Psychomech (20 page)

His plan for her was simple though not without certain dangers, but these would not deter him. The plan had worked before and he was sure it would work again; and providing she did not scream all would be well. He was in short a rapist and murderer, having raped several women and murdered one. The latter, his most recent victim, had screamed. Despite all his warnings she had screamed into the night, and he had sliced her throat. And as she had spilled out her life, so he had. spilled his lust into her. That had been some six weeks ago, since when he had lain low.

Tonight, however, the need was once more upon him. His car (complete with false number plates) was parked behind a hedge in a field one mile away down the road, where it had ‘broken down’. And so he and the girl went on foot. She was nervous now and resentful of his arm around her waist—and aware of his bulk against her and the strength in the fingers pressing her side and almost cupping her breast. Sobering, she knew how silly she had been in accepting his abortive lift home. For some minutes she had felt a tension building in him and dared not even guess what it meant. Then, as they passed a gap in the high brick wall that marked the boundary of Garrison’s property—

In a moment his hand was over her mouth as he dragged her through the gaping brickwork and into the dry, dark shrubbery. Thrown down on a bed of dead leaves, she gasped—until once more his hand fell heavy on her mouth, splitting her upper lip. Moonlight silvered the sharp blade he now held to her throbbing neck.’

‘All right, little Alice,’ he rasped, all gentleness gone now from his voice. ‘One peep out of you and it’s all over. I’ll stick this right through your windpipe, got it?’ Her eyes went wide and she lay frozen.
‘Got it?’
he insisted, shaking her like a rag doll.

She nodded frenziedly, shrinking from him in a paroxysm of fear.

He tore open her coat, used his knife to cut her dress down the front, buttons flying from sliced threads. Beneath the dress she was soft and white, the sight of her body drawing a sob from his quivering lips. He tore away her underwear and fumbled for a second with his own clothing.

Alice was a virgin. She saw him throbbing and huge and forgot his threat. Her scream, slicing the night air, was sharper than his knife—but not nearly so deadly.

‘
Bitch!
—I warned you!” he hissed. He jerked the knife to her neck—and something caught at his arm, dragging it up and away from her throat, holding it like a vice. His hair stood on end as he jerked his head round to stare wildly about in the darkness. All was silent, no one there—but his arm was caught up on something.

Waiting for the glistening blade to descend, the girl drew breath and screamed again. Through the shrubs, lights came on in the lower windows of a large house. A dog barked. The rapist sobbed and strained to bring his arm sweeping down. The sleeve of his coat must be caught on something—barbed wire or a tough vine—but he could see nothing. He dropped the knife and grabbed at the girl’s throat with his free hand, forcing himself between her legs and trying to enter her any way he could. But the grip on his inexplicably trapped arm tightened, drawing him to his feet and away from her. And still there was no one there.

No, there was something—some
thing!

Above him in the night, gigantic—two glaring red eyes gazed mercilessly down. And as the grip on his arm increased tenfold, suddenly it was the rapist’s turn to scream…

When Koenig got back to the house he was white and drawn. Even Suzy, who had accompanied him into the grounds when the screaming started, came back trembling and cowed. For Suzy to suffer from any sort of real shock or fear was a rare thing, but for Koenig it was unheard of.

‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I have to phone for the police. There was a girl in the garden, stripped and knocked about a little. Also, a man—I think.’ He quickly telephoned the local police station and spoke briefly to the constable on duty, then put down the handset. During his short telephone conversation, Garrison heard the words ‘rape’ and ‘murder’. They set his scalp tingling, bringing him more fully awake.

The entire household—Garrison, Koenig, Cook, Joe the gardener and handyman, Fay the maid, and of course Suzy—had heard and been awakened by the screams. High-pitched at first and obviously female, they had roused the house from slumber. But then they had turned hoarse and mannish, rising to a crescendo of utter terror before gurgling into an abrupt silence. By then Koenig had thrown an overcoat over his pyjamas and gone out with Suzy and a powerful electric torch into the darkness. Moments later he had called for help from Joe and Fay, and he had bundled a crumpled, ragged figure into the house and on to a bed in a spare downstairs bedroom. Then, while they attempted to revive the girl, Koenig had gone back into the garden. Suzy had gone with him, but reluctantly.

