Psychomech (34 page)

And yes, its power really was waning, growing weaker along with the weakening light. Garrison’s heart skipped a beat then—but in the next moment the Machine had soared across the summit of the hills, and below him in the valley—

A light!

A warm light in the darkness.

Garrison rode the Machine down into the valley, the light growing brighter and taking on shape and form. He saw now that it was not one light but many, a great domed city of lights, all friendly and gleaming and golden. This must surely be the place he sought, the place of sanctuary—

Surely…?

He stood off for a moment to observe, becoming quickly fascinated with what he saw. For across the valley floor streamed hundreds of people, travellers from the four corners of this weird world; and all of them making for the gates where the great curve of the domed city’s wall sank down into the valley’s floor.

That domed and golden city, like a mighty beehive of metal and glass, with massive circular porthole windows looking out upon the valley, and all the people streaming through the yawning gates. And they were beautiful, privileged people, for whom the city meant food and drink and rest, sanctuary from all the terrors of the night.

The last of them entered through the gate’s, tail-end of a mighty caravan gladly swallowed up in a great and glorious oasis. Garrison gasped and urged the Machine forward. He had been hypnotized, spellbound, but now he too must go in through the gates before—

They closed on him!

Before he could reach them, with a great sighing of air and a massive clanging of metal against metal, they closed. They shut him out, left him to the cold and the night and the darkness.

The gates, the city, the beautiful people—they all rejected him!

He rode up to the gates, alongside them, hammered on them uselessly with his fists. He floated up to the windows, gazing in wild-eyed upon the people where they ate and drank and played and loved and were warm. He shook his futile fists at them. ‘Why me? Why me?’

They heard him, flocked to the great circular windows, stared out at him, curiously at first. Then their curiosity turned to jeering, to harsh, uncaring laughter, and at last he saw that they were not the beautiful people he had taken them to be.

For the women all wore similar faces: those of his mother and of every girl or woman who ever rejected him in however small a way; and the men had the faces of his father, his stepfather, school teachers, Sergeants, Sergeant-majors and officers. Not that he truly recognized these faces he saw (or at best as the very vaguest of memories) but he knew that all of these people, at one time or another, had rejected him—and that now they were doing it again.

And all around him the unknown, malefic darkness, and the only light that which streamed out from the golden city’s circular windows—which even now were closing one by one!

Garrison flew Ms now straining Machine to the last window, gazing in and crying: ‘Let me in! Let me in!’

THEY WON‘T, RICHARD, the man-God Schroeder’s face suddenly loomed huge and dark in a dark sky. THEY REJECT YOU JUST AS YOU HAVE REJECTED ME. NOW YOU KNOW HOW IT FEELS. BUT IF YOU WILL ONLY LET ME IN, THEN—

‘
No!’ Garrison snarled. I beat them all before and I can do it again. I beat them at their own game. The trick is to turn their own weapon against them. They reject you, so you reject them—utterly! I reject them with my mind, kill them off utterly—in my mind!’

IT WON‘T WORK THIS TIME, RICHARD. YOU MUST SEE THAT. YOU ARE BEATEN. AND YOUR MACHINE, TOO. CAN‘T YOU FEEL ITS STRENGTH EBBING? YOU HAVEN‘T THE TIME FOR TRICKS OR TACTICS OR MIND GAMES. JUST LOOK ABOUT YOURSELF…

Garrison looked all about in the darkness.

As the Machine slowly drifted towards the floor of the valley, female figures black as blots of ink flowed forward. Lamias of Loneliness, they were, their curving white fangs agleam in red-rimmed mouths. And overhead, around and about in the still cold air, scything shapes of darkness swept the night: Vampires of the Aching Void, whose talons were sharp and cold as ice-shards, whose thirst was that of the scorched desert. And behind that single window, safe in the golden city, the hostile, uncaring faces stared out as before.

LET ME IN, RICHARD!

‘
No! I’ll beat them, I tell you!’

HOW? HOW CAN YOU HOPE TO HOLD BACK THE DARKNESS, THE LAMIAS OF LONELINESS, THE COLD OF NIGHT, THE VAMPIRES OF THE ACHING VOID? HOW, RICHARD?

‘
With my mind, damn you!’ Garrison shouted, hardly knowing that the words were his. ‘Don’t you remember? After all, you showed me the way. But you’ve been a long time dead, man-God, and you don’t know how far Eve gone…’

THEN SHOW ME, RICHARD, SHOW ME.

