Psychomech (37 page)

‘Yes it is—today—at any moment.’

‘And you’re all prepared for it?’

‘Almost. A little more tampering with the records, a couple of blown fuses to be put into the Machine, just to add a few extra complications for the “experts” who’ll doubtless be called in—and that’s about it. Who will ever be able to say what really happened here, eh? There are no real experts in this field, Terri. Not yet…’ He paused, remembering Maas-Krippner. ‘Not any more.’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘Oh?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He was warm now, responding to her hands where they stroked his back. ‘Terri—God, I love you. I mean, I really love you. You know, without anything else—with everything against us—we could still make it.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, I just love you.’

‘Then love me.’ Her voice was husky and quick with the passions he had aroused. ‘For God’s sake—no, since neither one of us believes, for my sake—love me. Fill me up, hurt me, but love me…’

They made love, and for the first time it was totally without pain, almost without passion. And it was pure.

The blackest jet is always the purest…

Garrison had found a way.

No tightrope walker, still he had found a way. He had picked up a six-foot length of clapboard with a stout iron bolt through one end. Now seated astride one rail, pushing the length of board before him and using it to steady himself, he inched his way forward over the abyss. The other end of the board lay across the parallel rail, spanning the gap between and holding firm where the dangling bolt projected over the rail itself. This way, so long as Garrison disposed the greater part of his weight towards the inside of the track, he could shuffle himself forward and maintain his balance without too much difficulty—but whatever he did he must not look down.

Thus he kept his eyes firmly fixed upon the slightly swaying rails ahead and on the dark, roofed-over section of fairly solid-looking track which terminated the viaduct’s span. And it was as he was staring straight ahead like this and inching his way forward that he noticed the change: where before there had been the merest wisp of a breeze, now the air was still and dead—as if the world held its breath. And where before the silhouettes of great black birds had soared on high, now the darkening sky was utterly void of life. The tinkling and splashing of the waterfall now seemed subdued, hushed somehow, along with the slow scrape of wooden board along rusty rail.

Because of the obscuring effect of the looming, intact section of roofed track ahead—which he would reach in another minute or two—Garrison was no longer able to see the spot beneath the cliff where crouched the Waiting Thing; a fact for which he was half-inclined to gladness, until—

Suddenly, coming alive in an easy, instant un-shuttering of great red eyes, the roofed-in darkness ahead became one with all the world’s evil. The Thing That Waited waited no longer but had come out to meet him. It sat there, squat and black and straddling the tracks, an awful silhouette in the cavernous mouth of the final section.

Garrison’s eyes went wide and he froze solid, his fear radiating from him in almost visible waves. And seeing the terror it inspired in him, the Thing eased rumblingly forward, taking firmer shape as it slowly emerged from the shadows. It was fat, bogie-like, a giant wood louse with well-oiled wheels for legs. And directly beneath its lantern eyes a ruler-straight metal mouth gaped wide as the beast itself, opening hideously and hydraulically as the creature made to spring upon Garrison’s shuddering, helpless form.

He could move neither back nor forward. A shriek welled in his throat but would not emerge except as a bubbling hiss. He wobbled wildly where he sat, the board clattering against the rails to the rhythm of his palsied hands.

It lurched fully into view, wheels clattering, girder-mouth clashing, headlamp eyes glaring evilly as it sped down the incline of the sagging, groaning, abyss-spanning rails. If that awful mouth did not get Garrison the wheels surely would. He threw up his hands before his face, made a useless effort to stab at the onrushing Thing with the length of clapboard and felt it knocked from his grasp into empty space. He wobbled wildly, was aware that he toppled sideways, outwards, his rubbery legs releasing their grip on the shuddering rail. Then—

His own scream was drowned out by that of the bogie-Thing, whose voice was a squeal of brakes, a grinding of gears and a scorch of burning metal; and in the next instant the monster had gone plummeting past him into the depths. Tracks and ties and bricks and masonry too, all torn free and falling, falling…

Falling… Vertigo… Crisis…

Levitation!

To suspend one’s body in empty air without physical support. To make weightless. To defy gravity as a mental exercise.

Falling, with the world whirling. Garrison squeezed his eyes tightly shut. ‘Stop falling!’ he told himself. ‘Descend less rapidly, float, fly—but stop falling!’