By this time Garrison was dressed and downstairs, waiting for Koenig’s report when he returned, and there he now stood stroking the trembling Doberman while Koenig got a grip on himself. Finally, taking his friend’s elbow, Garrison led him through into the library and closed the door behind them. A moment later, before he could repeat his question, Joe knocked and entered. He stuttered as he spoke to Koenig:

‘She’s come to, Mr Koenig, sir. Bruises on her throat, poor lass, and her mouth’s bleeding a bit—and shocked rigid, no doubt about that—but she’ll be OK. Fay’s giving her a hot drink right this minute. Name’s Alice Green, from Amsworth. And you were right, it was rape—attempted, anyway. She didn’t know the chap—met him in Wickham at a disco. That’s all I know at the moment.’

‘Did she say what… what
happened
to him?’ Koenig asked.

‘No she didn’t. Just something about him being snatched up—and about his screams. But we all heard them, I’m sure.’ Garrison sensed Joe’s shudder. ‘Actually, I’d say it was—I dunno,’ he shrugged helplessly,’—a pack of dogs?’

‘Thank you, Joe,’ Garrison told him. ‘The police will be here soon. Please let us know when they arrive, will you?’ As Joe left he turned to Koenig. ‘Willy, what the hell has been going on? I’ve got some of it, but—’ His hands made a bewildered gesture.

The German was more or less in control of himself now. He poured brandy into two glasses, something he would not normally do without first asking, and they both sat down. ‘I gather there was an attempted rape,’ Garrison started the other off. ‘Take it from there, eh?’

Koenig knocked back his drink in one and answered, ‘That is correct, Richard, an attempted rape. He—whoever he was—cut off the girl’s clothes with a knife. I saw the knife lying where Suzy and I found the girl. I left it there for the police. Anyway, the girl was scared witless and she passed out before I could get much out of her. She did say she had seen something big and black.’

‘Wait,’ Garrison held up a hand. ‘Willy, you’ve so far avoided mentioning him, the rapist. And what was all this about murder?’

Koenig nodded and cleared his throat. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘murder—
his
murder! Actually, I was glad to get back into the house. Whatever killed him
was
big. It must have been…’

‘Go on.’

‘Well—of course it was dark out there and I can’t be sure, and my torch was not very good in the shrubbery—but I think there are bits of him scattered about all over the garden!’

‘
What?

Koenig gave a nervous shrug. ‘That’s right, Richard. A hellish mess. You heard the screams…’

‘They woke me up, but—’

‘They would have roused the dead,’ Koenig shuddered. ‘The bushes where the girl was lying are—well, they’re red. I saw an arm. And a leg. And part of a face—I think.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Jesus?’ Koenig’s voice was very quiet and still a little trembly. ‘Even if I were a believer, still I could not see Jesus—or any son of any sane God—having anything to do with what has happened out there tonight!’

For Gareth Wyatt the night had been nerve-wracking; for Otto Krippner alias Hans Maas it had been wildly successful; for George Hammond it had effected a cure, in that he was later able to adjust himself once more into society and become, as he had been before, a solid citizen; but all over the central south of England it had been, to lift a leader direct from a local newspaper in the Portsmouth area, ‘A Very Bad Night for Rapists!’ That is to say the very least.

Wyatt failed once again to read the papers, however, and so made no connection; even if he had read them it is doubtful he would have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Or at the most he would have termed it a coincidence. After all, sensationalist reporting is commonplace. Maas did read the papers and noticed everything, which only served to reinforce his will and spur him on towards his crazed ambition.

