Edgar told Jake that he, Edgar, had gathered some of the nodules already on the workbench, from the local rapids in the Colorado. Edgar also cautioned him—quite unnecessarily—that such methods of collection were not something that either Jake or Camilla could undertake and expect to survive.
There seemed to be plenty of white nodules here now, as Jake could see for himself. He wondered momentarily whether Edgar really needed or wanted more of them, or if he just wanted to keep Jake busy and out of mischief. Camilla's warning that Edgar really wanted something else from both of them came back to Jake now.
Most of the day Jake had worked with his shirt off, sweating like a pig. The cave was a little cooler than the sunbaked canyon outside, but not much. He took frequent breaks, and at intervals during the hot hours Camilla brought him cold lemonade. He had had the electric lights turned on for part of his workday; he needed them if he really wanted to get a good look at what he was doing, unless the sun was coming in the entrance at just the proper angle. They were still on now, of course. Jake noted that Edgar's vision seemed to be extremely good. The old man could see small details from a distance, and he wore no glasses.
On the job Jake used hammers and pry bars and chisels. Edgar had explosives on hand—Jake had seen the little locked-up shed, just outside the mine—but said he rarely employed them.
Edgar was saying to him now: "I've tried dynamite, but this is a ticklish place to try to blast; much better to dig out what's wanted carefully, with hand tools. That's where you come in."
Jake nodded. The old man today was taking such a reasonable, businesslike attitude that Jake couldn't help getting the feeling, in spite of everything, that there was some chance this would turn out after all to be a decent, acceptable job. It was a crazy attitude, he realized whenever he stopped to think about it; but somehow when Tyrrell was talking so reasonably it seemed only natural.
"What's back there?" Jake inquired, nodding toward the almost completely blocked chamber at the rear of the cave. Things 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 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 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 now. 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 now: "I wonder what they're doing back at camp."
"Ha. They might have forgotten you already. On their calendar, you might 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.