City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (12 page)

“Porco zio!” The cab driver swore in Italian and swerved around the looming figure. I saw it, barely a foot or two away as we sped past, so close that, had the window been open, it could have reached down with its finger-worms and touched my face.

It was wearing wraparound sunglasses as large as ski goggles, and used a scarf to hide its nose and mouth. The mask itself looked like the face of a statue; it may have been made of rubber or plastic.

In that odd way one sees tiny details, I noticed that no clouds were coming from his scarf, despite the chill. Either it did not breathe or else its breath was very cold.

As I looked into the darkness of its sunglasses, a sensation of numbness jarred me. It felt like an icicle spike being driven though my skull and down my spine. The boneless fingers of the creature's glove touched the window and made a squeaking shrill noise as the cab shot past.

The driver stepped on the accelerator and we sped away down the street. The tall figure behind us, standing motionless in the middle of the street, dwindled in the rear window as we drove further away. We turned a corner and it was gone.

“Damn freak,” muttered the cab driver. “This town! It does something to people. Like they ain't human no more, you know?”

Little metallic flashes of light were swelling and then receding in my vision. I put my head on my knees, and drew slow, deep breaths until the faintness passed. I was still shivering with the cold. And fear.

But at least the creature was gone.

“So, where to, buddy?” called the cabbie over his shoulder.

Where to, indeed? Because it was not gone at all. I could still feel it inside my head, in my thoughts, like a swarm of bugs crawling through the folds of my brain. It was waiting, waiting to see what it was that I would think or say. Where to?

The chain of thought being ethereal, is unbreakable.

A long moment of crushing despair gripped me. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go.

“Say, buddy, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “I'm just fine.” Except there's some sort of inhuman prehistoric vampire-demon coming to eat my brain. Other than that, though, I'm just dandy.

“Right, so, where to?”

I didn't raise my head or open my eyes, but inspiration suddenly struck me. I didn't know where I was. “Say, is there a bus station in this city?”

“Yeah. Two of them.”

“Take me to one. Don't tell me which one it is. Just pick one.”

“Pick one? The bus station?”

“Yeah, either one. I don't care.

“Okay, but which one? Do you want the one on…”

“Shut up! Just take me to one of them. The one that is farther away. I don't want to know where it is, okay? Just drive.”

“Sure. Sure, pal. Whatever…”

I felt the cab take a turn and accelerate. I opened my eyes a crack, but I kept my head down. There was no way to see any landmarks. I didn't know where I was.I didn't want to know where I was.

I felt patient. Inhumanly patient, aloof and amused. Waiting. How far could I go, with no money and no friends? How far could I go without once knowing or at least suspecting where I was?

No. No. I could not afford to despair. Now it was time to think. This thing chasing me was obviously some sort of…

Of what? Martian? Demon? Stage Magician? Time-traveler? Something from another dimension? All of the above?

Whatever. Who the hell cared? It was a mind-reader. The book made that part sound easy. Once it understood a specific thought in my head, any thought, it could understand the next thought that followed, and the next, and so on. Was there a way to break the chain? A way to think something so creative or so irrational or so incomprehensible that the Soul Slayer would no longer understand me?

The book said that it can't be done, that every thought is intrinsically connected to the next, even if only by a subconscious thread. But by God, I tried. I tried to think no two thoughts in a row, to jump from topic to topic like a madman in my brain. I thought about baseball scores, the color white, the sixpence coin, the Celtic Cross, a flight of birds, the face of a crying woman.

The fear beneath all my thoughts was constant, though. It was always there. And so was the watching, brooding sense of endless, patient hunger.

Maybe the book had a clue. I drew it out and looked at it.

The human consciousness has no category for the sensation of external or alien thoughts. Any thought sensed by one's mind, therefore, always seems, to oneself, to be the product of one's own consciousness.

And since humans, as a race, are blind creatures, without self-comprehension, the Operator can introduce his own passions and thoughts into his victim's souls. The victim will assume all such thoughts are his own.

Any passion which directs the attention of the victim towards the Slayer whom we serve feeds and sustains the Great Ones, whom the Slayer serves. Of passions, fear is supreme. And the greatest fear is fear of the unknown.
.

