Psychosphere

by Brian Lumley

  “Coffee, yes,” said Vicki, standing up and slapping the girl’s face, almost knocking her from her feet.

  The blow stung some sense back into her. She held her face as hot tears gushed, more freely now, before turning and stumbling back towards the cockpit.

  Vicki fastened Garrison’s seat belt, half-collapsed into her seat and fastened her own. She knew Garrison was doing this—saving all their lives—knew it and dared do nothing which might interfere.

  LIFT HER UP, Garrison told the pilot. TAKE HER UP TO HER NORMAL ALTITUDE.

  No power! No engines! Impossible! the pilot was crying, tears streaming down his face. He was talking to God!

  FAITH!

  The plane began to climb. Powerless, she flew higher, her wings slicing the wind.

  “Vicki,” Garrison gasped from between clenched teeth. “I need your help.”

  “Richard, what can—?”

  “No, don’t touch me!” he shrank back as she leaned across. “Just…lift! Will the plane to fly, to keep on flying. Repeat over and over to yourself these words: we’ll make it, we’ll make it, we’ll make it. Repeat them and believe them.”

  Vicki took a deep breath, sat back and closed her eyes. She clenched her fists. We’ll make it, we’ll make it, we’ll make it…

  The co-pilot was coming out of it. Garrison probed him. WAKE UP. WE NEED YOUR HELP. WE’RE GOING TO MAKE IT. WE’RE GOING TO MAKE IT!

  Garrison cut the probe and groaned. He could feel his mind beginning to buckle. It wasn’t strong enough. He needed help. Much more help. He felt himself beginning to slip, to slide, to fall.

  It was as if he fell into a great hole in the earth, a chasm. But even as he rushed down into blackness, others were released to finish what he had started. His mind split. The Garrison facet receded, but the other facets surfaced, were free!

  Garrison’s body slumped in its seat, his face pale as death, his hands twitching. The body was useless now, except as a shell, a house for three minds. Two of these were now free to fly the plane, but Garrison himself—

  —HE FOUGHT A DIFFERENT BATTLE, FLEW A DIFFERENT machine. The machine. Psychomech. Except Psychomech wasn’t flying but plunging to destruction!

  “Liar!” Garrison’s yell drowned out Suzy’s howling. “Liar, Schroeder, liar!” But Schroeder was gone and still the Machine plunged.

  Garrison hung on for dear life—or death?—and bared his teeth in the rush of frigid air from the depths below; and behind him the bitch clung to his back, her fear no less than his own. And suddenly, from nowhere—like a cold cloak thrown upon him by some unseen hand—there was a chilly calmness, a clearness of mind, a feeling which went beyond fear. A desire to know whose design this was, whose hand had brought him to this end.

  Who was it down there, down in the depths and the darkness, whose magnet mind drew him like a meteorite falling from the night sky? Oh, yes, for someone had engineered this, be sure of it! This was the work of some dire enemy—perhaps one of those enemies spied in the pit of the wizards! But which one? Garrison must find out. His magic was weak now, true, but not so weak he didn’t feel the urge to fight back. He must at least try to fight back.

  Garrison sent his mind winging back, back to his dream within a dream. He sat once more in the circle of wizards, and he gazed once more upon them where they cast their strange runes and made their dark magics. And one he saw whose face he knew at once: a dark face and greedy, belonging to a swarthy wizard whose immaculate attire could not conceal the evil that lurked within.

  He shuffled cards and occasionally spun a small roulette wheel which he held between his crossed legs, this one, and his eyes smouldered with hatred where they stared unblinkingly at the tiny Garrison-figure in the crystal ball.

  And sure enough the Garrison in the shew-stone rode a tiny Psychomech, and man and Machine and dog all plunging to their doom in a lightless chasm. And now Garrison knew that this was the one!

  Still falling and knowing the fall soon must end, Garrison quit his useless, ineffective levitating and drew his powers in. He wrapped them about himself as a man wraps a robe—or coils a whip! He reached out his mind into another world, another place—the pit of the wizards—and hurled his energies in one final blast full in the face of the wizard with the cards and the wheel…

  IT WAS BUSINESS AS USUAL FOR CARLO VICENTI, AND AS USUAL HIS business was dirty. A thoroughly dirty game. His Knightsbridge penthouse flat was the venue; two of his boys’ were bit-part players; the star performer was one of Vicenti’s girls, caught once too often taking too much of the ante. She had a lesson to learn, as all of them did at least once in their short working lives, and Vicenti was just the one to teach her.

