Shock II

by Richard Matheson

  Then it was his dream coming true. The door was locked. He moved around the room on quivering legs, pulling down the shades. He turned on the wall heater. He found the light switch by the door and pushed it up. He turned on all the lamps and pulled their shades off. He dropped one of them and it rolled across the rug. He left it there. He went over to where Julie lay.

  In falling to the bed, her skirt had pulled up to her thighs. He could see the tops of her stockings and the garter buttons fastened to them. Swallowing, Eddy sat down and drew her up into a sitting position. He took her sweater off. Shakily, he reached around her and unhooked her bra; her breasts slipped free. Quickly, he unzipped her skirt and pulled it down.

  In seconds, she was naked. Eddy propped her against the pillows, posing her. Dear God, the body on her. Eddy closed his eyes and shuddered. No, he thought, this is the important part. First get the photographs and you'll be safe. She can't do anything to you then; she'll be too scared. He stood up, tensely, and got his camera. He set the dials. He got her centred on the viewer. Then he spoke.

  "Open your eyes," he said.

  Julie did.

  He was at her house before six the next morning, moving up the alley cautiously and into the yard outside her window. He hadn't slept all night. His eyes felt dry and hot.

  Julie was on her bed exactly as he'd placed her. He looked at her a moment, his heartbeat slow and heavy. Then he raked a nail across the screen. "Julie," he said.

  She murmured indistinctly and turned onto her side. She faced him now.

  "Julie."

  Her eyes fluttered open. She stared at him dazedly. "Who's that?" she asked.

  "Eddy. Let me in."

  "Eddy?"

  Suddenly, she caught her breath and shrank back and he knew that she remembered.

  "Let me in or you're in trouble," he muttered. He could feel his legs begin to shake.

  Julie lay motionless a few seconds, eyes fixed on his. Then she pushed to her feet and weaved unsteadily towards the door. Eddy turned for the alley. He strode down it nervously and started up the porch steps as she came outside.

  "What do you want?" she whispered. She looked exciting, half asleep, her clothes and hair all mussed.

  "Inside," he said.

  Julie stiffened. "No."

  "All right, come on," he said, taking her hand roughly. "We'll talk in my car."

  She walked with him to the car and, as he slid in beside her, he saw that she was shivering.

  "I'll turn on the heater," he said. It sounded stupidly inane. He was here to threaten her, not comfort. Angrily, he started the engine and drove away from the curb.

  "Where are we going?" Julie asked.

  He didn't know at first. Then, suddenly, he thought of the place outside of town where dating students always parked. It would be deserted at this hour. Eddy felt a swollen tingling in his body and he pressed down on the accelerator. Sixteen minutes later, the car was standing in the silent woods. A pale mist hung across the ground and seemed to lap at the doors.

  Julie wasn't shivering now; the inside of the car was hot.

  "What is it?" she asked, faintly.

  Impulsively, Eddy reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the photographs. He threw them on her lap.

  Julie didn't make a sound. She just stared down at the photographs with frozen eyes, her fingers twitching as she held them.

  "Just in c-ase you're thinking of calling the police," Eddy faltered. He clenched his teeth. Tell her! he thought savagely. In a dull, harsh voice, he told her everything he'd done the night before. Julie's face grew pale and rigid as she listened. Her hands pressed tautly at each other. Outside, the mist appeared to rise around the windows like a chalky fluid. It surrounded them.

  "You want money?" Julie whispered.

  "Take off your clothes," he said. It wasn't his voice, it occurred to him. The sound of it was too malignant, too inhuman.

  Then Julie whimpered and Eddy felt a surge of blinding fury boil upward in him. He jerked his hand back, saw it flail out in a blur of movement, heard the sound of it striking her on the mouth, felt the sting across his knuckles.

