The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  Oh, my God! thought Ganzer. Someone, some would-be hero, had broken one of the rules—and the first rule at that! When the culprit was discovered, which he would be, the Three would make him pay for it . . . horribly! They would make an example of him, and it wouldn’t be the first time. Some people never learned.

  But as for right now: “What!?” Ganzer replied, in his best “shocked” voice. “But I’m at a complete loss to understand! Are you really saying that such is the case?”

  Again Stein’s nod. “I got a letter—more a note, a scrawl on a scrap of paper, really—just yesterday. It arrived in an envelope, slipped under my door at the inn. ‘Stay away from the Schloss,’ it said. ‘Go nowhere near but simply take your family and leave. In no event take them up there!’ ”

  “Fantastic!” said Ganzer, hating himself and hating Hauser even more. For if the trustee wasn’t here . . . but no, even then he wouldn’t dare speak out but must continue to play the coward for his poor wife’s sake, not to mention his own. And hurriedly, without thinking, he continued: “So then . . . why did you come?” An utterly stupid question, for it tended to suggest that perhaps Herr Stein shouldn’t have come! Which prompted another sly prod from Erik Hauser that silently but insistently warned:

  “Careful now, Herr ‘Direktor’! Don’t say too much.”

  But Stein appeared deep in thought himself, and he finally said, “My wife was quite put off by the note. We weren’t due to visit until tomorrow, as you know, but she thought we shouldn’t come at all. On the other hand my children were keen to see the Schloss, and I thought perhaps I might just drop in—you know?—to see for myself if there was anything—?”

  “—That you should be concerned about?” Ganzer finished it for him. “Yes, of course. But as you have seen . . .” He shrugged and left it hanging there.

  “The salary your principals have offered me is most tempting,” Stein mused; and then continued with some certainty, “but I must admit to finding them . . . strange. It may be that Schloss Zonigen isn’t what I’m looking for after all.”

  Too late! Too late! thought Ganzer.

  Erik Hauser had moved to the front and was leading the way again. They had emerged from an ice tunnel into a gallery where the ice was in its original state, with huge icicles descending from the ceiling and others rearing from the floor like so many stalactites and stalagmites, except they gleamed like sapphires where the blue light of looping neons shone through them.

  Here a wooden catwalk along one wall made the going a lot easier, so that they soon came to a junction with a side tunnel some twenty-five to thirty feet wide whose mouth opened high in the wall. Climbing steep wooden steps to a landing and entering the tunnel, they found a man-made floor inlaid with metal rails on wooden sleepers; and while neons continued to light the way, they saw some sixty yards ahead a rough disk of true white daylight shining in from the external world.

  Now once again Erik Hauser took up a position at the rear of the party. And speaking quietly, with his breath pluming in the bitter air, he muttered, “This is it. The cryogenic units. We’re there.” Much more alert now, the trustee seemed suddenly nervous. He had thrown back his hood and looked paler—which might have been an effect of the lighting.

  But Gunter Ganzer knew it wasn’t . . .

  The tunnel was a natural tube of massively thick ice whose walls had been drilled into so that cores of some thirty inches in diameter could be removed. Skids had then been inserted into the niches, and the freezer units with their contents slid into place. The niches were numbered, and along every six feet or so of wall the handles and frost-rimed ends of these metal cylinders protruded some three inches from the ice. Under each unit’s crystalline coating a small green light winked on and off.

  Thus Erik Hauser’s nervous comment had been quite unnecessary, for the silent mausoleum atmosphere of the place made it perfectly clear that they were indeed “there” in the cryogenics area.

  Ganzer, who knew every inch of the entire complex as well and better than Hauser, now led the way. Not that he wanted to, but someone had to. He knew that at the far end of this shaft a ravine fell sheer for almost two thousand feet down to the ski slopes; knew also that they weren’t going to make it that far, for someone else was here in the cryogenics shaft. Someone who called himself Simon Salcombe when he went abroad in the world of men, but who was also known to his colleagues as Mordri Two. And Mordri Two was a very terrible someone indeed.