What the newspapers said was this:

That over an area of some six hundred square miles a series of amazing accidents or occurrences of a weird nature had seemingly conspired to defeat the activities of at least four would-be rapists. A freak whirlwind, coming up from nowhere out of the still night, had snatched an attacker from his victim in a railway siding on the outskirts of Barnham, hurling him under the wheels of a passing train. Another sex-fiend had lured a girl into his car in Havant, had then parked in a dark alley on an industrial estate, and had been on the point of assaulting his frightened captive when a large vehicle had struck his car, decapitating and thus killing him outright. The girl, miraculously, had not been harmed, though firemen had been obliged to cut her from the wreckage. Only a very large vehicle could have delivered the tremendous punch, and police were still seeking assistance from an as yet unknown driver of an articulated truck. Then there was the attempted rape in Garrison’s garden, where the authorities had been unable to supply a better answer to the riddle than to echo Joe’s statement and report that a man had been ‘killed by a pack of dogs’; and finally, a middle-aged night cleaner in Southsea had been attacked while preparing rooms on the top floor of the Bonnington Hotel. She had struck out at the man with her bucket but had not thought she actually hit him, which was why she had been astonished when he ‘flew away’ from her, taking an entire window and frame with him and falling six floors to his death on the street below.

And all of these things occurring in that hour following immediately upon Maas feeding Hammond with Psychomech’s surge.

A very bad night for rapists indeed…

T
ime passed swiftly for the new Richard Garrison. Thirty months gone by like leaves blown from an autumn tree, utterly beyond recovery. But not wasted like dead leaves. Filled with activity.

In fact there had been almost too much for him to do, especially since the news of Vicki’s death. For Garrison had deliberately buried himself in work, knowing that in this way he could avoid the brooding sorrow which must otherwise fester within him.

His prime concern had been to put Thomas Schroeder’s more than substantial legacy to work, as a result of which his assets had grown in direct proportion to his expanding business acumen—and Garrison’s name had rapidly become synonymous in the city for shrewdness in all business matters. Well on his way to making his first half-million (other, that is, than the money Schroeder had left for him), his judgement was always sound, his thinking un-marred by sentiment or sense of duty. Duty had been for the Army; Garrison was all for Garrison. In short, his lack of ethics—or rather, his ignorance of the niceties or dictates of ethics—worked as a protective cloak against the powerful business counter-forces which must otherwise crush him. So that despite the fact that he was a relative newcomer, a mere entrepreneur on the wheeling-and-dealing scene, he was nevertheless one whose talent and naked vitality left little doubt but that he should be played very carefully. Even the most powerful forces were wary of Richard Garrison.

Lady. Luck had played her part in his success, certainly; but the Lady loves a gambler, and Garrison had always been that. It had not all been luck, however, for as well as Koenig’s invaluable assistance (the ‘chauffeur’ had picked up a good many tips from his old master) Garrison had also employed the skills of one other. Skills, that is, if one might accept the rulings of the very stars themselves! For Garrison, ever a searcher after knowledge, had early decided to take a leaf from Schroeder’s own book and employ talents—or invoke powers—others might all too readily scorn. In this way he soon came to heed the advice of one whose work he had earlier seen as trickery and sheer charlatanry, namely Adam Schenk, Thomas Schroeder’s astrologer.

As to how they came to meet: that was due to Schenk’s need to use Garrison’s Retreat, to which facility Schroeder had said Schenk must always be allowed access. Garrison grudgingly bowed to his ex-mentor’s wishes, but at the same time he remembered and resented the fact that Schenk was the man whose horoscopes had foretold the deaths of two people he had come to love. But for all that, even Garrison had to admit that his resentment was tempered by the knowledge that to date Schenk’s horoscopes had worked out 100 per cent correct right down the line.

Out of curiosity then, he had contrived with Koenig to be at the Retreat at the same time as the astrologer. This occurred in the winter, shortly before Christmas, some eight or nine weeks after the attempted rape in Garrison’s garden, which had terminated so terribly and inexplicably.

And for once Garrison was quite wrong. Adam Schenk turned out to be just the opposite of what he had expected. A youngish forty, with wild blond hair, watery blue eyes and gangling frame, Schenk was hardly the suave occultist, the devil-worshipper, the Black Magician and necromancer type that Garrison had pictured. But he was everything Thomas Schroeder had said he was.

He and Garrison had become friends almost from their first meeting, and with the passage of time their friendship and correspondence grew hand in hand with Garrison’s dependence. For having met Garrison and gained a greater insight into the man, Schenk’s interest in him and concern for his future (and doubtless for Schroeder’s future, for of course Schenk knew of Schroeder’s aim: to return from the dead into Garrison’s body) prompted him to offer what assistance he could, which meant that his forecasts were soon to become a regular feature of Garrison’s life.