  "Take them off!" His voice was deafening in the stifling closeness of the car. Eddy blinked and gasped for breath. He stared dizzily at Julie as, sobbing, she began to take her clothes off. There was a thread of blood trickling from a corner of her mouth. No, don't, he heard a voice beg in his mind. Don't do this. It faded quickly as he reached for her with alien hands.

  When he got home at ten that morning there was blood and skin under his nails. The sight of it made him violently ill. He lay trembling on his bed, lips quivering, eyes staring at the ceiling. I'm through, he thought. He had the photographs. He didn't have to see her any more. It would destroy him if he saw her any more. Already, his brain felt like rotting sponge, so bloated with corruption that the pressure of his skull caused endless overflow into his thoughts. Trying to sleep, he thought, instead, about the bruises on her lovely body, the ragged scratches, and the bite marks. He heard her screaming in his mind.

  He would not see her any more.

  DECEMBER

  Julie opened her eyes and saw tiny falling shadows on the wall. She turned her head and looked out through the window. It was beginning to snow. The whiteness of it reminded her of the morning Eddy had first shown her the photographs.

  The photographs. That was what had woken her. She closed her eyes and concentrated. They were burning. She could see the prints and negatives scattered on the bottom of a large enamel pan-the kind used for developing film. Bright flames crackled on them and the enamel was smudging.

  Julie held her breath. She pushed her mental gaze further- to scan the room that was lit by the flaming enamel pan-until it came to rest upon the broken thing that dangled and swayed, suspended from the closet hook.

  She sighed. It hadn't lasted very long. That was the trouble with a mind like Eddy's. The very weakness which made it vulnerable to her soon broke it down. Julie opened her eyes, her ugly child's face puckered in a smile. Well, there were others.

  She stretched her scrawny body languidly. Posing at the window, the drugged Coke, the motel photographs-these were getting dull by now although that place in the woods was wonderful. Especially in the early morning with the mist outside, the car like an oven. That she'd keep for a while; and the violence of course. The rest would have to go. She'd think of something better next time.

  Philip Harrison had never noticed the girl in his Physics class until that day-

  8 - LAZARUS II

  'But I died,' he said.

  His father looked at him without speaking. There was no expression on his face. He stood over the bed and -

  Or was it the bed?

  His eyes left his father's face. He looked down and it wasn't the bed. It was an experimental table. He was in the laboratory.

  His eyes moved back to those of his father. He felt so heavy. So stiff. 'What is it?' he asked.

  And suddenly realized that the sound of his voice was different. A man didn't know the actual sound of his voice, they said. But when it changed so much, he knew. He could tell when it was no longer the voice of a man.

  'Peter,' his father spoke at last, 'I know you'll despise me for what I've done. I despise myself already.'

  But Peter wasn't listening. He was trying to think. Why was he so heavy? Why couldn't he lift his head?

  'Bring me a mirror,' he said.

  That voice. That grating wheezing voice.

  He thought he trembled.

  His father didn't move.

  'Peter,' he said, 'I want you to understand this wasn't my idea. It was your -'

  'A mirror.'

  A moment longer his father stood looking down at him. Then he turned and walked across the dark-tiled floor of the laboratory.

  Peter tried to sit up. At first he couldn't. Then the room seemed to move and he knew he was sitting but there was no feeling. What was wrong? Why didn't he feel anything in his muscle
s? His eyes looked down.

  His father took a mirror from his desk.

  But Peter didn't need it. He had seen his hands.

  Metal hands.

  Metal arms. Metal shoulders. Metal chest. Metal trunk, metal legs, metal feet.

  Metal man!

  The idea made him shudder. But the metal body was still. I sat there without moving.

  His body?

  He tried to close his eyes. But he couldn't. They weren't his eyes. Nothing was his.

  Peter was a robot.

  His father came to him quickly.

  'Peter, I never meant to do this,' he said in a flat voice. 'I don't know what came over me - it was your mother.'

  'Mother,' said the machine hollowly.

  'She said she couldn't live without you. You know how devoted she is to you.'