  Twenty paces deeper inside the tunnel, with his tall, angular frame silhouetted against the disk of distant white light, Salcombe cast a long, spidery shadow. Hearing them approaching, he turned his head, saw them, slowly straightened up from what he was doing and stood taller still.

  “Ah, Herr Stein!” he greeted the scientist. “My colleagues told me you were coming. I am Simon Salcombe. I had intended to send this vehicle to wait for you at the end of the tunnel, but instead I became engrossed with this small problem here. I apologise.” The vehicle he spoke of was a four-seater electric car, its motor softly humming, where it waited on the tunnel’s central tracks.

  “No matter,” Stein answered, his mouth half open, looking up at Salcombe, staring in fascination at his smiling face. But such a strange smile on such a strange face; he could well be a brother to those two up above! A moment more of this inspection until, realizing how rude he must seem, Stein gulped and turned his gaze to a cryogenic unit that had been drawn out of the ice on its skids. The seals on its convex metal lid had been broken and the lid itself thrown back. The figure of what was probably a young woman lay within . . . it was hard to tell without moving closer. But:

  “By all means do,” said Salcombe, still staring piercingly at Stein as he answered the scientist’s unspoken question!

  “What?” Stein glanced again at Salcombe—and at once drew back as the tall, apparently leering man leaned toward him. “I mean”—Stein faltered over his words—“did I say something?”

  “You thought something,” Salcombe answered, leaning closer still. “You thought this was probably a young woman. And so she was, upon a time. Now she is an old woman who has lain here for more than twenty years waiting to be revived. Alas, today something seems to have gone wrong. A seal has worn out, or perhaps there’s a fault in the electrical circuitry. But anyway, and as you can see for yourself, the unit’s green light has failed and a red one is blinking in its place.”

  Both Ganzer and Hauser had backed away a pace or two from Stein where he was now bent over the unit peering into its dark interior. “One moment,” Salcombe told him, “while I try to shed some light on the subject.” He shone a torch into the cylinder.

  “Good Lord!” Stein gasped at once, his gloved hands gripping the unit’s rim.

  “Ah, but see!” said Salcombe, actually chuckling. “Perhaps the system has been faulty for quite some time, eh?”

  For the flesh on the face of the surgically gowned figure in the unit was as brown as leather, with shrivelled lips drawn back in a rictus grin from brilliantly white teeth. A girl, her hair was luxuriant still, shining curls lying soft on her scant shoulders. But the fingernails on the hands that were folded on her chest were more than two inches long.

  “But . . . this is gross negligence!” Stein looked up again into Salcombe’s face. “How often are these systems checked? You really don’t seem to care!”

  The monster held up a hand, stopped smiling, looked stern. “Checked? The systems? No one cares about these systems! Do not concern yourself, Herr Stein. It is a small matter. And anyway, there’s life in this young-old girl yet. Now look—and see!”

  Handing Stein the torch, he reached into the unit and tore the corpse’s shift, exposing the girl’s right arm from shoulder to wrist. And taking hold of that wrist where it lay across her chest, he bared his little fish teeth in an expression that was almost a snarl. Then Salcombe’s face took on a strained look—or if not that then one of concentration, his black-marble eyes half closing—and Stein took the
opportunity to study him more closely: his sallow, sunken cheeks, waxy mask of a face under a shining domed head that was close to acromegalic in its length; looks that were oddly reptilian, despite that his gape would be small. But no, Stein corrected himself, deciding that there was little or nothing of the reptile in Salcombe’s looks . . . it was simply that he repelled like one. And:

  “Look!” the man said again.

  Stein looked, he stared. His jaw dropped and his eyes went wide. There was . . . a transformation.

  The dead girl’s wrist where Salcombe held it had taken on a different hue. A pale pink blush suffused the withered flesh, seeming to flow down into her hand and up her arm to the elbow, and the desiccated meat around the bones was visibly taking on substance. Stein’s eyes bugged; his mouth went dry, which made it hard to voice his thoughts even if he’d dared. But he could still think them:

  This had to be some sort of grotesque trick!

