Psychomech (32 page)

Forever…?

On Thursday Garrison had business people down from the Midlands to see him. Normally he would have had Koenig in attendance but on this occasion handled it himself.

He felt more or less obliged to listen to them and spend most of the day with them, however, and so had written it off entirely to business talk and entertainment. Terri, who was not much good at the former and had her own ideas about the latter, went ‘into the city’ by train to see friends. In fact she did not go to London but left the train at Arundel to meet Gareth Wyatt. They spent the day at a charming, sprawling hotel in the town, whose bar was cosy and discreet and where their room was adequately intimate.

There, in the crisp, clean sheets of their bed, they made various sorts of love for many hours and to their complete satisfaction, then talked of their hopes for the future—especially the immediate future. For during the last six months their lives had changed so completely that neither one of them would ever have believed it could be like this. They were, in short, desperately in love; their resumed affair had blossomed out of all proportion and quite beyond their control.

Now, lying in Wyatt’s arms while he stroked her breasts and kissed her throat, Terri had just asked him how long they would have together each day when Richard was on the machine.

‘About five hours or so. He’ll go on to Psychomech about 11.00 each morning and stay until 5.00. After that he’ll be pretty groggy for an hour or two. He won’t be coming home at all during that week. It’s to be a very exacting routine for him. I expect Psychomech to drain him both emotionally and physically, even though he professes to have no hangups. It will be machine, sleep, food and drink, a little exercise, machine again, and so on.’

‘What’s all this about hangups?’ she asked.

‘That’s what Psychomech is for, silly: to cure neuroses and psychoses. Richard doesn’t believe he has any, but you may be sure he has. Curing them will be a great strain on him. If he’s hidden them away, Psychomech will have to dig that much deeper, that’s all. But afterwards—’ he shrugged. ‘He’ll be the better man for it.’

‘And while he’s actually on the machine, you’ll have all that time to be with me?’

He held her close for a moment. ‘Oh, yes. The process is quite automatic. I need only check the safety margins every now and then. The rest of the time will be ours.’

‘And afterwards you’ll be richer to the tune of half a million,’ She snuggled closer to his warm, firm body.

‘That’s only starters,’ he answered. ‘If all goes well Psychomech will soon be making us a great deal more money than that. Miller Micros will build more machines, and of course I shall demand control of the patents.’

‘And that’s when we’ll let Richard find out about us—which is when he’ll divorce me.’

Wyatt pushed her gently away to arms’ length and stared at her. She was so utterly lovely he knew he had to have her for his own. For the first time in his life he, too, was now truly and deeply in love. And yet he frowned.

‘Is something wrong?’ Her voice was suddenly full of anxiety.

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘something is wrong. It may not be as easy as all that, Terri. If Richard wants to fight it—’

‘Fight the divorce, you mean? Then I would simply come away with you.’

‘But you’ve told me he loves you.’

‘He does, as much as he can love anyone. I’m sure of it. But I’m not necessary to him. I
am
necessary to you, and you to me.’

‘Yes, I know,’ he nodded patiently, ‘but that wouldn’t stop him from taking me for every penny I had! And then we’d be back where we started. On the other hand—’ Something he had said to her a minute earlier kept repeating in his memory.

‘Yes?’

‘If all does
not
go well—’

She froze in his arms. ‘But you said Psychomech was a hundred per cent safe!’

He tried to relax a little and smiled, but she could see that his smile was forced. ‘Well, it’s all still very experimental, you know. I mean, how do you carry out dry-runs on a machine like Psychomech? Richard will be sort of a guinea pig. That’s why I’ve insisted he signs an indemnity. We’re doing that tomorrow, at your place.’

‘God, yes, he mentioned it!’ she said. ‘To see you and not to be able to touch you.’

‘I know,’ he stroked her,’—but at least that damned dog is out of the way.’

She nodded. ‘And Koenig. He’s so watchful, that man.’

‘Yes, but it seems the coast is pretty clear for us now.’ He paused again, suddenly restless, clasping her to him so that she could not see his eyes. ‘But if something were to go wrong… I mean, if he were actually to die on the machine—’

He felt her body stiffen once more, then slowly relax. ‘I’m Richard’s sole beneficiary, so far as I know,’ she said, her voice very quiet. She drew back and gazed steadily at him.