  'Devoted,' he echoed.

  Peter turned away. He could hear the clockwork of himself ticking in a slow, precise way. He could hear the machinery of his body with the tissue of his brain.

  'You brought me back,' he accused.

  His brain felt mechanical too. The shock of finding his body gone and replaced with this. It numbed his thinking.

  'I'm back,' he said, trying to understand. 'Why?'

  Peter's father ignored his question.

  He tried to get off the table, tried to raise his arms. At first they hung down, motionless. Then, he heard a clicking in his shoulders and his arms raised up. His small glass eyes saw it and his brain knew that his arms were up.

  Suddenly it swept over him. All of it.

  'But I'm dead!' he cried.

  He did not cry. The voice that spoke his anguish was a soft, rasping voice. An unexcited voice.

  'Only your body died,' his father said, trying to convince himself.

  'But I'm dead!' Peter screamed.

  Not screamed. The machine spoke in a quiet, orderly way. A machine like way.

  It made his mind seethe.

  'Was this her idea?' he thought and was appalled to hear the hollow voice of the machine echo his thought.

  His father didn't reply, standing miserably by the table, his face gaunt and lined with weariness. He was thinking that all the exhausting struggle had been for nothing. He was wondering, half in fright, if towards the end he had not been more interested in what he was doing than in why.

  He watched the machine walk, clank rather, to the window, carrying his son's brain in its metal case.

  Peter stared out of the window. He could see the campus. See it? The red glass eyes in the skull could see, the steel skull that held his brain. The eyes registered, his brain translated. He had no eyes of his own.

  'What day is it?' he asked.

  'Saturday, March tenth,' he heard the quiet voice of his father say, 'Ten o'clock at night.'

  Saturday. A Saturday he'd never wanted to see. The enraging thought made him want to whirl and confront his father with vicious words. But the big steel frame clicked mechanically and eased around with a creaking sound.

  'I've been working on it since Monday morning when -'

  'When I killed myself,' said the machine.

  His father gasped, stared at him with dull eyes. He had always been so assured, so brittle, so confident. And Peter had always hated that assurance. Because he had never been assured of himself.

  Himself.

  It brought him back. Was this himself? Was a man only his mind? How often had he claimed that to be so. On those quiet evenings after dinner when other teachers came over and sat in the living room with him and his parents. And, while his mother sat by him, smiling and proud, he would claim that a man was his mind and nothing more. Why had she done this to him?

  He felt that fettered helplessness again. The feeling of being trapped. He was trapped. In a great, steel-jawed snare, this body his father had made.

  He had felt the same rigid terror for the past six months. The same feeling that escape was blocked in every direction. That he would never get away from the prison of his life; that chains of daily schedule hung heavy on his limbs. Often he wanted to scream.

  He wanted to scream now. Louder than he ever had before. He had chosen the only remaining exit and even that was blocked. Monday morning he had slashed open his veins and the blanket of darkness had enveloped him.

  Now he was back again. His body was gone. There were no veins to cut, no heart to crush or stab, no lungs to smother. Only his brain, lean and suffering. But he was back.

  He stood facing the window again. Looking out over the Fort College campus. Far across he could see - the red glass lenses could see - the building where he had taught Sociological Surveys.

  'Is my brain uninjured?' he asked.

  Strange how the feeling seemed to abate now. A moment ago he had wanted to scream out of lungs that were no longer there. Now he felt apathetic.

  'As far as I can tell,' said his father.

  'That's fine,' Peter said, the machine said, 'That's just fine.'

  'Peter, I want you to understand this wasn't my idea.'

  The machine stirred. The voice gears rubbed a little and grated but no words came. The red eyes shone out the window at the campus.

  'I promised your mother,' his father said, 'I had to, Peter. She was hysterical. She - there was no other way.'

  'And besides, it was a most interesting experiment,' said the voice of the machine, his son.