  “A trick?” said Salcombe out loud, gutturally. “You think so? But no, I assure you, it is nothing of the sort. Keep looking—look even closer—and see for yourself. It is a skill, Herr Stein. You have surely heard of faith-healing, am I right? Then have faith in this, in me, and believe what you see.”

  Have faith in you? Stein thought—with the merest glance at the other before his fascinated gaze returned to what was or had been in essence a dead girl in a coffin—No, I think not! For to his mind faith was a matter of one’s religion or belief, a spiritual process, while this was just the opposite, in fact ghoulish!

  “Oh, ha!-ha!-haaaa!” Salcombe laughed out loud, as alien a sound as Stein could ever have imagined, and yet again answered his unspoken thoughts. “You are right, of course. I am no god—I only seek him out across the universe—but I do have godlike powers. Now see how her flesh quickens.”

  Stein was almost on his knees now, his legs trembling, his drawn white face peering over the rim of the failed unit. Purple veins were beginning to pulse however sluggishly in the back of the girl’s hand, while her bare arm had taken on the texture and pinkish marble colour of living flesh. Moreover, to Stein’s utter amazement, her chest had commenced a slow, jerky rise and fall! But the changes were as frightening as they were amazing.

  Petrified yet fascinated, Stein had failed to notice the onset of a different, perhaps more mundane sort of change; but in an abrupt sputtering of electrical fixtures, the strobing of suddenly erratic neons, and the faltering beam of his torch, he couldn’t any longer help but notice. For even the muted humming of the railcar had increased; the vehicle was actually vibrating on its tracks, as if striving to drive off on its own!

  Finally, despite the strangeness of his location and situation, the scientist gulped, moistened his throat, looked again at Salcombe, and found his voice. “What did you do to this girl? I mean, is she . . . but how can she be . . . alive?”

  For the girl’s (or corpse’s?) face had filled out a little and her body was now . . . “alive,” yes, with twitches and spasms at least. And even as Stein had asked his question, so her eyes had come unglued and cracked open—but behind their lids they were yellow, filled with pus!

  “Oh, my good God!” Stein gasped, paralysed with terror and clinging to the rim of the open cylinder for all he was worth.

  Salcombe had released the girl’s wrist, and laughing again he said: “Without me she cannot last. She will revert. This was merely a demonstration. But for the moment, as you see, she has life. Well, a sort of life. She is at least ‘lively,’ eh?”

  “Lively,” Stein repeated faintly. And again, “My God!”

  “However,” said Salcombe, “I think it’s only right to warn you, mein Herr, that while common flesh responds readily enough, quickly accepting a partial revival, the brain—or mind—is wont to take longer. And as for the soul, it is lost forever!”

  The yellow pus had flowed away from the girl’s pupils; her eyes swivelled and stared at Stein; her jaws snapped open, issuing a gut-wrenching stench. Then:

  She screamed—a nerve-shattering sound, like chalk on a blackboard, like a shovel in cold ashes—and her long-clawed hands reached out to clasp and rake Stein’s face!

  The scientist at once collapsed, blood streaming from his gashes, and sat hunched up in an almost fetal position against the wall of ice. Simon Salcombe let the girl draw her suddenly limp hands back inside the cylinder, slammed its lid, and without pause slid it back into its niche.

  Then he leaned and touched the shuddering Stein’s bleeding face, saying, “That will heal, don’t worry.” And beckoning Erik Hauser and Gunter Ganzer from where they had spread-eagled themselves against the wall at what they obviously hoped was a safe distance, he called out, “Come now, you two, come! For I believe Herr Stein requires your assistance. Help him into the car, and then let us be gone from here.”

  As they scrambled to obey him, the buzzing and sputtering lights and other electrics were slowly returning to normal . . .

  16

  Schloss Zonigen, in its upper and most highly restricted levels, was abuzz with rumour among the guards, trustees, and foremen—the self-styled “upper echelon”—and fraught with dread among the “working classes.” Since rumors only rarely agree with the actualities, however, on this occasion it was the upper echelon who by rights should be the more concerned. But in any event in this place the divisions of class—those characteristics that would usually distinguish between lower, medium, and higher IQs, skills, abilities, worthiness in general, at least according to human gradations—were far less apparent than in the world’s more orthodox communities.