‘You would be an incredibly rich woman,’ he told her, just as quietly.

She pulled him close, buried her head in his chest, felt him stirring against her. ‘But nothing will go wrong… will it?’ She drew him into her body, her flesh a soft vice as her hips began their gentle gyrations.

‘No, of course not,’ he answered, finding amazement in the fact that they had started to make love yet again, and at such a juncture. ‘And don’t worry about us, Terri. Things will work out. Just see if they don’t…’

11.00 A.M. Sunday 6 June, and Garrison, clad only in a short-sleeved dressing gown, went on to the machine. As soon as consciousness slipped away and Psychomech took over, Wyatt left the room of the machine and half an hour later Terri was with him. There were only the three of them in the entire house. Or rather, four of them—if Psychomech itself were included.

11.00 A.M. and in the Midhurst kennels Suzy, the great black Doberman bitch, set up such a yelping and screaming—her screams sounding like nothing so much as those of a human being—that a keeper in a protective suit had to enter her cage and sedate her heavily. But Suzy was ever a quick learner. She would not scream again, not until it suited her purpose—and the next time she would make sure there was no sedation.

11.00 A.M. and in his hotel room in Hamburg overlooking the Reeperbahn, Willy Koenig jerked spastically on . his bed and dropped his Keil cigarillo. The naked whore he was with mistook his spasm for something else and moved her hand climactically on his flesh, only pausing when there was no positive result. Then she delicately picked up his smoke by its plastic mouthpiece and placed it back between his lips, her hand returning at once to a member gone suddenly limp.

‘Ist et was los, Willy? What’s wrong, mein Schatz?’ she asked. ‘You come without coming?’

He stared at the ceiling in silence for a moment, then looked at her. ‘I didn’t come, no.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s 11.00 A.M. in England right now.’

‘So?’

He shrugged. ‘I should be there, that’s all.’

‘Oh, Willy!’ she pouted, removing the cigar from his mouth and leaning over to replace it with her left nipple. ‘But isn’t it so much nicer here?’

Again he shrugged. ‘Actually, I have no choice.’ He forced a short, barking laugh. ‘You have big sweet tits, Hannelore,’ he told her. He was big again, beginning to throb. ‘Sit on me.’

Happily, she complied…

12.20 A.M.

Garrison was drawn into the whorl of his own mind like a comet rushing down the throat of a black hole. Drawn backwards through years he remembered to those earlier years before memory began, years of infancy and first fear, he was suddenly a child again. But as is the way of things in dreams, he knew that he was also Richard Garrison, a man full-grown, and that his quest had commenced.

A man full-grown, yes, but clad now in a body and mind weak as those of a puling babe. A paradox and a riddle—but what sort of riddle?

As the whirling slowed and finally stopped, leaving Garrison’s child mind tottery as a drunkard, he found himself deep in dreams, in a recurrent nightmare from his earliest years. He was an infant, and the room he found himself in was largely his world, with a dirty-white ceiling-sky and pink-wall horizons (his parents had wanted a girl, if they had wanted any child at all) and a gleaming square window-sun to let in the light. Except that now the window was dark for the night had come again.

The night had come—and She was not here. A child knows its mother, even a mother without love, and senses her presence or her absence. Now it was her absence, which always went hand in hand with the night. She had used to work at night to keep Garrison’s father in money to drink and to spend on his women.

Garrison let out a little wail of a cry, his lips puckering in the manner of a disturbed child. He knew this dream dredged up from the murky deeps of twenty-eight years, knew and feared it. And he had every right to fear it, for at some obscure point on the periphery of his mind he was still the adult Richard Garrison and remembered Psychomech. And he knew what Psychomech could do to this childhood dream.

It began.

The pink walls faded into dull pink shadows as a vast door opened to let in bright electric light, hurting Garrison’s eyes. He rubbed at his eyes and turned his head away—but not before he had seen through the bars of his crib a dark man-silhouette framed against the brightness, from which his father’s voice had whispered:

‘
Shhhh We don’t want to wake the little shit up. It would be no fun with him bawling his bloody head off!’