Garrison threw himself flat on the broad back of the Machine, squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated. He called upon the same power which had drawn the Machine to him in the quicksand. He poured his mental strength into Psychomech, became one with the Machine, then desperately sought out the source of the power loss—

—
And found it!

In the room of the machine a weird change came over the unconscious, dreaming, beleaguered Garrison. He stopped writhing on his couch and his body grew still. His frantic pulse rapidly regulated. His face grew stern as a frown, then soft as fresh snow, then rapt in concentration. His hands curled into tight fists.

The three knurled knobs on Psychomech’s control panel—the controls for the feeder systems—suddenly, simultaneously clicked into the ‘on’ position, then turned themselves up, and up, to the limit of their calibration—and began to glow with an incredible heat! In a very short while they melted down, the smoking plastic liquefying and fixing the knobs permanently in that position.

And as Psychomech hummed and purred with a new vitality, so Garrison relaxed upon his couch and smiled an awful smile…

The golden city was silent now. No sounds of revelry came floating through its massy walls; no echoes of joyous laughter; even the last window had commenced to close its shutter, but very slowly, where crowding faces gazed out upon Garrison and jostled for better viewing positions.

Garrison was fighting for his life, they knew it, and the outcome of his fight was all-important—to them as well as to him. They had rejected him, cast him out, refused him entry. And if he won his fight? What then? No, they did not want him to win.

The belly of the gently settling Machine touched the soil of the valley’s floor and came to rest. Its hum faded into silence. Dim lights within its black and silvery frame flickered out. The man upon its back remained spread-eagled, as if frozen in that position. And indeed he might well have been frozen; for ice-crystals were forming on the earth and rocks, and snow had commenced to drift down from the night sky in flat flakes as big as fists. And as the shutter slowly fell on the last window and its beam of light narrowed down, so the night-things gathered; and soon the cold and darkness would reign supreme over all.

Then—

The Lamias of Loneliness, black in their inky night-rags, white fangs gleaming, pounced upon the Machine. They fell upon it and held it down ;and others of their handmade to pounce upon Garrison. And descending out of the black sky and the white drifting snow, hovering on ragged membrane wings, down came those legions of the lost, those eaters of forsaken souls, the Vampires of the Aching Paid; and they too settled upon Garrison where he hugged the back of the now inert Machine. And Lamias and Vampires fought to be first with him.

And while they fought—

Psychomech began stutteringly to purr and dull lights flickered into life deep within its metal and plastic mass. And as power flowed once more within the Machine, so strength returned to Garrison where he huddled to its back. He rose up, hurling the Lamias of Loneliness from him, his fists flailing like warclubs and crunching the fragile bones of the fluttering Vampires of the Aching Void.

Rejection?

Reject Richard Garrison?

Reject Psychomech?

The Machine’s hum was now a roar of power. Power crackled and lashed within the beast like trapped lightning. The internal lights flashed dazzling and multi-hued, turning the Machine into a great coruscating diamond.

‘
Rise up!’ Garrison ordered then. ‘Lift me up to that window. Let them see me. Let them see how I’ve won!’

And Psychomech rose up, its lights a throb of colour, its power the snarling of primal beasts. And Garrison the master astride the beast’s back—Garrison the Phoenix rising from the Ashes of Rejection—Garrison the Avenger!

Lamias fell like black rain amidst the white, whirling snow, shaken off as fleas from Psychomech’s underbelly to crash in ruin down to the valley floor. And all the screaming, thirsty Vampires were driven back from Garrison and Psychomech, hurled headlong in a panic flight by the sheer power of the man and Machine.

‘
Rejection?’ he cried at the white faces in the window as finally the shutter closed on them.’ You reject me?Then damn you all! Damn every last one of you!’

I DID NOT REJECT YOU, RICHARD. The man-God Schroeder’s face was dark in darkness. YOU REJECTED ME. BUT… IT IS NOT YET OVER. And he was gone. And the snow whirled down.

‘
Every last one of you!’ screamed Garrison again, and he hurled Psychomech at the dome of the golden city.

