Psychomech (39 page)

Garrison had called for her.
He
had cried out to her for help and she must answer that call now—but how? If only she could be with him, face alongside him whatever dangers he faced…

The link between them strengthened, bypassing the merely mundane laws of science and nature.
In her mind
Suzy sniffed him out and discovered him in his torment and terror. And
in her mind
she sped to him—flew to him on telepathic wings—to be one with him against the monsters of his id.

Her body still lay there, apparently spent, in a field of breeze-rippled summer grasses, so that any sympathetic observer might have imagined she was drowning in an ocean of green; but this was only her shell. This was her hair and skin and flesh and bones, the material Suzy. Suzy
herself—the essential Suzy—she was somewhere else…

Willy Koenig was just in time to buy a ticket and board the 13.30 Britannia Airways flight for Gatwick. Aboard the plane he tried to relax but found it impossible. He calculated how long it would take to get from Gatwick to Wyatt’s place. By taxi, if he bribed the driver heavily enough, maybe something less than two hours. Which meant that in less than four hours’ time he would know exactly what the trouble was.

Of one thing he felt fairly certain: there
was
trouble. What else could it mean?—that voice, Garrison’s mind-voice, calling to him telepathically. And thinking about it, Koenig knew why he had gone on last night’s drinking binge. That too had been Garrison: Koenig had known that something was going terribly wrong, and that Richard Garrison was in the thick of it. Very well, orders or no orders he must return to England at once and find out what was amiss. And put it to rights, if that were at all possible. If anything had happened to Garrison—then let the Good Lord have mercy on whoever was responsible.

Now who would be responsible? Koenig fingered his chin and frowned long and darkly, and he sat thinking his bad thoughts from the beginning of the flight through to its end…

Garrison could hold on no longer. With a groan of despair he relaxed his mind-grip on the Machine; which immediately fell outwards and rolled on to its side, carrying several of the big cats with it and crushing them. The rest sprang aside and, snarling their triumph, hurled themselves at the entrance to Garrison’s cave. With one final burst of ESP energy, Garrison levitated two of them and crashed them together against a pink-veined column. But as these two fell stunned, so the others were upon him.

At that very moment Garrison became aware of an extra presence here on the fringe of the fossil forest, one which blew upon him like a breath of fresh air in the heart of a burning desert. He felt a mind brush his mind, felt the warmth of a love transcending all other loves, the love of this—stranger?—for him, and was awed by the sheer raging force of the emotion.

At that moment, too, he knew that his time was up. The great cats were upon him, their teeth and claws raking him, sinking into his vital places. They were upon him, yes, but upon them… a great black shadow that moved and struck like dark lightning, a creature more savage yet, whose strength was love and therefore stronger by far than the vengeful hatred which motivated the zombie-tigers.

Unreal she was—certainly un-solid, ethereal—but at the same time and completely paradoxically, effective as a scythe amongst stems of ripe corn. And Garrison knew her, remembered her from that Otherworld where once he had had substance.

‘Suzy!’ he gasped, and the huge black ghost-dog whined worriedly, once, before snarling and snapping yet again as she hurled herself at the throat of a startled cat. And though they \ fought back, turning their great fangs and claws upon her, still they had little chance against this phantom hound. Her advantage was this: that where she bit they felt it, while where they clawed she was as smoke. And in the end the entire pack of them fled as one; and bounding high, their heads lolling as one head, they merged, shrank and became flat and two-dimensional, melting into a pink wall and forming a small cat-pattern trapped in the eon-frozen coral.

Only then did the ghost-dog relax and pad silently to Garrison’s side, her eyes like twin golden will-o’-the-wisps in a head of black smoke. A manifestation, nothing more, but one possessed of a will and a love beyond the ken of mundane men; and where she laid her head upon Garrison’s lap he felt its weight, but when he went to fondle her ears his hand passed through her as through a dusky mirror of dirty water. But he knew her strength, the strength of her devotion, and it buoyed him up.