  Now she was held down in a straight-backed dining chair, Fatso Facello on one side and Toni Murelli on the other. They had torn her dress down the front and jerked up her brassiere, so that her normally proud breasts were forced down a little beneath the black material of the bra and made to bulge. Vicenti considered all women cows to be milked dry; and now, the way this little tramp’s udders flopped there—swollen and bruised by the rough handling of his thugs, who’d taken turns with her on the thick pile carpet for a warmup—they only served to affirm his conviction.

  “Mary,” said Vicenti almost genially, waving his thin cigar in the air in an expansive gesture as he drew up a second chair in front of her and hung his arms lazily over its back, “you have given me problems. Things to think about. Now this I don’t like. Smooth operations I like. Girls doing as they’re told I like. Whores making money and taking their cut, I like. But taking my cut, too—or not even telling me there’s a cut to take—this I really do not like!” His voice had hardened. “Not one little bit do I like it…” He reached out, caught up her bra in one tight fist and wrenched it from her. Its elastic had left a horizontal groove in the flesh of her breasts two inches above her small nipples, just over the rim of her large, prominent areolas.

  Scared to death, the girl panted. She was blonde, young—no more than twenty, twenty-one years old—and the perspiration of panic and terror gleamed on her face. She would normally be pretty, but now her eyes were bright darting pinpoints in the bloodless face of a trapped animal. Vicenti thought: why is it that when they’re scared they always look so ugly?

  Finally she gabbled out: “They were just a few spare tricks, Mr. Vicenti, honest! And in my own time…”

  He gave a short, harshly barking laugh, which was echoed by amused grunts from the thugs holding her down. “Your own time? Hey—your time’s my time, little woman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you anything? And my time you’ve been wasting.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “But you did!” He leaned forward, tilting his chair. “Now listen and I’ll tell you how it’s going to be. You’ve maybe been working too hard and got kind of confused, forgot your loyalties. You know? So…see, I’m a nice guy really. What I’ll do is this: I’ll give you a couple of weeks off. A holiday. No work. Of course that also means no money, but you’ll get by on what you got stashed. And just to make sure you don’t work—” he drew deeply on his cigar, blew the white crust of ash from its glowing tip, reached it towards her breasts.

  “No, Mr. Vicenti, no! Please don’t mark me! Please!” She cowered down, then tried to surge upright. Facello and Murelli grunted as they tightened their grip, holding her rigidly immobile.

  “See,” Vicenti said again, almost conversationally, “there’s not too many guys will suck on scabby tits. You know, they get to wondering how they got that way. They think, you know, maybe she has a bad case, eh?” He reached out his free hand, pinched her left nipple until it stuck out between his thumb and forefinger, brought the hot tip of the cigar closer.

  What happened then was too fast and too fantastic for Vicenti, Facello or Murelli to follow. The girl, half-fainting, her eyes shut in a face death-white and quaking, didn’t even see it.

  Vicenti seemed suddenly to squash down into himself, as if someone had placed a massi
ve unseen weight upon his shoulders. He crashed through the debris of his splintering chair and slammed against the floor. He didn’t cry out, had no air left in him for that; and even as his soldiers let go the girl and went to help him he was lifted up away from them and hurled against the wall. Fortunately for him the wall was of soft-board on thin timbers, more a fancy partition than a true wall, with tiny shelves for expensive knick-knacks and odds-and-ends. Fortunately because it gave beneath his weight, caving in on him as he went through it. Then—

  —For a moment it was as if a howling wind filled the room. Curtains flapped angrily and magazines were scattered in the rush of frenzied air; pictures rocked crazily where they hung on the walls; doors and windows slammed and small ornaments fell from shelves. In all it lasted no longer than three or four seconds. Then the winds were gone, and in their place…silence!