The whirling sensation slowed and stopped. He opened his eyes.

The viaduct fell past him—past him!—the entire structure going down in a thundering of rubble and dust, but Garrison floated on the twilight air light as thistledown. And as the viaduct went down, so he went up.

And up too went the Machine, floating on air as he lifted it from where he had left it, drawing it to him with his mind. And Psychomech no longer bearing his weight but him bearing the weight of Psychomech. And… it was easy!

In mid-air he climbed on to the Machine’s back, rode it free of the abyss, followed the rusted rails into deepening gloom. And even knowing that the Machine was a dead weight, knowing it for an inert useless mass, still he carried it with him. The Machine had been faithful to him in its way and now he would pay it back in kind. Besides, it had been with him in that other dream, the dream of the black lake and the black castle, and Garrison knew that these things still awaited him at the end of his quest.

He cleansed his mind of the horror so recently passed by and searched the darkening sky as he went. He looked for the man-God Schroeder but saw no sign of him now. Garrison shook a fist at the sky. ‘Come all you want, man-God,’ he cried, ‘and may the best man win.’

Then he shivered and huddled down flat. He was cold, tired and hungry. He must find shelter and sustenance for the night.

‘What?’ Wyatt’s eyes widened. ‘No milk? But that’s absurd, not possible!’ He sat up straight in his black-sheeted bed and reached for a cigarette. ‘Are you sure? There should be sandwiches, too, in a clear plastic box. A little curly at the edges by now, I imagine, but still perfectly edible.’

‘No,’ Terri denied. ‘No milk, no sandwiches.’ She shrugged. ‘What does it matter? I can drink my coffee black and I’m not especially hungry—I ate last night. But I do think you should eat. Tell me what you’d like and I’ll cook it for you. There’s enough of almost everything in your fridge. Well, except for milk and sandwiches, that is—’

‘I have to take a look at that fridge.’ He pulled on pyjama bottoms, led the way out on to the landing with Terri close behind.

‘But what’s so important about it?’

He paused, turned to her. ‘Listen, I told you I thought someone had been feeding him, right?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Well, I don’t know why and I certainly don’t know how, but suddenly I have this feeling that I know
where
they’re getting the food! Not how they’re getting it into him, not even who they are, but—’

‘But… it’s crazy!’

‘Terri,’ he grated his teeth, ‘I
know
it’s crazy. Here—’ He caught her, took padlock keys from the pocket of her dressing gown. ‘Look—’ He led her to the room of the machine. The door was padlocked, exactly as he had left it. ‘One way in. No windows. No attic trapdoor. Only one set of keys. No way anyone can get to him. And yet—Goddamn!—he’s still alive in there! I’m betting he’s still alive…”

She clung to him. ‘But you don’t know that.’

He calmed himself. ‘No, of course not.’ He stuffed the keys back into the pocket of her gown. ‘I’ll go in and see him in a moment. First I have to take a look inside that fridge.’

In the kitchen he snatched at the fridge’s door, glared within. The plastic sandwich container was there where he had left it—empty. The milk bottles stood empty, their silver caps sucked inwards. Wyatt drew breath sharply, began brushing his fingers repeatedly, feverishly through his hair. ‘Jesus, Jesus,
Jesus
’ he said, ‘I don’t believe it. I’ve searched the place top to bottom. It can’t be happening. I must be going out of my fucking—’

‘Gareth!’ She reached up, made as if to slap his face, burst into tears instead and buried her own face in his chest.

For a moment he was rigid as iron against her, but then he slowly drew in air and relaxed, hugging her to him. He patted her back, quieted her. ‘It’s OK, it’s OK.’ His voice was a husky whisper. . ‘It must be me. Nerves. Cracking up. I’ll be OK now. I can get a grip. Hell, it’s a rough time for both of us. I thought I was stronger.’

‘Oh, Gareth, Gareth…’

‘Listen, you cook us up a bite to eat. I’ll go and take a look. Just excuse my hysterics._Damn it all, we’ve no time for that, not now. And anyway, if he’s still alive—well, there’s one last trick I’ve yet to play.’ He felt a trembling starting up in his arms and froze it before it could get started. Then, releasing her, he said, ‘OK?’

