by Dean Koontz
Both Jon Margle and he had overlooked something that should have been considered before the PBT had been given to him. His body was human, yes, but it was nonhuman as well. His brain was obviously somehow special, or he would have had no psi power whatsoever. They should have seen that there was a strong possibility that the drug would not work on him in exactly the same manner it had worked on the tens of thousands of addicts the Brethren had created with it. Now he wondered whether it would have even remotely the same effect. He was beginning to believe that he might not become addicted at all—that it might, instead, free the psionic portion of his mind, develop his talent to the logical extreme, or at least increase it. If it could be permanently brought even to the level it had attained for a short moment this afternoon, he could easily break out of this prison, would no longer have a need to fear any weapon no matter whether it was a throwing knife or a tiny narcodart.
He hoped there would be no beating this time. He wanted to lie down, to be docile, to play the part of the converted user who just wants his junk and his subsequent high and is willing to play along with the opposition to get it.
The night passed in eons.
The darkness seemed eternal, deep, and unremitting, as it always does when one is waiting impatiently for morning.
Then the first light shone through the barred window, cresting the ridges and distant peaks of higher mountains, a fluid orange that became crimson, then red, and finally burst across the sky in yellow fingers.
When they finally arrived, some two hours after daybreak, they had Polly London with them. She was dissheveled, though still beautiful, and there was a bruise along the lovely line of her right jaw. She fell to her knees on the floor, dazed, gasping for breath like a landed fish.
"You've got a cell partner," Margle said. It was evident that both he and Baker had worked out a little of their sadistic nature on her—and that he had sampled the sensuality she was famous for on the senso-film screen.
"Why this?" Ti asked, suddenly miserable. He had been angered by her childlike inability to see evil in the world, but he had not wanted to be a witness to her education in the ways of ugliness.
"She's a bleeding heart," Margle said. "Got very restless about you. Pities you. A little too much pity and restlessness to be trustworthy any longer."
"What are you going to do to her?" Timothy asked, giving her one of his servos to help her get to her feet.
"Addict her," Margle said. "Medium range, like you. Not only will she give up these childish attempts to go to the police, but she'll be a nice little piece of woman to have under one's thumb, don't you think?"
"You're sick," Ti said contemptuously.
"No, no," Margle said. "I'm perfectly healthy. I've never taken junk and never will. It's the two of you who are soon to be addicted, friend."
Margle ordered the girl onto the second bed in the room where he would give her her first dose. When she stood and refused—out of incomprehension of his ruthlessness more than out of bravery—he sighed and ordered Baker to manhandle her onto the mattress. She kicked at the brute's shins and struck him with her small and ineffective hands. She bit his fingers, making him howl in fury. At last he chopped her viciously alongside the neck, and took her weight as she collapsed against him. By the time she had regained her senses a few moments later, Jon Margle was slipping the PBT needle into her slim brown arm.
Timothy winced as the stuff disappeared from the syringe's glass tube.
Polly arched her back as the first taste of PBT brought her bad dreams rather than good ones. Ti was glad she had not had to suffer a massive dose as he had. She looked miserable, thrashing on the cot, fighting to hold onto her humanity, being sucked deeper and deeper into unreality despite herself. Her eyes glazed, and she slumped against the mattress, lost to the delusions that rose out of her own mind and swallowed her.
As Margle prepared a needle for Timothy, the mutant almost thought of resisting. But the Other was waiting . . .
"Glad to see you're reasonable now," Margle said.
"Bastard."
"Cliche," Margle noted. "I really expected more from someone as literate as yourself."
Ti said nothing more, but watched the needle slide into his puncture-marked hip. He felt the drug hit him faster than ever before. That would have worried him if he had not been looking forward to meeting the Other. Now addiction was secondary to what he might be able to achieve through PBT.
"Sweet dreams," Margle said, turning and leaving with the battered Baker, who cast Ti a chilling ugly look that swore a permanent revenge for what had been done to him the previous day.
The door clanged.
The key turned in the lock.
A chain fell in place.
Then quiet.
Then dreams . . .
This time he was lying in a field where tall, exceedingly colorful flowers sprang out of the ground, grew arms, legs, became flower women. There were reds and yellows, burnt oranges and creams, emeralds and deeply shimmering blues. The petals turned into hair of the same color, and the women came forth, smiling, fragrant, delivered of Mother Earth. But one of the flowers bloomed and was transformed into the Other. Dream Timothy rose from his blossom bed and approached the spectral figure. Closer . . . closer . . . the Other seemed to have more solidity now. They touched . . . and meshed. And the Other was within him. And . . .
. . . He woke again, his mind crystal clear as he laid on his bed in the basement room of the house.
He was aware of thoughts that were not his own. He expanded his mind, realized he was picking up Polly's emanations, was experiencing her dreams as if they were his. She was being thrust through hideous nightmares in which her beautiful face had been disfigured by acid . . .
He extended his mind further.
He soared into a cluster of thoughts he recognized immediately as Jon Margle's. They shifted about him like colored neon tubes, flashes of amber and rouge and cinnabar, sparklings of silver and great pulsing clouds of muddy brown.