For no human mind can ignore its own fear. Fear, once rooted in the victim-mind, always, even if only at a subconscious level, continues indefinitely.

Our race was chosen as a feed-animal because of our deep and lasting capacity for infinite fear.

The process of consumption is the process of turning the thoughts, each leading to the next, link by link, to the contemplation of infinite fear. Once perfect and eternal fear is achieved in the subject, then all the victim's thoughts, conscious and subconscious, are directed utterly at the object of his worship and terror. Cognition ceases. Limbs go numb. All action stops, for the victim has no spare brain activity left to tend to these matters. The mind, cut off from the body, paralyzed and helpless, continues to scream without pause for eternity, while the body remains as a comatose flesh-puppet useful for certain purposes of the Great Race.

I snapped the book shut. I had been wondering why, if the Soul Slayer could put thoughts into my head, didn't it just lull my fears and convince me I was hallucinating? I would have waited by the bench in St. Jude Park if I hadn't felt the monster's thoughts in my head.

Maybe it wanted fear. The book said so. The book also said you could project your own thoughts into someone else's mind. Not your words, not your lies, your thoughts. It did not seem logically possible that someone could lie through telepathy. You would have to think thoughts you weren't actually thinking, believe things you didn't believe.

So I was picking up some of what the Psychophage was thinking. Why? Because one of his thoughts was linked to one of mine. And from any link in the chain, any other link can be found, like those holographic picture that can be reconstructed, the whole of it from any part.

The book said the chain was unbreakable.

“We're here, pal,” said the cabbie.

I saw buses crowded around the station like frozen whales, pale in the flat neon glare from the parking lot spotlights.

“That'll be $12.50.” I had raised my head, so he got his first good look at me.

Twelve dollars? He might as well have asked me for twelve million. I lunged for the door handle, but he had already locked the door with his remote switch, trapping me inside.

“You're not even thinking of trying to stiff me, are you, jerk?”

“I can give you the coat. It's worth more than the fare.”

“You stole it.”

“But you have to help me! There's someone chasing me; it's trying to kill me! I've got to get out of town. I'll–I'll pay you back!”

“Shut up, loser,” he said, disgusted. He had seen through my disguise and now he knew how poor I was. Pity was only for people with money, I guess. “I'll drive you to the police station. My cousin Antonio is at the Twelfth Precinct. And don't worry, this trip's on me, pal!”

And he pulled away from the curb. We rolled up over the crest of a hill. Behind me, I saw the bus station, my only hope of getting out of town, sinking away into the distance. It was like a drowning man's last view of a ship sailing over the horizon, a ship filled with people laughing and smirking at him. I never felt such biting fear, or such pure hatred. In that moment, I wished the cabbie dead.

In another part of the city, the Simulacrum was in a subway station, standing in front of a dirt-streaked, fly-specked plastic panel which held the city map. The Twelfth Precinct Station was clearly marked. There. It was in no hurry. I would be trapped there all night. The creature stepped onto an empty train. The doors snapped shut behind it. With a shriek and rattle, the rocking subway car began to move. Windows flashed bright and dark as the underground lights streaked past.

I tapped on the glass separating the back seat from the driver. “Hey–driver! Look here! I've got my wallet right here in my pocket! You said the fare was six-fifty, right?”

And I tried to understand him. I tried to anticipate his thoughts. He was going to say the fare was twelve fifty. He's going to be annoyed, impatient.

“Twelve-fifty,” he said, irked.

He is annoyed because he hates this damned job, and the damn dispatcher doesn't speak any good English. He is abrupt because he's afraid that someday some crazy in the back with a gun will…

Fear. Of all the passions, fear is supreme.

Without warning, I started screaming at him, high-pitched lung-wrenching shrieks, and I slammed one fist against the glass, again and again. My other hand I placed in a coat pocket, thumb up and index finger out, lifting and pointing the flap of my coat just the way people do in bad sitcoms when they are pretending they have a gun in their pocket.

“I've got a gun! I've got a gun!” I screamed. I could feel him thinking. My God, what if he really does have one? “Gimme the money! Gimme the goddamn money or I'll blow your stinking head off!” I followed the demand with a loud, inarticulate scream, a wordless, meaningless cry of hate and fury. The whole time I was kicking the back of his seat with both feet.

