Psychomech
Psychomech
Book One
Brian Lumley
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
PSYCHOMECH
Copyright © 1984 by Brian Lumley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Visit the author’s Web site at
www.brianlumley.com
This one is for Francesco Cova,
Garrison’s Godfather
Prologue
D
ark-haired, long-limbed, naked except for a towel wrapped about his middle, Garrison lay sleeping. It had been a hard day, one of many, and he had been exhausted. A couple of brandies with friends in the camp mess had finished him, put him down for what he had hoped would be a restful night. But to make absolutely sure he had also taken a hot shower. Towelling himself dry always wearied him, had a sort of soporific effect which usually blended easily into deep sleep. Tonight had been no exception, but—
—No sooner had he slept than the dream had been there, that same repetitive dream that had bothered him now for some three weeks, almost every night, and which he could never bring back to mind in the world of waking reality, except to say that it was a frightening thing which invariably left him drenched in his own perspiration, and that at its climax he would leap screaming awake. The dream involved a silver car, a black dog (or rather, a bitch), two men (one unseen), a beautiful girl (also unseen), a Machine and a man-God, in the reverse order of importance. And Garrison himself. That much he could always remember quite clearly, but the dream’s finer details were always obscure. Except for the sure knowledge that it was a nightmare.
Of those details, forgotten in his waking moments:
He rode the Machine.
It was not a motorcycle, not any sort of vehicle one might imagine, but he rode it. He rode through valleys and over mountains and across oceans, through lands of weird vegetation and weirder, lizard-inhabited rock formations and over primal seas where Leviathan and all his cousins sported and spouted. Behind him, seated upon her haunches with one great paw upon his shoulder, the bitch whined and panted and occasionally nuzzled his neck. She was worried for him. He understood her fear without knowing its source, as is often the way with dreams.
In his mind was the picture of a girl, one he knew intimately even though he had never seen her—which is also the way of dreams. He wanted to find her, save her, kill her—but he did not know where she was, what he must save her from (herself?), or why he must kill her. Indeed he prayed that perhaps he might not have to kill her, for he loved her.
Her face haunted him. It was a face he knew and yet had never seen; but if he closed his eyes she was there, misty in his memory, but with huge dark eyes, small scarlet mouth, flat ears and hair which he painted shiny black without ever having seen it. Or if he
had
seen her, then it had been in a dark room, or through curtains as a silhouette. Yes, he remembered that, the darkness. But his hands knew her!
His fingers remembered her. He had never seen her, but he had touched her. He remembered her body, its feel. His own body remembered it; and he ached with the thought that others—and one other in particular—also remembered her. And the ache turned to anger. Feeling his rage, the black bitch howled where she clung to his shoulder.
Garrison rode his Machine harder, towards distant crags where a lone figure stood beside a silver Mercedes impossibly perched upon a spike of rock. High over a mountain pass, the man and the car. Friends, both of them. The man was large, squat, naked, crewcut and blond, with small hard eyes. But he was a friend and he beckoned Garrison on, pointing the way.
The way to the black lake!
Garrison waved and rode the Machine through the pass, and the man and the car faded into distance behind him…
Beyond the mountains a forest of dead, skeletal trees went down to a shore of pitch washed by a great black oily lake. And in the middle of the lake a black rock loomed, and built upon it a black castle glittered like faceted coal or jet.
Garrison would have flown straight on across the lake, but here the Machine balked. Something—some invisible thing—reached out from the black castle and touched the Machine. He could maintain control only if he drew back from the lake, the castle, the Black Room.
The Black Room!
Somewhere in that castle, a Black Room, and in that room the girl with the face he had never seen. And a man, a tall slender man with a voice that caressed, lulled, lied and cheated! And it was
his
Power that held off Garrison’s Machine.
But the castle, the room, the girl, all of these things were the things Garrison sought. The end of his quest. For he suspected that Horror also lurked in the castle, and he had sworn to banish that horror forever. Even if it meant destroying the girl, the man, the Black Room and the very castle itself!
And yet still he prayed that he might somehow save the girl.
He turned the Machine, sent it rushing back over the roof of the bleached brittle forest, turned it again and hurled it at the lake. His mind powered the strange Machine, drove it like a bullet from a gun at the rock that loomed and leered in the oily lake—so that when the Machine came up against the Power from the castle and slammed to a halt, Garrison and the bitch were almost hurled from its glittering back.
How the Machine fought him then. He knew that it would throw him, trample him, kill him if it could. And it could! Except—
As the Machine fought to be rid of him, the man-God came. A face in the sky. Bald, domed head; eyes that loomed bright and huge behind lenses that magnified monstrously; an agonized, pleading voice that cried out to Garrison:
ACCEPT ME, RICHARD! LET ME IN. ACCEPT AND
WIN!
‘No!’ he shook his head, afraid of the man-God no less than of what he might find in the Black Room. He gritted his teeth and battled with the Machine.
THEN YOU ARE DEAD! the man-God cried. BOTH OF US, DEAD. AND WHAT OF OUR BARGAIN, GARRISON? DON‘T YOU REMEMBER? YOU CAN WIN, GARRISON, LIVE. WE BOTH CAN. BELIEVE ME, YOU DON‘T WANT TO DIE. AFTER ALL,
I KNOW WHAT IT‘S LIKE HERE.!
‘No!’
Garrison screamed.