He shifted . . .
And the next mind was Baker's. It was a vast, unbroken whiteness. Along the rim of the featureless plain were flashes of blood-colored lightning, thoughts of hideous, terrifying savageness. But the orderly, solid white paved over all else.
He let his mind return to the basement room, into his own body once more. He was just in time to hear Polly scream . . .
She thrashed on the bed and clawed desperately at the sheets as one of her dream phantoms chased her down imaginary corridors. He wished there were something he could do for her, and he was maddened by the thought that, had he had more experience with his developing psi power, he might have been able to reach into her mind and counter the dark visions that plagued her.
Then he thought of the door and what he should have done immediately. He sent his psionic power to it, sent it into the lock to unkey it ...
. . . And the Other passed through him, returning him to the world of the PBT delusions and the insubstantial form of Dream Timothy. Again, the meshing had not been complete. He wondered, agonizingly, how long it would require to solidify the uniting of his two parts. He did not want to think about the possibility of that never transpiring. He allowed the illusions to entertain him . . .
But they had lost something of their color and texture and were little better than a senso-theater show now. Time and again he found himself waking into reality for short moments, listening to Polly thrashing at the demons that tormented her. As he watched her and thought about what they were trying to do to her—and what they had already done by trampling her innocence irretrievably into the bottom of her soul—he wondered if he could kill them. Not as he had killed Klaus Margle and the two gunmen with him that night so long ago —this time, he wondered if he would be able to torture them a little first, if his hatred had grown that bitter . . .
CHAPTER 10
Timothy woke before the girl and was forced to lie there, listening to her squeals of terror, her cries for help. Whe
n she did wake, she was so exhausted she fell into a sound sleep until it was necessary for him to rouse her when supper arrived. As they ate, they talked, and Timothy was tempted, several times, to reveal the thread of the chance they had: his developing psionic abilities. She needed reassurance, for she was terribly depressed now. But he had no way of knowing if the room were bugged or not, and he wasn't anxious to let the Brethren know they might be destroying themselves rather than him by administering the PBT.
As they were finishing the meal, Polly heard the familiar two sets of footsteps approaching their door. "Margle and that beast?" she asked.
He nodded. "Two doses a day."
Her eyes widened. "But at two a day, you don't have any time to hold onto reality. You're either drugged or sleeping it off."
"That's it," he said. He didn't tell her that he had been eagerly awaiting this dose, wanting a chance to meet the Other again.
She tried to resist Jon Margle, but only earned herself a series of stinging slaps across the face and a more brutal injection than she might otherwise have received.
Timothy was the model of docility, and Margle enjoyed that, smiling at him rather smugly and making the injection a gentle one. Then he turned and was gone, two pair of feet on the floor, the slam of the door, the rattle of the key in the lock. The ritual had, by this time, almost a religious significance.
Polly moaned, but not unpleasantly.
Timothy closed his eye and relaxed. There was a light-headedness, followed by a feeling of floating above the bed without benefit of his mobility system. Then the drug thrust him out of that basement room and into a field of bright flowers . . .
The Other was waiting. He stood a dozen feet away, his hands in his pockets, eyes staring intensely at Dream Timothy. He was both a welcome and a frightening specter.
The flowers, this time, did not change into women.
They swayed in the soft breeze, the odors of them sweet, almost rotten-sweet as they came to him.
The Other drifted forward.
Dream Timothy did not make any effort to rush forth to meet him, for he was somehow aware that it was not necessary. The meeting about to transpire, the meshing of two into one, was inevitable.
Closer . . .
"They are trying to do to you what the military tried to do so long ago," the Other said. "Do you understand that?" It was the first time he had spoken.
"I know," Timothy said.
"They're trying to make you helpless again. It's the way of the world. Governments proceed the same way against subjects, man against man. They want to remove every vestige of self-respect from you and instill in you a doubt of your own abilities and a fuzziness of purpose."
"I know."
"They'll never be able to do it again. Not now that we are together," the Other said.
"I know."
They meshed. They locked.
Flowers swayed, wilted, and dissolved.
The walls of the basement appeared again, permanently this time, and Timothy felt the full weight of the power within his mind as it surged and leaped. The power to do anything he pleased . . .
He reached up through the floors of the house, through concrete reinforced with steel rods, through soundproofing, through tangled wires, through floorboards, and sought out the richly thought-filled consciousness of Jon Margle. He found it, skirted the edge of it, getting the feel of the tangle of emotions and desires and plans that beat like thousands of different hearts within that single skull. It had been confusing when only this morning he had merely let himself ride through the cerebral river of the Brother's mind. Now that be wanted to take full control of it, the task was infinitely more difficult. He thought his power was limitless, but he could not be certain—and a battle within another man's mind for control of that mind might very well be a psychologically shattering experience.
He opened the door, however, and walked in . . .
His mind grasped the intangible elements of Jon Margle's mind and forced them into an analogue of something which Timothy could comprehend: a party in a huge house; Margle's mind accepted the form of a house, and his thoughts were the members of the celebration . . .