  Vicenti lay groaning, barely conscious, half-in, half-out of the wall’s debris. His soldiers crept towards him, eyes wide, mouths agape, unable to take it in.

  The girl, seeing her chances, bunched up the tatters of her dress in front of her chest and fled the room. Facello and Murelli may have heard her go but they made no move to stop her.

  “Boss—?” Murelli croaked, shocked almost dumb where he kneeled beside his hoodlum master.

  “Get me…uh!…a doctor,” Vicenti told him. “And…later…you can pick up those…uh!…sons of bitches, the Black brothers. Jesus, I want to see…uh!…those bastards! They were supposed to…uh!…kill the guy, not him kill me!”

  “Guy?” Murelli turned bewildered eyes upon the gaping Facello and shrugged questioningly. Obviously Vicenti had banged his head. He wasn’t making much sense. “What guy, Boss?”

  Vicenti coughed and tried to lie still. He didn’t know which part of him hurt the most. “What guy?” he managed to reply. “You have to be kidding! Are you…uh!…blind, you two? Didn’t you even…uh!…see him?”

  “Who, Boss, who?” Facello kneeled beside Murelli and stuck his fat, scarred pig’s face close. “Who do you mean, eh?”

  “Uh!…Garrison, that’s who! You two…uh!…you didn’t even see him? Idiots! I don’t know…uh!…how he got in here or what he…uh!…hit me with. But—oh, God! Get me a fucking doctor, will you?—but it was…uh!…him OK. Yeah.”

  And with that he lay back his head and let the pain roll over him, bearing him swiftly away upon a dark red cloud of unconsciousness…

  GARRISON HURLED HIS BOLT OF ESP-ENERGY—AND IN HIS MIND’S EYE he saw the wizard struck and hurled back from the satanic circle. But—no time to stay and savor the event. No time to wait and see if this wizard lived or died. Time merely for a final glance at the shewstone before returning his mind to the plunging Machine. One glance…but sufficient to tell him all he needed to know.

  For in the shewstone the toy Machine’s monstrous descent was halted and a tiny, triumphant Garrison sat upon its back, howling his victory, shaking his fists and beating his breast!

  Garrison thrust the vision away, returned his mind to the Here, the Now, the Chasm and the Plunge. And…

  …The wind no longer howled past his head, Psychomech no longer plunged, Suzy no longer yelped her terror but licked his ear and whined worriedly. The Machine stood still upon the air, held there by Garrison’s power returned. And if he had stepped down from the Machine, then he could have stood upon the chasm’s boulder-strewn floor.

  That close!

  He did not step down but stood up, stood tall upon the Machine’s broad back and howled his victory and shook his fist—behaving even as the tiny Garrison in the crystal had behaved—and Suzy’s sardonic baying gave strength to his own, until the chasm rang to the echoes of their laughter.

  Then, upward to the narrow crack of star-scattered sky which was the great rift’s mouth, Garrison rode the Machine. Upward and outward, and away upon his quest…

  Chapter 11

  The meeting was of ten men; if not the most important or influential men in the British Isles, certainly their representatives. It had been convened secretly, through government channels, and its Chairman was the head of an obscure branch of the Secret Service. Obscure in the sense that it dealt with “obscurities,” current jargon for tasks which were too intricate, problematic, sensitive or bloody for the talents and tastes of its contemporaries.

  The Chairman was an extremely tall, slim man whose high-domed head and shifty, piercing blue eyes spoke of a foxy intelligence. His hands were very long, delicate and fragile-looking, as were his features, but there was nothing fragile about his mind. That was a steel trap.

  Of the others gathered about the long, polished table: with the sole exception of a small and wiry yellow man, they were white, in the main British or of European extraction. Their fields were Finance (mainly banking), Mineral Rights and Mining (oil, gold and diamonds, etc.), Transport (shipping and airlines), Telecommunications (including computers), Weapons (the manufacture, sale and control of such), and Espionage (on a more general or at least more easily recognizable level than that of The Chairman, namely MI6.) There was also an Official Observer, governmental of course, and finally a Man from the Inland Reserve.

