if you want. He brings me some. I ask him for cigarettes, but he says they’re bad.”

      “How does he get out of here, when he goes on these trips to the rim? I mean what path does he follow?”

      She shrugged. “He just goes. Vampires can do it. Maybe not all of them, but he can.”

      “Come on.” Softly Jake was trying to coax her out of being crazy. “How d’ya know he’s a vampire?”

      “I know.” Camilla raised one hand to rub her throat.

      “Come on.”

      Camilla shook her head, as if she could read Jake’s thoughts. “You’ll know I’m crazy, lover, if I tell you all about what Edgar can do. You just watch for yourself. You’re gonna see a lot of him from now on. And you better do the job he gave you in the cave, lover. You really better.”

      Remembering the strength that had caught and wrenched his arm, made him helpless as a baby, Jake had to agree with that, at least.

* * *

      When Jake went back to work in the morning, he discovered that sometime during the preceding night Edgar had harvested a massive chunk of deep Vishnu schist from somewhere in the bed of the river—the rock was still wet, and there were tiny shellfish still clinging to one side. Then he had somehow brought the slab, which must have weighed five or six hundred pounds, up the side canyon to the workshop.

      All by himself? Jake could believe that now.

      On the workbench was a small note, in neat, precise handwriting, changing Jake’s orders for the day slightly, and