A cube, small, brown, burning, came hurtling out of the sky from afar. It paused, spinning, between the desperate face of the man-God over the lake and Garrison where he fought the Machine.
The cube expanded, contracted, glowed hot as the heart of a sun—exploded!
White fire and heat and blast and searing agony—
Garrison’s eyes!
—And coming awake with a strangled scream, to find an autumn sun shining damply through the drizzle on his windows. And the hands on his alarm clock standing at 6.30 A.M., the calendar telling him it was a Friday in September, 1972, and the nightmare receding.
He clutched at his mattress, damp with his sweat, licked dry lips and desperately tried to conjure the details of the dream. For one instant they stood out clearly in his mind and he could feel again the frantic bucking of the Machine, then swept away, rushing away into distances of mind, they were gone. And only the fading howl of a dog echoed back to him.
And with that howl ringing in his ears Garrison knew that he had dreamed again of a silver car, a black bitch, two men, a man-God, a beautiful girl—and a Machine.
And an unknown Horror.
The known horror was waiting for him in the city. Out in the corridor the night-duty Corporal was hammering out his own hideous version of reveille on an empty fire bucket…
I
t was Belfast and the year was 1972, a Friday afternoon in late September.
Thomas Schroeder, German industrialist, sat at a small table in a barroom with a sawdust floor. A brass spittoon lay under the chipped mahogany footrail against the dully stained skirting of the bar. Blinds were drawn at the windows and a single naked electric light bulb high in the centre of the ceiling burned fitfully, its filament almost spent. Its dull gleam was twinned in Schroeder’s spectacles.
Beside him, shuffling uncomfortably on a bolted-down wooden bench, sat his friend, his sometime secretary and his constant companion, Willy Koenig. Opposite them sat two other men whose faces were almost obscured beneath thick hair and unkempt beards. What little could be seen of their actual faces seemed largely blank, impassive. They had been speaking to Schroeder, these two Irishmen, in voices which, despite the soft lilt of a naturally roguish brogue, had been coarse and filled with terrible words.
Koenig’s hands were nervous on the thick black briefcase that lay before him on the wooden table. An ugly tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth. He sweated profusely, despite the coolness of the room. He had sweated from the moment he and his master had been met by these two alleged members of the IRA, sweated and crouched down into himself and made himself small when in reality he was a large man. By comparison, the tallest of the two seated opposite was only of medium height; but no one watching Koenig sweat and twitch would ever guess his real stature and massive strength.
Schroeder seemed as nervous as his aide, but he at least was cool and appeared to be keeping a grip on himself. Small, balding and in his late fifties, he could be said to be a typically dapper German, but leaner and paler than might be expected. An additional twenty or thirty pounds of flesh and a cigar in the middle of his face might have turned him into the popular misconception of a successful German businessman, but he neither smoked nor ate to excess.
This was part of a determined effort to live to the fullest extent of his years, of which the best were already flown. He knew this,—and also that the rest of his time would not be completely satisfactory; therefore it must be as good as he could make it. Which is one reason why the people he faced should have been more careful. They knew him for what he was now, not for what he had once been. But then, only Schroeder himself knew that. Schroeder and Willy Koenig.
For if the Germans were really the timid, badly frightened men they appeared to be, why had they come? This was a question the Irish terrorists had failed to ask themselves, or had not asked searchingly enough. Was it really to save Schroeder’s wife? She was young and beautiful, true, but he was no longer a young man. Could he really love her? They should have seen that this was doubtful, these Irishmen. More likely she was a decoration, icing on Schroeder’s cake. And indeed he had come for a different reason. There are some men you can threaten, and there are others you must
never
threaten…
Somewhere in a shady corner of the room an old clock ticked the time away monotonously; beyond the locked door, in a passage with leaded lights of red glass, whose outer door opened on the street, two more men talked in lowered tones that filtered into the barroom as mere murmurs.,
‘You said you wanted to talk to me,’ said Schroeder. ‘Well, we have talked. You said that my wife would be released, unharmed, if I came to you without informing the police. I have done all you asked. I came to you, we talked.’
His words were precise, perhaps too precise, and sharp with his German accent. ‘Has my wife been released?’
Their beards were all that the Irishmen shared in common. Where one was dark-skinned, as if he had spent a lot of time in the sun, the other was pale as a mineshaft cricket. The first was thinner than Schroeder, narrow-hipped, tight-lipped. The second was small and round and smiled a lot, without sincerity, and his teeth were bad. The thin one was pimply, scarred with what might be acid bums across his nose and under his eyes. The scars were white against his tan. He looked into Schroeder’s eyes, his gaze seeming to penetrate right through the thick lenses of the industrialist’s spectacles. His thin lips opened a fraction.
‘That’s right, Mr Schroeder,’ he softly said. ‘Sure enough it is. Indeed it’s been done. Your dear wife is free. We’re men of our word, you see? She’s back at your hotel this very minute, safe and sound. We only wanted to see you, talk to you. Not to harm your pretty Fraulein. Actually, we’d have let her go anyway, for she’s nothing to us. But you must admit, she made a fair bit of cheese to bait our trap, eh?’
Schroeder said nothing but Koenig sat up straighter, his small eyes staring into the faces before him. ‘Trap? Of what do you speak?’
‘Just a manner of speaking,’ said the fat man, smiling through his rotten teeth. ‘Now calm down, calm down, Mr Koenig. Stay cool, like your boss here. If we’d wanted you dead you’d be dead now. And so would the Fraulein.’