The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  The darkness passed; going to one knee, Scott helped Wolf down from his shoulders; the three stood on a dirt road in the predawn gloom before the once-inviting, now menacing frontage of the ski lodge. Wolf set off at a lope, a grey shadow skirting the building but sticking close to its walls. And silently, half crouching, Scott and Shania mounted wide wooden steps to the doors.

  There were surprisingly few windows to the front, or perhaps unsurprisingly. The mountains and the ski lift were to the rear and this would have been the preferred view when the lodge was in use. The double doors were unlocked, so whoever occupied this place wasn’t expecting visitors. Scott and Shania entered, closing the doors quietly behind them. From somewhere within—from the rear—came the muted rumble of machinery in motion.

  “Three minds,” Shania whispered, in the even deeper gloom of the lobby. “Two are full of murderous thoughts, but I think the third is frightened. They’re all three at the back, two on the landing stage, and one other . . . I’m not sure where he is.”

  “I know,” Scott answered, his own telepathic probes reaching out before him. “I can read them, too. And at least two of them are would-be killers, murderers for money and for someone else’s insane cause. Mercenaries and dupes . . . Lord, I find it hard to believe that such as these are human beings! But three of them? Well, what else should I expect? Three against three? Always that same fucking number!”

  “Don’t curse!” she admonished. “It only serves to detract from your concentration, your ability to rationalize, which has to have an adverse effect on your judgment.”

  Scott nodded and replied, “I know. I haven’t forgotten.” I should think coldly, without anger, pain, or passion. And though he couldn’t see it he sensed Shania’s response—her smile, however brief, tense, and nervous—as they crept forward into and through the lodge.

  It was a big place: dining rooms, corridors, stairs, passages, all in wood, pine-panelled and -ceilinged; and in a large central area a pine-columned modern barroom where a lone light burned over the long bar and the white walls were still decorated with crossed skis, photographs of skiers, and various trophies. Scott could almost hear the clink of glasses and the small talk of holiday-makers, tourists, and thrill seekers out of the past. But that past was some four years ago, and the room wore a fine coat of dust now and cobweb veils in the corners of the ceiling.

  But still, that single bar light was on. And:

  Look, said Shania. On the bar near the door there.

  Scott looked where she directed. Three bar stools, grouped together against the bar; two beer steins, a wineglass, and an ashtray on the bar itself. And on a nearby table a plate with a few crusts of bread and what looked like bits of cheese rind.

  Also, there on the floor, said Shania.

  But Scott had already seen: three makeshift beds, with the covers thrown back. The caretakers, he said. The rearguard.

  We have to hurry. Shania’s “voice” was anxious. The cable car is halfway down.

  They moved on out of the barroom into the dim grey light of a large glass-walled and -ceilinged observation lounge whose central area was a conservatory with benches in a delta arrangement, so positioned to look out on the mountains and especially the rising pylons and gently looping cables of the aerial tramway. Steps opposite the forward section of the delta climbed to the floodlit landing stage, and as Scott and Shania arrived at the foot of the steps they heard excited German-language voices coming from overhead.

  Only two of them, said Scott. But where’s the third?

  He’s down here, came Wolf’s answer at once. He’s on watch, prowling the area. Now he looks in—he sees you and is startled—he raises and points his weapon—and I attack!

  Now, even through the strengthened glass of the panoramic windows, Scott and Shania heard the guard’s outcry: “Halt! Wer sind sie? Was tun sie hier? Halt, oder ich schiessen sie zusammen!”

  The pair “heard” all of what he said, especially the last part: “Halt, or I’ll shoot you to pieces!”

  But the guard and the cable-way operator up on the landing stage had heard it, too, as had Wolf, who was already snarling, launching himself out of the shadows!