She would be his companion on the quest, sniffing out the way for him to the end of the journey. Inspired, he stood up and stepped out of the tiny cave; and Suzy was there padding at his heels.

‘
Up,’ he commanded the Machine; and Psychomech righted itself and floated free of the floor. Garrison climbed aboard the Machine and called Suzy up behind him. She sat there, and despite her insubstantiality he felt her paw heavy upon his shoulder; and for all that she was the ghost of a dog, still her sweet panting breath warmed his neck as they rode the Machine out of the coral complex under a night of indigo sky and jewel stars.

No longer weary, Garrison guided his massy mount towards the distant glow of dawn; and he somehow knew that the way would not be long now, and he wondered what the end of it would be…

4.20 P.M.

Koenig was well satisfied with the taxi driver’s performance. He paid him, included a large tip, entered his master’s house and questioned the servants. His original intention had been to go direct to Wyatt’s place, but in the space of the last three hours he had changed his mind. What if… just supposing… how could he be
sure
that what he had experienced was real? Might it not have been conjured by his own fear for Garrison’s well-being? And what now, if he went bursting in on this experiment in which Garrison had involved himself; this necessary experiment if ever Adam Schenk’s forecasts were to prove themselves, if ever Thomas Schroeder were to have the chance to return, reborn in Garrison’s body and mind?

The servants were not reassuring. Garrison had left the house early on Sunday morning; Mr Wyatt had collected him by car. Before leaving, the master had warned them that he would not be returning, that he might well be away for the entire week. They were not to worry but must expect him when they saw him. The mistress of the house had gone out that same morning, returning in the evening, and she had gone out again this morning bright and early. She had taken her own car, the red Ford Capri. That was as much as they could tell him.

Koenig thanked them, told them that all was well and said they were not to worry. He would be taking the Mercedes out and could not say when he would be back; he, too, was to be expected when he appeared. Then he went out to the garage…

Koenig!

Garrison saw him there high on that jutting rock, standing square and squat atop that un-scalable flat-roofed peak in the shining dawn air, a semi-solid silhouette like a burning afterimage which will not remove with a blinking of the eye but seems to smoke and smoulder on the retina.

And yet the image was incomplete. Garrison recognized this scene from some previous time and knew that something was missing. A machine? Yes, a machine. Not like the Machine, no, but a machine nevertheless. A bright, silver thing. A—

—
Car? Yes, an automobile. A… Mercedes!

Memories at once flooded Garrison’s mind. Of Koenig, of the great silver Mercedes with its dual steering system. He blinked his eyes again at the figure on the high jutting rock. Koenig, alone. Koenig, like a mirage, a mind-picture.

Garrison formed an idea.

Suzy the Doberman pinscher, however solid she felt where she hugged close behind him, was merely a ghost-dog, avatar of a creature from a separate world and life. Koenig, too. Very well, if Garrison could mind-project these images of living things—if he could dream of them, draw them to him from that Otherworld—might he not also mind-project the image of an inanimate object? Koenig was incomplete without the car, like a picture without its frame.

Garrison squeezed his eyes tight shut… and when next he opened them the shimmering shape of a silver Mercedes stood behind the darker silhouette of the man, who now waved and beckoned Garrison on, pointing with outstretched arm and hand.

This was what Garrison had been waiting for, this sign. Now he knew for certain that he was close to quest’s end, that Koenig merely pointed the way to his ultimate objective.

Behind him now those valleys and oceans of earlier dreams, those lizard-lands of weird vegetation and tortured rock formations. Behind him, too, the cloud-capped, moon-stabbing mountains and silvery lakes of Leviathan. But ahead… ahead the winding mountain pass above which, impossibly perched, Koenig stood with legs wide-spread, squarely pointing the way.

The way through the pass. The way to the final confrontation.

Garrison waved his thanks to the figure on the rock and rode the Machine into the mouth of the tortuously winding pass. And behind him Koenig and the car faded slowly into shimmering distance. And beyond the pass—

Beyond the pass 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 looming, and built upon it a black castle glittering like faceted coal or jet.