  Here a bearded, myopic nuclear physicist with thick-lensed spectacles, a reasonably white laboratory smock, several honour degrees, and a list of similar qualifications as long as his arm was a “worker” no less than the sweaty, heavily muscled, slack-jawed man in dungarees who fetched and carried, spat and cursed, and wouldn’t know pi from pie in the sky. Exhausted, they slept in exactly the same hollowed-out “accommodations”—cavelets in essence—each with a mattress and blanket; grubby, they bathed in the same tepid shower stalls; thirsty, they drank drip-filtered water from the same communal basins. They would also have eaten the same food if necessary; which it wasn’t because they didn’t any longer require to eat—or masturbate, or even defecate—not the more permanent residents of Schloss Zonigen. For they had been “fixed” by the Three, by which means their needs, the so-called basic essentials of life, had been reduced beyond what doctors and nutritionists would consider a minimum. And in that respect their situation could only be compared to that of political prisoners in some gulag in Stalin’s USSR; except life in a gulag would be far preferrable and its prisoners would not have been “fixed”—although in certain cases they would have been ideologically brainwashed.

  As for the current excitement, unease, and terror: there was a traitor in the Schloss, and the Three would investigate.

  And they would find him . . .

  Having dealt with Herr Stein, administered a powerful sedative, and lodged him in a holding cell, Gunter Ganzer and Erik Hauser had only just finished when they heard first the alert klaxons, then the instructions of the Three issuing loud and clear from the Tannoy system: all trustees, foremen, and other privileged employees—especially those who had been allowed down to the village yesterday—were to proceed at once to the great workshop cavern in the heart of Schloss Zonigen.

  “Direktor” Ganzer and trustee Hauser knew well enough what was going on, but despite that they personally were innocent of any misdemeanour still they hurried to the specified area. Even at the “best” of times, meaning anything better than the worst, no one but an idiot would disregard the “instructions,” in fact the orders, of the Three. But at times such as this—one would have to be suicidal or else a complete lunatic.

  The complex was a vast gorgonzola of hollowed rock, a maze of natural shafts, chimneys, crevices, caverns; even crevasses, split almost as deep as the mountain’s roots by the pressure of ancient ice. Central t
o all of this, the workshop area was like the subsurface chamber of a volcano’s caldera, drained of magma in a forgotten geological era. More recently it had been filled with ice, but the last twenty or so centuries had left it windswept, dried out, and empty, at least until men climbed up here.

  As for its contents during the last few decades, up to and including the present day:

  In the olden times, the time of “Doktor” Emile Zonigen, it had been a warehouse for the Schloss’s cryogenic equipment. Now all such machinery had been cannibalized for certain electrical components, and the rest of it put aside, heaped up and rusting in a disused bay like so much useless junk.

  Now, too, in the north-facing corner of the domed ceiling, work was in progress where scaffolding had been erected, enabling engineers to drill into the rock preliminary to cutting an angled shaft through to the clear mountain air of the exterior heights. Like light through a circle of pinprick perforations in a card, narrow lances of dusty daylight now outlined a perimeter where small holes had already been drilled through to the outside. This perimeter defined the extent of the project: the volume of ceiling that would be removed en masse in a blast of coordinated, simultaneous explosions; a considerable mass, for when finished the shaft would be about twelve feet in diameter.

  Down below, in an area somewhat off-center in the mainly level floor, an as yet incomplete cylindrical machine like the barrel of a huge gun was tilted at precisely the same angle as the projected ceiling shaft. And all around this great gun—if such it was, for no one but the Three knew—were strewn coils of shiny copper wiring, leagues of insulated cable, instruments of apparently alien design and purpose, dynamos and generators, panels of lead shielding, and all manner of experimental equipment. Spreading concentrically from the centre, two dozen huge benches supported the components of elaborate circuitry; while set back in the base of the great cavern’s walls, laboratories with strengthened-glass doors, windows, and portholes crackled with man-made energies, issuing rays of purple and blue light, and smells of ozone and sulphur.