. . . In the first room, there were two hundred gaily dressed men and women dancing across the glittering onyx floor, while crystal chandeliers twirled overhead, casting marvelous reflections in the polished stone below. Many of them were colorfully clothed in satins and laces of all the brightest hues, the women in low-cut gowns, the men in velveteen suits with flowing capes.
The chatter of shrill conversation and squealed bursts of laughter was so utterly intense that Timothy could not make out a single word spoken by any of those who were present. There was a roar of noise without any fine delineation between speakers. The dancers moved so swiftly that their faces were nothing more than blurs, and their bodies were flashes of brilliant yellow, emerald, red.
He crossed the ballroom, stumbling into a great number of people, rebounding, excusing himself. He passed through the archway into a drawing-room where a number of people sat about engaged in conversation, speaking quietly and almost reverently, a totally different group from those engaged in the madness of the ballroom. From there, he went into a long dining-hall that contained an enormous banquet table where one man in a blue and green clown suit sat and nibbled in melancholy fashion at deep purple grapes.
He spoke to the man.
He received no reply.
He continued.
It seemed that he knew where to go, almost instinctively, to seize control of this house—though he had never attempted anything like this before.
He found the kitchen, sparkling white-walled place that looked stunningly like an operating theater in some large city hospital. On the table were cuts of meat. They were fresh. They gleamed with beads of blood. Each cut, he saw, was some portion of human anatomy . . .
He looked away from that. He did not, at this moment, want to think about the nature of the mind which he had entered, the sort of ugly dreams and visions it contained.
In the kitchen, he found the pantry door, opened it, went through and carefully went down the cellar steps. The walls here were of natural rock, and odd, dark creatures clung to the wall, staring at him with huge, luminous eyes. He was aware that these creatures knew very little about the house upstairs and that the people up there knew absolutely nothing about the demons below them.
In the last room of the basement, where dark-winged things cowered from him, he found the power generator of the house, changed the lock upon it with tools he created out of thin air, and forged the only key to that lock . . .
The analogue disappeared, and he was in total control of Jon Margle. He looked out through the Brother's eyes at the room in which the man had been sitting. It was a study with thick, green carpeting, oak-paneled walls, bookshelves full of volumes that seemed to have been selected by the most common of literary standards: the color of the bindings and their harmony with the chamber's decor. Margle was seated at a heavy plasti-wood desk, in a tulip-shaped chair on a swivel base. There was no one else in the room.
Briskly, Ti scanned the man's thoughts and discovered there were three others in the house. Baker, of course. A man named Leopold, from Chicago, was sleeping in a bedroom just down the hall. Timothy was startled to discover, through the captured mind he possessed, that Leopold was Jon Margle's superior. Ti pushed his curiosity about the power structure of the Brethren to the back of his mind and got on with immediate business. The third man was named Siccoli and, like Baker, was a surgically created bodyguard.
He directed Margle to call Baker into the study. This was accomplished by pressing a stud on the desktop that sent lights flashing throughout the house. On the third burst of color, Baker's footsteps sounded on the stairs. When the giant entered the room, Timothy almost lost control of Margle as his emotions welled up and cracked the shell of his cold psionic intellectualism. He held the anger and hate in check and used Margle to say, "Get Mr. Leopold and Siccoli ove
r here. I have received some orders."
When Baker left his master's study, unaware that his master now had a master of his own, Timothy rifled Margle's store of knowledge and discovered the location of a nonlethal pin gun in the top left drawer of the desk. He got it out and held it in Margle's lap, under the desk. He waited for almost five minutes before the three men entered, then directed them to sit on the couch facing the desk from the other side of the room.
"Dammit, I just got to sleep!" Leopold said. He was a brawny man who had begun to let his physique slip and was now entering the first stages of desolation—that desolation of forgetfulness that looks so much worse than the heaviness of a man who was born to be heavy.
Margle-Timothy raised the narcodart pistol and unloaded a third of a clip of darts at the men across the room. By the time Baker and Siccoli fell, they were halfway across the study, trying to get him. Leopold had only begun to rise, and when half a dozen needles stung his belly, he folded like a collapsible chair. Margle-Timothy directed the barrel of the weapon on his stomach and fired. In a few moments, Jon Margle was asleep.
He left the quiet house of Margle's mind and returned to his own husk in the basement. Before he did anything else, he had to take care of Polly and make certain she was well out of the way. He drifted over to her and hovered beside her. With invisible fingers of ESP, he reached within her and tenderly exorcised the PBT from her system, restored unhealthy cells to health, leaving her even better than she had been before she had become involved in all of this.
When she was awake, she was full of questions. He answered only those which he felt like answering, and only for as long as it took him to escort her to a grav-plate car which he found parked before the house. Now that the ESP powers within him had reached maturity, she did not seem so beautiful or so fragile or so interesting. He realized that, having fulfilled this part of his evolution, he had divorced himself completely from empathy with other human beings. But his hatred remained: there was a job to do on the Brethren, and he would see it done. Besides, as he concentrated on the problem of finding their headquarters and tearing down their organization, his mind was free from worrying about the future, a future bound to be lonely, a future with a challenge so large it frightened him . . .