And Garrison heard too the coarse giggle of a woman and knew that it was not his mother’s laugh. But he did not cry, not with his father out there beyond the door and the night outside beyond the window. He dared not cry, for if he did… his father’s hand was a heavy one, and She was not here…

1.10 P.M.

Psychomech quietly purred and hummed, and strapped to its padded bench Garrison’s body twitched and jerked. He moaned a little, which alone would have indicated that Psychomech had found a vulnerable spot in his psyche, a target.

The machine dug deeper, exciting Garrison’s fear-centres, exploding his deep-rooted, shadowy fear-dream into a vivid full-blown shrieking nightmare…

The pink walls had now completely faded away into sulphurous horizons, the dirty-white ceiling dissolving into a leaden sky. Garrison lay naked and helpless, a man with the strength of a baby, gazing out through the bars of his crib at the bubbling marsh which stretched away in all directions as far as the eye could see. He caught at the vertical bars, pulling himself to his knees. The quicksand streamed from his thighs, fell from his chest and forearms in splattering, stinking gobs.

He was sinking, the crib too, settling down slowly into depths of liquid filth; but in his baby’s mind he did not recognize the danger and his child’s eyes saw only Da-da… the Da-da who hated him—Da-da and his women and his booze.

There they lay, a dozen Da-das, identical upon a dozen old-fashioned identically rickety beds; and with the Da-das a dozen different slatternly women, one to each Da-da, peaky-faced and big-, loose-breasted. That had been the type he liked—like Garrison’s mother herself—’ poor desperate women who were too morally weak to refuse him, or to whom the Fates had delivered blows so powerful that they had not been left with the strength to fight back. And the twelve Da-das like a dozen rutting pigs, slavering, eyes bulging, as their bodies worked frenziedly upon those of the women in as many varieties of the sex act. And where baby Garrison sank in the mire, the Da-das and the women in their beds did not sink but frothed and fornicated and laughed coarsely as they drank of each other’s bodies and of the bottles which littered the marsh beside each groaning, creaking bed.

The mud bubbled as the crib sank down several more shuddering inches into it, and slime oozed half-way up Garrison’s thighs. He sobbed—and at once held his breath in a frozen gasp—but too late. They had heard.

‘
Look!’ the slatternly women shouted, their breasts jouncing as they kneeled in their beds the better to see Garrison, pointing at him. ‘Your little boy—he can see us! You left his bedroom door open…’

‘
So? the dozen Da-das roared in unison. ‘So bleedin’ what? He don’t know nothin’, do he? I mean, he ain’t gain’ to tell his mother, now is he? See, he can’t bleedin’ talk yet!’

And the dozen sluts cackling like witches as the Da-das mounted them where they kneeled and the beds recommenced their swaying and creaking.

The real Garrison had heard and understood what was said, but baby Garrison had heard only the shouting. He clutched at the steadily sinking bars of the crib, the mire up to his loins, and the tears rolled steadily down his man’s cheeks. First the shouting, then the swinging, stinging hand on his baby flesh. That was always the way of it, it was always the same. Except… sometimes Ma-ma would come, and sometimes she would stop him.

‘
Ma-ma!’ he wailed, quietly at first. But then, as the enraged Da-das sprang from their beds like a dozen drunken robots, he cried louder, and louder still: ‘Ma-ma! Ma-maaaaa!’

1.30 P.M.

Wyatt slipped out of bed and put on a dressing gown. Terri lay between black sheets, her white arms and breasts showing. She stared at him through dark, anxious eyes. At first she had not been completely at ease with Richard so close, but then the idea had started to appeal to her. She remembered someone once telling her that libertines find their pleasure and excitement not so much in sin itself as in the
knowledge
that they are sinning.

But now, as he made to leave the bedroom, she felt uncomfortable once more. ‘Gareth… will you be long?’

‘Not long.’ He spoke quietly, as if afraid Garrison might hear him. He too was nervous, but sure now of the course to be taken, this golden opportunity he could not afford to miss.

‘Will it be… all right?’ Again the anxiety, and of course he knew what she meant. Without ever discussing it, or only in the vaguest of terms, the two had come to a decision: that Richard Garrison must not be allowed to return from his trip. That when finally he came down from the machine it must be as a corpse.

‘It will be all right, yes.’