He was thinking of his wife. I saw her in my mind's eye, a thick-waisted, bad-tempered woman in a gray housecoat, wearing her hair up in a plastic scarf. They argued all the time and yet he could not imagine life without her. He could imagine, however, her stern face beginning to fall as an unsympathetic cop explained how he had been blown away by some hop-head, and now she was alone, no one to argue with, no protection, no love, nothing, forever and ever.

The Operator can introduce his own thoughts and passions into his victim's souls. But they have to be his thoughts. I was terrified. Now he was terrified too.

And I knew what it was like to suddenly lose the only one you'd ever loved in your life. He was wondering how his wife would feel if her beloved husband died?

So I showed him. I gave him my pain.

It acted like a match; his fear was like a pool of gasoline igniting. Somehow, I was warmed by that sudden blaze of smoke and flame.

He slammed on the brakes, hit the switch to open my door, and threw his roll of bills—a rubber band held everything he had made that evening—out the window. He thought I would jump out the door to get the money. I jumped, but I just wanted out. But he almost took my leg off, roaring away while I was still half inside.

I stumbled and fell. Then I picked up the little green-and-white cylinder of bills from the gutter nearby. “Hey!” I shouted at his receding taillights. “I didn't really want your damn money!”

I didn't need to count it. The cabbie—his name was Brian Delveccio—knew how much he had made that night. It had been a long shift, and the guy from the Cobolt Hotel had been a particularly good tipper. I had $283 now, mostly in singles and fivers. I would have liked to give it back to him. I knew exactly what effort it had cost him to make this.

But instead, I got to my feet and began to walk up the hill. Once I crested the summit, I could see the station before and below me. I was sorry about stealing the man's coat and I was sorry about robbing the cabbie. I would have been a lot sorrier if the Soul Slayer got me, though.

The Simulacrum was probably still riding on the subway, going the wrong direction, unable to get off until the train's next stop. I had a little time, if only I could use it right.

I handed the ticket seller a handful of cash without looking at the bills, and asked him for a ticket to go as far as that would take me. By some miracle, mostly because I kept my eyes fixed on the floor, and I kept shouting down and interrupting anyone who tried to help me or to get me on the right bus, I managed to buy a ticket without looking at it. I even managed to get aboard a bus without knowing where it was going.

The bus rolled on into the night leaving the lights of the city behind.

There wasn't much light inside the bus. I mostly saw my fellow passengers as silhouettes and shadows around me. They were sad-faced women and bitter-looking, tired men, huddled up in dull-colored coats, everyone sitting alone. Here and there were one or two young students, too poor to afford any better form of travel, sleeping on their duffle bags and backpacks.

Maybe they were not as noble as I'd like to believe, my race. But they were not food-animals.

I'd heard that in Virginia, you could buy a gun without a five-day waiting period. And maybe getting real drunk would disorganize my thoughts enough for the Soul Slayer to lose track of me. Or maybe, if I rode far enough away, a good night's sleep would do it.

The rocking motion of the bus was lulling me to sleep. The bus rolled on, leaving my enemy farther and farther behind me. I was safe… for now.

I fell asleep and dreamed of the Slayer, who despite the distance between us was no further away than my own thoughts. I dreamt the Slayer sent its Simulacrum to hunt Mr. Delvecchio. The cab driver never got lost and he always knew where he was; it was part of his job. It was simplicity itself for the Simulacrum, looking human in the dark, to flag down a cab, to lean across the seat, to reach a glove through the little window-slot and touch the driver's shoulder.

It was simplicity itself to turn all the little man's fearful thoughts into thoughts of infinite, insane, all-destroying panic. It was simple to sever certain nerve trunks by means of hypnotic psycho-somatic force, the placebo effect in reverse, so that Mr. Delvecchio could no longer move or speak or see or feel. A second touch drained his vital essences, destroying his higher brain functions, so that only the endless, animal agony of fear was left. No, it was not even animal. The thalamus and hypothalamus were drained and destroyed. Only the brain-stem, with its simple reptilian functions, was left, full of terror on the most blank, most primitive level.