‘OK,’ she nodded. She managed to smile through her tears. ‘OK.’

He took the keys, left her and went back upstairs to the room of the machine. He unlocked the door, entered, and…

Garrison was not dead. Far from it.

He smiled in his sleep. His weight was almost back to normal; normal, too, his bio-functions. Psychomech hummed and purred as before, its fear-stimulation controls jammed wide open. Gritting his teeth, Wyatt half-snarled, half-whispered to himself: ‘I don’t believe it, I
don’t
believe it!’

He got a grip on himself, filled a hypodermic with a dangerously high dose and administered it into Garrison’s arm, then went to a wall cabinet and took out a sealed packet of sugar cubes. But these were very special cubes. He had often taken one himself—but just one at a time—or given one to a girlfriend, on those past occasions when he had wanted something different, a night’s sweet tripping. Now, however, it was for Garrison. He diluted three cubes in a little water, then spooned it to the blind man drop by poisoned drop. And when all of it was gone, only then did he leave the room and padlock the door firmly shut.

‘Let’s see you come out of
that
one, you bastard!’ he said, making his way unsteadily back to his bedroom.

12.00 Noon—

—But in Garrison’s mind-world it was a night such as he had never before experienced, where time and space and the denizens of both had become completely distorted and alien. Indeed as darkness had closed in it had seemed to him that for hours without number he had simply wandered through a wonderland of benighted marvels, through grottoes of twilight mystery and shadow-cloaked beauty.

Beasts big as houses, with pulsing lantern proboscises and luminous purple eyes had floated on flimsy filament wings and in strange aerial formations across the star-strewn sky, drawn to where high over the hills aurora borealis danced inflames of such brilliance as to put all mundane colours and coruscations to shame. Silver clouds etched with ever-changing traceries of electrical fire had raced in writhing ecstasy overhead, while pallid poppies had bloomed in the light of a scarlet-cratered moon, sending up puffs of opiate perfume to make the head reel and the senses stagger. And moths big as bats had crowded in a curious cloud about man and Machine, as if puzzled by the intrusion of these, visitants from outside.

From outside, yes, for of course these creatures were the dwellers of the inner Garrison; this world, however warped by Wyatt’s mind-bending ministerings, was the inner Garrison. And along with the wonders of drug-induced and mechanically magnified fever came the terrors. And Psychomech’s fear-stimulation controls were still jammed wide open…

Garrison had not completely forgotten the need for shelter.

When it came, it was in the form of a glossy pink forest of vast extent, which might almost have been some gigantic prehistoric coral reef left high and dry fifty millions of years ago, petrified and preserved to come down all the centuries intact and maze-like in its many-roomed, many-caverned magnificence. The ‘trees’ of this great fossil forest were columnar and occasionally clurriped, branching overhead to spread and form pink and white coral ceilings woven so close that not even a scrap of night sky showed through. The walls of the halls, passages and caves were webs of translucent coral, finely veined panels of intricately wrought organic designs with almost nacreous lustre; so that even in the outer areas of this paleogean palace Garrison might well have imagined himself in the vastly segmented whorl of some incredible and alien conch.

Not wishing to penetrate the labyrinth too deeply—fighting the urge he now felt to explore to their full the myriad avenues and arenas of this wonder—he brought the Machine to rest before a small cave only large enough for his immediate needs. Claustrophobia was now a thing of the past, however, an elemental fear which would never bother him again.

Flopping to the sandy floor and pulling the hood of his Army parka up over his head, Garrison considered the veined organic patterns of the walls. His body seemed desperately tired while his mind, in complete contrast, was inspired by bursts of brilliant imaginings and flights of soaring fancy. Something was in his blood- some imp of the perverse in his brain—conjuring a kaleidoscope of feverish images which simply denied him sleep. Even the patterns on the pink-glowing walls took on lifelike shapes as he gazed at them; one of which—

Was that of a cat! A cat with a broken neck…

Long ago in another world there had been such a cat. Garrison remembered it now. It had been his pet, and when he had erred—rather,because he had erred—the cat had been killed. And its broken neck, its death, had been his fault. His.

Oh, yes, he remembered the loss of… Tiger! Tiger, little Tiger.