  Now, crouching low and turning on his heel, Scott saw the man outside and at the same time heard the stutter of automatic gunfire. Pushing Shania aside and down and lifting his sawn-off shotgun, he saw as in slow-motion the prowler-guard struck from the side by a wild grey shape and sent reeling off balance as a tracery of stars shaped themselves where they climbed the glass wall; then the feral shape detached itself to go bounding away from the distracted guard. And as things speeded up again and a section of the glass wall crashed to the floor in shards, Scott saw the guard staggering and beginning to aim his weapon in the direction that Wolf had taken. And yanking on both of his gun’s triggers he saw the guard hit by the double blast, hurled backward out of sight.

  Booted feet clattered on the metal steps. The beam of an electric torch cut the cordite-tinged air. Behind the torch, a black shape loomed and metal dully glinted. “Was ist? Was ist?” the second guard shouted. Then came a curse and the crazed chatter of gunfire as a stream of bullets lanced down, striking hot white sparks from the steps.

  Scott had broken open his weapon, was loading cartridges into the breech when the torch beam fell full upon him. Damn it to hell! he thought, for that was probably where he was headed. But Shania only said:

  Not ever, and certainly not yet! And with that she hurled herself down on the steps close beside him. Then:

  The sound of her triggering off a single barrel so close to Scott was deafening, but he’d never heard a sweeter sound in his life. As for the guard descending the steps: he didn’t hear it at all; but as his body went tumbling past them like a scarecrow blown off its pole in a storm, they saw the raw red blotch that had been his face and head.

  Oh! said Shania then. All this killing! And Scott felt her pain.

  Yes, that was ugly, he said, snapping his shotgun shut and keeping as low a profile as possible as he went headlong up the steps, but a lot worse if he’d fired first! In fact, he did fire first, and if you hadn’t shot him I wouldn’t be alive.

  I know, she answered. But, Scott, that one up there on the landing stage—the last of them, the operator—he’s so very frightened, and I don’t think he’s armed at all.

  Wolf went racing past her, past Scott, too. Let me test the way for you, he growled. I’m much faster than you, and this man may fear my snarling visage.

  He disappeared from view, and moments later:

  “Nein! Nein!” came a hoarse cry from above. “Oh, Mein Gott in Himmel! Was fur ein Hund ist dieser Geschopf?”

  “He’s my Geschopf,” said Scott, emerging from the steps to prod the small, fat, white-faced cable-car operator in the gut, backing him up against the throbbing boxed-in cable gear. “He’s my creature, and if you so much as twitch he’ll rip your throat out!” Wolf was there, of course—muscles bunched, jaws slaverering, crouched as if to spring—and indeed he looked the very essence of a nightmare, a hound from hell.

  “English?” said the operator. “You English?” Sweat rivered his face, gleaming in the landing stage’s neon lighting. “Don’t shoot me. Bitte, nicht schiessen!”

  Shania touched Scott’s shoulder. “He’s scared to death. He isn’t one of them . . . or he is, because he’s helpless to be anything else.”

  “I have ohne Waffe, er, no weapon.” The man began to lower his trembling hands, until Scott prodded him again.

  “So what are you doing here?” But Scott knew it was a dumb question the moment he’d asked it. Reading this poor man’s mind was like reading a large-print book! He was here because he had no option. “You’ve got family up there, up in Schloss Zonigen, right?”

  “Jah, meine Frau. My wife is a prisoner. And those animals have done things to her—will do things to her if . . .”

  “I understand,” said Scott, lowering his shotgun.

  “Look!” said Shan
ia, lifting her chin and gazing into the gloom. Emerging from behind a high spur, the lights of a cable car had just this moment come into view, the car itself like a softly glowing phantom ship of the air. “In a few more minutes they’ll be here.”

  “Maybe not,” said Scott grimly. “Maybe they’ll be scattered all over the scree at the base of that spur.” He took the grenades from his belt.

  “What do you do?” cried the operator.

  “What I have to do,” Scott answered. And to Shania, “Take him downstairs. Wolf, go with them.”

  “But those . . . those monsters up there,” the operator protested. “You don’t know them! They’ll come down on you, on all of us!”