In through that metal wall sped Psychomech as a dart through tissue paper, as a bullet through a balloon—and the result no Jot less devastating. The city simply burst open, fell in egg-shell shards, crumbled like a dried-out castle of sand. And even as she collapsed, out sped Garrison and the Machine through the far wall, their exit accelerating and completing the city’s destruction.

And now, speeding away towards the far dawn, it was Garrison’s turn to reject. To reject and put aside every rejection he had ever suffered.

He cared not at all but curled himself up and fell into a sleep of exhaustion upon the warm, broad back of Psychomech; and the Machine glowed and purred and hummed with power as it sped him onward through the night…

6
.00 P.M.

Terri had gone home now. There were the servants to think about. Silly at this stage needlessly to arouse any sort of suspicions or leave room for unnecessary, possibly harmful rumours. More than this, however, the tension at Wyatt’s place had doubled and redoubled in the last couple of hours, until the atmosphere had become quite untenable for her. Also, she had seen the look on Wyatt’s face when, at 5.00 P.M., after an absence of only a few minutes, he had returned to the bedroom haggard and hollow-eyed. She had not seen him looking like that before—when for once, however handsome the facade, his age had showed mercilessly through—and had experienced a thrill of alarm at the sure knowledge that something was seriously amiss.

She had guessed that her husband still lived and the ‘experiment’ was not proceeding as Wyatt had determined it should, but beyond that she knew nothing.

And so she had embraced him one last time and he had promised her that it
would soon
be over, and finally she had driven away and he had been left alone. Which was when he had returned to that haunted room, the room of the machine, where for some little time he had simply stood before the bulk of Psychomech and listened to its mechanical purr, staring un-comprehendingly at the control panel’s melted-down knobs.

An electrical fault? Was that possible? And why—
how
—had Psychomech bypassed the backup controls? It was… crazy!

Wyatt felt that he, too, must be going crazy. And on top of this latest freak he now had at least two and a half hours’ work to do continuing his ‘log’ and falsifying the machine’s records. Again panic struck at him, setting him trembling. What the hell was going on here? What was happening?

For the third or fourth time (he was rapidly losing track) he checked Garrison’s bio-functions, the chemistry and mechanics of his life. The man’s weight was down by about nine pounds in lost fluids, but apart from that… all else seemed normal! Everything normal! Incredible! And by now Garrison should be dead twice over…

Wyatt checked himself. Stupid thought, for of course a man could only die once—
but why hadn’t he?
At the very least he should be a raving lunatic; and yet there he lay, apparently soundly (even comfortably) asleep! In fact he should soon be coming out of it, gradually returning to consciousness as the dream-engendering drug was lost or neutralized in his system.

Wyatt shook himself out of a state he recognized as a sort of shocked or bemused lethargy. He quickly prepared and administered a hypodermic, thus ensuring that Garrison would stay under, then returned his attention yet again to the control panel. Useless to conjecture any further upon what had happened here, and certainly useless to attempt to free the backup controls. Better by far simply to disconnect the entire system. The connections were easily uncoupled, leaving the backup as an inert and completely useless pile of machinery. Which made it utterly impossible—yes,
utterly
impossible—for Psychomech to leak any assistance to Garrison from this time forward. Wyatt barked a harsh, half-hysterical laugh. Damn it all, it should have been impossible before!

It was just after 8.30 P.M. when Wyatt finished falsifying his log. By then too he had wiped clean the machine’s record of the experiment and replaced it with a clean, pre-recorded run. On several occasions he had paused in his work to go and look at Garrison where he lay. The blind man’s resistance must be phenomenal. Now, exhausted, he left the blind man to the machine’s mercy and made to return to his bedroom. On the landing he paused, then headed downstairs. He was hungry, thirsty too. He ate sandwiches cold from the fridge and drank a pint of milk. There were three unopened bottles of milk left when he was through, and enough food to hold off a siege.

He paused, frowning, with the fridge door still open. Now what had prompted him to stock up like this? After all, it wasn’t as if this thing was going to take a lot of time… was it?

At 9.10 he wearily climbed the stairs and looked in for a moment on Garrison. The man was moaning now and straining against his padded manacles, perspiring like a fat man in a Turkish bath. Wyatt gritted his teeth and gave a vicious nod of his head. Good! If his nightmares couldn’t kill him, then all of that sweating surely would. Christ, by now he should be almost dessicated! And
that
might take a little explaining away, too. Well, he would worry about that later.