  Silence.

  'Peter Dearfield,' said Peter, said the turning, twinkling gears in the steel throat, 'Peter Dearfield is resurrected!' He turned to look at his father. He knew in his mind that a living heart would have been beating heavily, but the little wheels turned methodically. The hands did not tremble, but hung in polished muteness at his steel sides. There was no heart to beat. And no breath to catch, for the body was not alive but a machine.

  'Take out my brain,' Peter said.

  His father began to put on his vest; his tired fingers buttoned it slowly.

  'You can't leave me like this.'

  'Peter, I - I must.'

  'For the experiment?'

  'For your mother.'

  'You hate her and you hate me!'

  His father shook his head.

  'Then I'll do it myself,' intoned the machine.

  The steel hands reached up.

  'You can't,' said his father, 'You can't harm yourself.' 'Damn you!'

  No outraged cry followed. Did his father know that, in his mind. Peter was screaming? The sound of his voice was mild. It could not enrage. Could the well-modulated requests of a machine be heeded?

  The legs moved heavily. The clanking body moved toward Doctor Dearfield. He raised his eyes.

  'And have you taken out the ability to kill?' asked the machine.

  The old man looked at the machine standing before him. The machine that was his only son.

  'No,' he said, wearily, 'You can kill me.'

  The machine seemed to falter. Gears struck teeth, reversed themselves.

  'Experiment successful,' said the flat voice, 'You've made your own son into a machine.'

  His father stood there with a tired look on his face.

  'Have I?' he said.

  Peter turned from his father with a clicking of gears not trying to speak, and moved over to the wall mirror.

  'Don't you want to see your mother?' asked his father.

  Peter made no answer. He stopped before the mirror and the little glass eyes looked at themselves.

  He wanted to tear the brain out of its steel container and hurl it away.

  No mouth. No nose. A gleaming red eye on the right and a gleaming red eye on the left.

  A head like a bucket. All with little rivets like tiny bumps on his new metal skin.

  'And you did all this for her,' he said.

  He turned on well-oiled heels. The red eyes did not show the hate behind them. 'Liar,' said the machine. 'You did it for yourself- for the pleasure of experimenting.'

  If only he could rush at his father. If he could only stamp a
nd flail his arms wildly and scream until the laboratory echoed with screams.

  But how could he? His voice went on as before. A whisper, a turning of oiled wheels, spinning like gears in a clock.

  His brain turned and turned.

  'You thought you'd make her happy, didn't you?' Peter said, 'You thought she'd run to me and embrace me. You thought she'd kiss my soft, warm skin. You thought she'd look into my blue eyes and tell me how handsome I -'

  'Peter this will do no -'

  ' - how handsome I am. Kiss me on the mouth.'

  He stepped toward the old doctor on slow, steel legs. His eyes flickered in the fluorescent light of the small laboratory.

  'Will she kiss my mouth?' Peter asked, 'You haven't given me one.'

  His father's skin was ashen. His hands trembled.

  'You did it for yourself,' said the machine, 'You never cared about her - or about me.'

  'Your mother is waiting,' his father said quietly putting on his coat.

  'I'm not going.'

  'Peter, she's waiting.'

  The thought made Peter's mind swell up in anguish. It ached and throbbed in its hard, metal casing. Mother, mother, how can I look at you now? After what I've done. Even though these aren't my own eyes, how can I look at you now?

  'She mustn't see me like this,' insisted the machine.

  'She's waiting to see you.'

  Wo/'

  Not a cry, but a mannerly turning of wheels.

  'She wants you, Peter.'

  He felt helpless again. Trapped. He was back. His mother was waiting for him.

  The legs moved him. His father opened the door and he went out to his mother.

  She stood up suddenly from the bench, one hand clutching her throat, the other holding her dark, leather handbag. Her eyes were fastened on the robot. The colour left her cheeks.

  'Peter,' she said. Only a whisper.