  Scott turned on him, shoved him roughly toward the steps, said, “They already came down on me! Is your wife still alive? Yes? Well mine isn’t!”

  And taking the stumbling, terrified man away, Shania told him, “We’re here to try to save your wife, to save all of them, up there in Schloss Zonigen.”

  “What? Just two of you?” His jaw had fallen open. “That’s unmöglich—impossible!”

  “There are several of us,” she said, taking his arm, “and we are strong. Come with me.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  But Shania shook her head and led him away down the steps.

  And arming the grenades, Scott tossed one of them into the gearbox, hung the other on the travelling cable, and paused for a single moment to watch it swing out toward the first pylon no more than the length of a cable car away—

  For a single moment, yes.

  —But on a count of five he’d followed Shania part of the way into the lodge and was lying flat on his face halfway down the metal steps. And on a count of six . . .

  There were two distinct explosions coming in rapid succession, followed by a continuous, frenzied whipping sound and the spatter and clang of concrete and metal shards where the debris of the gearbox and its container bounced or ricocheted off this or that surface. Dust, smoke, and the smell of cordite and burning came wafting down the steps from the landing stage, and its neon light went out in a sputter of sparks and a rain of splintered glass tubing.

  In just a matter of seconds, when the tinkling and twanging ceased, Scott got to his feet and ran up the top five steps to the landing stage. Now in near-darkness, still he could make out the shattered gearbox housing where frayed strands of cable made the whipping sound as a snapped length continued its whirling revolutions around a buckled, eccentrically spinning shaft. Out in the gloom the closest pylon was mainly intact except for the gear in its upper gantry, destroyed in the explosion; Scott could hear broken cables snaking and clattering, snatched along the stony ground first by contraction, the release of tension, and second by the weight of the swaying, sagging cable car.

  Scott didn’t understand the mechanics of the thing; he had hoped to stop the cable car one way or the other, and knew that the most merciful scenario would be just that: that the car was brought to a halt. But on the other hand the people in that car were killers; one of their masters had murdered his wife coldly and cruelly, without a single moment’s regret . . . which was why Scott had also accepted that he might be sending the men in the car to their deaths. And in fact he’d told Shania that was precisely what he intended to do.

  And now he had done it. The fate of a world—perhaps more than one—was hanging in the balance, but in these frozen moments that was a thought far from Scott’s mind . . .

  There were safety blocks—brake shoes—that would snap shut on a broken cable in the event of its failure, but the designer hadn’t reckoned on an act of sabotage or the catastrophic failure of both cables. The blocks had snapped shut, only to be snatched piecemeal from their pylon housings by the impetus and sheer weight of frenziedly lashing steel.

  One hundred fifty yards away and one hundred fifty feet above the rocky scree slope, the cable car sagged, dipping its nose like a sinking ship. Its lights flickered low, brightened momentarily, and Scott saw figures milling at the windows. Then a knotted tangle of cables and brake shoes hit the gear on the pylon closest to the cable car with all the force of a runaway truck! The pylon shuddered; twin cracks! like pistol shots signalled the snapping of two of its girder legs; the other two bent over like strands of spaghetti as the pylon toppled toward the car. But as quickly as the pylon fell, the doomed cable car fell faster yet. Now standing on its nose, its tail pointing at the dimming stars, it dropped like a stone and its lights went out.

  Watching, Scott gritted his teeth, felt his shoulders drawing in toward his neck, squeezed his eyes to slits. This wasn’t the same as when he and Shania had blown a coach full of people off a mountain road. That had been desperation, all part of the action; this had been planned, the result of a very deliberate, destructive act. Scott found it hard to justify. And:

  “Oh!” said Shania again, from behind him.

  “Don’t go trying to read them,” Scott hoarsely warned her, unable to disguise a shudder as he turned her face away. For he could already “hear” the screams of the doomed men . . . suddenly shut off as the sound of shattering glass and plastic and metal and flesh and bones came like a roll of thunder out of the predawn gloom.

  “Mein Gott!” said the small fat man, wringing his hands at the top of the steps.