And somewhere in that castle a Black Room with a forbidden secret. And in the discovery of that secret, the end of the quest.

The end, too, of the man who had been Richard Garrison

O
n a small wooded hill overlooking Garrison’s Sussex place, Kevin Connery lay in the short grass beneath the fringing branches of a bush and gazed through binoculars at the front door of the house. His excitement made his breathing sharp, irregular. He had waited here more or less continually for three days and nights, until at long last the man he hated most in all the world had returned. Willy Koenig had entered that house just a few short minutes ago, but to Connery each one of those minutes had seemed like an hour.

Despite the fact that it was cool beneath the bush, where the springy earth was dappled by splashes of penetrating sunlight, Connery sweated. It was the hot sweat of anticipation, the sweet sweat of revenge. He mopped his brow, gingerly fingering a stipple of insect bites where they had blotched his grotesquely scarred nose and cheeks. His fingers traced the scars, ugly white river valleys on the landscape of his face, and he remembered how they got there.

He remembered his headlong flight through a plate glass window, and the delay in treatment through his natural reluctance to seek a bona-fide doctor, and the IRA ‘medic’ who finally stitched him up—in more ways than one—but mostly he remembered the man who tossed him through the window. Willy Koenig.

After that there had been the humiliation of his reduction to the ranks for gross inefficiency’; and finally, permanently scarred and hideously so, he had been advised simply to ‘go away’. And that was advice he could not ignore. He had become an embarrassment; he could never pull another job, not looking the way he did. And any casual employment outside the IRA (he had always been a petty criminal) was equally unfeasible; he would be far too easily recognized. As for his needs as a man; even before his ‘accident’ he had been unattractive, but now—? Who would look at him now? Now he would have difficulty buying himself a whore.

And all of this had festered in his heart, producing more black pus of hatred than the yellow pus which had poisoned all one hundred and seventy of those clumsy stitches in his face. Then, a year ago, he had spotted Koenig and his blind boss at a big party in the London Hilton. By then Connery had been the head downstairs porter at the hotel and doing all right for himself, but as soon as he had seen Koenig the old sores had opened up again.

It had been a simple thing to find out about Koenig—where he lived, what he did—and only a little more difficult to keep tenuous tabs on his comings and goings. After that—

During the last twelve months Connery had used up considerable money and time and energy in putting together a far more complete file on Koenig’s present life and situation than any dossier the war-crimes researchers might have constructed at the end of World War II. And over that same period he had let his hatred bleed and rot until it became gangrenous; and in the mire of his mind he had plotted his revenge, which could only be complete if it were Koenig’s death.

As to how that murder would be achieved: that was easy, Connery had always had ‘the knack’ with explosives. After all this time he would be a little rusty, that was true, but he knew he could trust his talents this one last time. Finally his opportunity had presented itself. An Irish friend at Gatwick had reported Koenig’s departure, the fact that he had returned to his homeland on an open ticket. A short visit, doubtless—for Connery now knew that Koenig rarely left Garrison’s side for more than a week or so at the outside—but that was fine. Two or three days would be more than ample time.

And now, for the first time in Connery’s life that he remembered, his luck seemed inexhaustible. Not only Koenig but Garrison, too, was absent from the house in Sussex; and the blind man’s young wife much given to going off visiting;
and
the household’s great dog kennelled at Midhurst! What could be simpler?

It would have to be the car, of course, that great silver Mercedes of which Koenig was the only driver except on very rare occasions. Connery had got into the garage yesterday and planted his bomb beneath the bonnet close to the dash on the driver’s side, since when he had waited and watched and sweated it out.

He had been prepared to wait for several days (a good many empty bottles and cans, hastily buried in a shallow pit, and a number of full bottles and foodstuffs in a knapsack, and a rolled-up sleeping-bag close to hand beneath the bush, would readily testify to that) but it had not been necessary. Koenig was back earlier than Connery had foreseen, and only a few minutes ago he had gone into the house.