  MI6 had brought someone along for the ride, his aide, apparently: a silent, gray-eyed, stony-calm wedge of a man whose movements, despite their almost robotic precision, were remarkably adroit, hinting at great speed, strength and coordination. He sat back a little from the table, unobtrusively reading from (or writing in) a file which lay open in his lap.

  Some of those about the table knew each other, however vaguely, or knew of each other, but in the main they were strangers and in other circumstances might be more than a little cagey. Though their interest was a common one, still they made strange bedfellows.

  The object of the meeting was that which formed this common bond amongst them, making friends or conspirators—for the moment, at least—of otherwise potential antagonists. The venue was The Chairman’s country house not far from Sutton, Surrey, and the meeting was set to commence at 2 P.M. on an early June day. No one had been late.

  “Gentlemen,” The Chairman rose to his feet when all were settled down, “thank you for being here and for your punctuality. I’ll try not to waste your time but get straight to the point. When this, er, get-together was planned some months ago it was not projected as an extraordinary meeting but more an overview from which to glean essential facts upon which to act—” he shrugged, “—in whichever ways were considered necessary. In short, while a problem was foreseen, it was not yet known quite what we were dealing with. And…we’re still not sure.” He paused, looked around the table at each face individually, and finally continued in his dry, well-modulated voice:

  “Since then continued investigation has lent the matter a deal more urgency, so that we must now consider the subject extraordinary as stated, but with a definite emphasis on extra! All of you, with the exception of—” he almost said “our Oriental friend,” but at the last second checked himself, merely inclining his head in the Chinaman’s direction and receiving a similar acknowledgement, “—who has his own sources, were furnished with brief details from which to prepare your own points of information. The findings of your preliminary or subsequent investigations are what now bring us together to discuss—again as an overview, but with more positive action in mind—the very serious nature of the, er, possible disruption?” Again he paused.

  While his opening address had been couched in terms which must surely mystify any uninformed observer, the circle of faces meeting his own showed no sign of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Each and every one of them knew what he was talking about.

  “To be more specific,” he eventually went on, “the problem quite simply is a man. A very strange, immensely talented, highly enigmatic and incredibly rich man. His name, as you are all aware, is Richard Garrison.” The assembled personages stirred. Someone cleared his throat. Another shuffled his feet.

  “Yes,” The Chairman nodded, “you all know his name well enoug
h. Individually. But perhaps as a group you are not aware of the interactions of his…influence? His influence, that is, in so many—and such diverse—spheres. Perhaps the Bank of England would like to start us off?”

  As The Chairman sat down, B of E (or Finance), a stocky, middle-aged man of medium height whose small-lensed spectacles and jutting jaw gave him a sort of aggressively fishy, pikelike look, stood up. “Nine years ago, ahem!” he began, “Mr. Garrison was a customer of ours. A fairly important, respected customer—ahem! That is to say we held—er, you understand I am not at liberty to disclose actual figures—some ahem, millions of pounds of his money in cash, disposable assets and various investments. A lot of money for one man, yes, but a mere drop in the overall financial ocean. Recently, however…well, things have changed somewhat. In fact they have changed a great deal.” He paused to take out a handkerchief and wipe his suddenly perspiring brow.

  “To illustrate my point I might say that if Mr. Garrison, ahem, were to withdraw or transfer his cash—his cash alone, you understand—then there could be problems. The ‘drop in the ocean,’ you see, has become a bucketful, indeed a lake! Oh, we could cover it, of course, but even the B of E might have to call on certain reserves…” He paused again to let that sink in, though no one at the table seemed in the least surprised.

  “A little over a month ago,” B of E continued, “acting on rather special instructions, I contacted friends in Switzerland to confirm their backing in the event of just such a massive withdrawal or conversion. This had become necessary when, in the space of just a few weeks, Mr. Garrison had added, ahem, considerably to his account. Various deposits totalled half as much again as his original holdings.

  “Well, as a result of consultations in Zurich, it came to my knowledge—and of course this is in the strictest confidence—that Garrison’s accounts abroad, ahem, make his British holdings seem a pittance by comparison!” The sweat was heavy on his brow now and he had stopped wiping it. “In fact, gentlemen, he is capable of moving millions about like you and I might move pieces in a game of chess, but far more devastatingly—ahem! And he never loses a piece!