  “Now we’ll be leaving,” Scott told him. “You might like to wish us luck because we—yes, and your wife, too—we’ll need all the luck we can get!”

  “Wait,” said Shania as she turned her questioning eyes on the fat man and in the next moment spoke to him: “Have you ever worked up there in Schloss Zonigen?”

  He nodded, his jowls wobbling, his eyes wide and terrified. “Jah. For almost two years. But I didn’t want to. I had to, for my wife’s sake!” He backed stumblingly away from Shania.

  She shook her head, took his arm. “It’s all right. I’m not blaming you. But listen now: did you have the run of the place? Do you know its layout?”

  “The run of the place?” the man replied. “Yes, I suppose I did. I ran messages for . . . for them, for the Three.”

  “And you remember?”

  “Of course. How could I ever forget?”

  Meanwhile Scott had started to display his impatience, his anxiety. Glancing at the eastern peaks, silhouetted now against the first faint glow of the coming day, he said, “Shania, do we really have time for this?”

  “Oh, yes, we really do,” she replied. “This is exactly what we need to know!”

  “But we have to get back to the hotel,” said Scott. “Questioning him and extracting all of his knowledge, that could take hours!”

  “For you, yes,” she answered. “But not for my Khiff!”

  Scott read her mind, nodded, grabbed the fat man, and half dragged him down the stairs into the lodge. And in the barroom he sat him in a chair, blindfolded him, and said, “Now we want you to tell us all, everything.”

  “Yes,” said Shania, “tell us about Schloss Zonigen. Simply think about it: everything you saw there, the routes, the rooms and places where prisoners are kept, the workshop where they’ve built the machine. It must have access to the skies, that machine, so tell us about it. Just think about it.”

  While she talked her Khiff had emerged from below her ear, transferred to the fat man, slid into his head. Jerking in his chair, he said, “What was that? Something touched me!”

  “Do as you’re told,” Scott told him, prodding him with his shotgun, “or something really will touch you, and hard!”

  “Schloss Zonigen,” said Shania. “Think about it. Just let your thoughts flow . . . let them flow . . .” For she knew that her Khiff would find the source and learn everything. And:

  Done, said Shania’s Khiff as it emerged, smiled its sweet, no longer entirely innocent smile, and reentered its host.

  They took off the fat man’s blindfold, and Scott told him, “We have to leave you here. You’re free to go wherever you can, wherever you wish.”

  And Shania said, “Yo
u can walk into Idossola if you like. If we’re successful, then sooner or later you may even see your wife there.”

  But the man only said, “I’ll go and sit in the open on the landing stage. Right now, I don’t quite know what else to do.”

  They went part of the way with him, watched him step carefully over the guard with the raw red face—which was turning black now—and make his way unsteadily up the metal steps.

  But then as Scott took Wolf up onto his shoulders and they prepared to return to the hotel:

  You fucking bastard! someone said close by; a male “voice” that only Scott could hear.

  “What?” Scott gave a massive start, crouched low, and spun on his heel. And glancing this way and that, finally he stared at the dead guard.

  Wide-eyed, Shania grabbed his elbow. “Scott, did you hear something? What happened just then?”

  He continued to stare at the dead man, who said, You lousy shit, you or someone with you killed me! I had a life, for what it was worth. Now I have nothing.

  Scott’s blood ran cold, and the short hairs at the back of his neck stood erect. Finally he found his voice. “But you were about to kill me and mine.” His words were deadspeak, of course. For at last the Necroscope’s “talent,” that dark seed that he’d planted in Scott’s metaphysical mind, had blossomed into being.

  Of course I tried to kill you, said the other. It’s what I do, or did. And I would again if I could! But deadspeak is more than mere conversation, and Scott sensed the murderous lust and psychotic menace behind the dead man’s words.

  Then, at the back of his mind, he thought he heard someone whisper: An eye for an eye, Scott. It wasn’t the dead man this time—or perhaps it was another dead man—but in any case it was now a part of himself. And so: