Psychomech (27 page)

Screaming as no man ever screamed before, Otto Krippner crumpled to his knees…

When Maas stopped whining and began screaming Wyatt clapped his hands to his ears and almost ran from the room. Then he heard the hum of Psychomech’s back-up systems as they stepped up their aid to Maas, feeding him the psychic and physical strength he required to fight back and win over all odds, and he remembered his real purpose in being here. But even as he reached for the cut-out switches he was aware of a subtle difference. It was not that the machine was malfunctioning in any way, rather that it functioned
in excess
of the requirement. Lights suddenly glowed on panels where Wyatt had never before noticed them, and the spinning tapes of Maas’s newly installed automatic systems had commenced to whir and click behind their clear plastic covers. Pre-programmed for this precise moment, the machine was delivering its surge, flooding the ESP areas of Maas’s mind with the powers of a God!

Without understanding what was happening, and yet shudderingly aware that something outside his experience—some utterly abnormal thing—
was
happening, Wyatt’s trembling fingers found the cut-out switches…

Renewed, swollen, bloated. Otto Krippner stood within the circle of Accusers and glared. Glared? His eyes, so recently bright with fear, were now almost glassy with power! He glared, yes—a glare of pure malevolence—and the Accusers fell back from him like leaves blown in a gale, melting as icicles in the withering blast of a furnace. In a moment they were gone, banished back to his id, the black vaults of their spawning.

And now his uniform was whole once more, replete with jackboots, swastika armband, SS cap and badge, Sam Browne belt, cross-strap and pistol holder. Otto Krippner in full regalia, completely in command—and commanding more sheer power than any fifty Nazis before him!

And now let them beware, the ones who sought him. Now let them fear his wrath, where he for years had feared theirs.

With enhanced clairvoyance he searched for them, found them; with remote viewing he spied upon them, saw what they were about; and telepathically, telekinetically he visited them, briefly, simultaneously, and let them feel his presence, his power…

Felix Goldstein was at a dance in the American Embassy, enjoying himself as best he could and perhaps drinking a little too much to disguise the sour taste of defeat. Defeat, yes, for yet again a hot lead on Herr Colonel Doktor Otto Krippner had proved to be nothing more than a wild-goose chase. It was sickening, physically sickening! The trail had looked so good, and then—nothing. If Krippner had come to England, then he had died here quietly and in obscurity; or he had acquired a new identity which, through the accruement of years, must by now afford him complete protection.

Yet even as these thoughts played in Goldstein’s mind he remembered Charalambou-Keltner’s dying words: how Krippner had come to England, and the name he had used, Hans Maas. With that thought came another—so hard it was almost a physical blow—and Goldstein reeled with the force of it: a vivid mental picture, clearer than any photograph, of the man he sought. Krippner, smiling hideously, large and larger than life, in uniform befitting the Nazi’s rank and suiting perfectly his clinical, cold-blooded (or was it hot-blooded?) evil. In another moment the vision had disappeared and Goldstein steadied himself and shook his head. He must have been working too hard. Unsteadily, he walked out on to the balcony to get a breath of fresh air. He wondered how the others were progressing, and guessed that they would not be making any headway. But… it was their last chance: immigration for the years 1957, 1958 and 1959. A man calling himself Maas, if Keltner had been right and the Nazi really had come over to England under that name…

In the private library of the Golders Green home of a prominent British Jew, Gerry Hochstern and Ira Levi wearily sat at a desk and pored over the foolscap photostats of near microscopic print. A stack of discarded sheets, all void of the one name they sought, cluttered one end of the desk. They worked in silence through the night, as they had worked for hours, in the yellow glow of a desk lamp, almost without hope—until suddenly Levi drew breath sharply and stabbed with an extended forefinger. ‘There!’ The word was a whisper. ‘There. Hans Maas—July ‘58…’

‘Where?’ Hochstern leaned across the desk, shrugging off his weariness and coming to life in a moment, placing a magnifier over the spot where Levi’s finger pointed. ‘Maas,’ he breathed. ‘Hans Maas, alive—at least in 1958. Hans Maas—alias Otto Krippner!’

It was like an invocation.

The desk light grew dim, blinked out in a moment, and in that same instant the temperature of the room plummeted. Their breath plumed in suddenly freezing air.
‘What the hell!’
Levi hissed.

A bluish radiance glowed into life in one corner of the room. Frozen, the two men sat in the eerie illumination, their hackles rising as they gazed wide-eyed and awestruck at the apparition—or was it an apparition?—forming out of the blueness. Otto Krippner, uniformed, malignant, bloated, tall as the ceiling and glowing with the blue rottenness of loathsome, poisonous fungi.

But his huge hands, reaching out, were not apparitions; those great hands, big as meat platters, the left closing over Levi’s head and the right over Hochstern’s. And beginning slowly to squeeze, while the burning eyes of Otto Krippner glared and glared, and the room was filled with all the eerie energy born in a madman’s mind and now released in a massive psychic attack…

Gareth Wyatt’s fingers depressed the cut-out switches and the fortified, expanded ESP centres of Hans Maas’s mind were instantly denied Psychomech’s assistance. A moment more and the figure of the man on the machine seemed to crumple. He began to scream. But there are screams and there are screams, and these were different to any that Maas had ever heard. They were such that he could not bear to listen to them. Nor could he bear to look at Maas on the bed of the machine; a single glance was sufficient to send him flying from the room. With hands that shook uncontrollably, he locked the door behind him, then hurried downstairs and sat alone, sweating and shuddering in a quiet room in the most un-quiet house in the world…

Miles McCauley, American diplomat, went out on to the large balcony of the embassy high over central London’s streets. He had seen an old friend of his, Felix Goldstein, wander out there with a drink in his hand. Goldstein had looked a bit down in the mouth, had seemed pensive and worried, and perhaps this would be a good time to talk to him. Maybe seeing McCauley would cheer him up a little. McCauley wondered what sort of work he was doing these days. Still tracking down war-criminals, he supposed.

And he supposed correctly, except that this time a very special war-criminal had tracked down Goldstein.

Later, McCauley would not be able to remember exactly what he saw out there on the balcony. He would never be quite sure. But there was Goldstein on his knees, gasping, his face contorted in agony and his arms held up at strange, strained angles. And McCauley
heard
those arms snap, heard it quite clearly, as the other screamed and his arms began to flap about like snakes with their backs broken.

Then the Jew dragged himself—or
was
dragged, by something invisible—towards the balcony’s low stone wall, lurched upright—or was snatched upright—and bent backwards against the parapet. Impossibly, in that bent over backwards position, he began to slide
upwards
, over the parapet, his feet lifting clear off the floor.

Leaping across the space between, McCauley sensed a malevolent presence. He felt it even as he grabbed at Goldstein’s legs, felt it effortlessly dragging the Jew from his grasp—until suddenly the shrieking man fainted and fell back into McCauley’s arms, at which very moment the force withdrew. One second it was there, this feeling of a hateful, destructive force, and the next… gone.

In Golders Green also those same weird energies, that malefic Power, had been shut off, leaving Hochstern and Levi crumpled over the desk of the now scattered photostats. They, too, were alive, but it had been a close thing.

Finally Levi was able to lift his bruised and bloodied, sweat-soaked head from what had been a green desk blotter, now stained uniformly brown. Hochstern stayed where he was, bleeding a little from his ears and feeling as if his head had been in a vice. Opening his bloodshot eyes, he blinked until his vision cleared and looked at Levi. The desk light burned as steadily as before and all seemed back to normal—with the exception that the two men knew their heads had been very nearly crushed.

But by what?

‘What the hell was that !’Levi croaked.

‘Krippner!’ the other answered at once, his voice a groan.

Hochstern was a member of an Israeli metaphysical society and was generally recognized as having some clairvoyant ability. ‘It was him, I’m sure.’

‘But how—’

‘How did he do it? I don’t know—but when we can move, I think one of us should contact Felix. I’ve a feeling he may also have been… visited! Whether he has or hasn’t, one thing is now certain. Otto Krippner was still alive, and he was here somewhere in England.’

‘Was? But you just said—’

‘He’s dead now,’ Hochstern said with certainty. ‘He died doing—that. Maybe it killed him, maybe not, but be sure he is dead. If he wasn’t dead—then we surely would be!’

It was more than an hour before Gareth Wyatt dared return to the room of the machine. And when he saw what lay upon Psychomech’s bed he had to go away again and be sick—very sick indeed—before his nerves were steady enough for what must be done next. Then he thanked whichever lucky stars shone down upon him that the house was empty, that he had fired his servants some four months ago when k became clear that he could no longer afford to keep them. That made very easy work of what must otherwise be impossible, or at the very least extremely dangerous.

But in fact it was simpler than he ever could have imagined. Hans Maas had not been a heavy man before, and now he was little more than a bag of bones. That was something which would frequently return to haunt Wyatt for the rest of his life: the awful
depletion
taken place in the body of the ex-Nazi. It was as if Psychomech had completely drained him of his body’s fluids; had sucked the entire essence of, Maas into itself, like some gigantic mechanical vampire…

After the thing which had been Maas had disappeared into the deep waters of the pool, Wyatt returned to the house. Tomorrow there would be much to do. He must search the old gatehouse thoroughly, from top to bottom, removing and destroying anything which would incriminate him or Maas.

But tonight—tonight Wyatt would do nothing. He would not even sleep, for sleep was out of the question. No, he would simply sit downstairs, with all the lights of the house ablaze, and he would drink coffee. A lot of coffee. And upstairs, silent now and utterly inactive, Psychomech would crouch on its metal and plastic haunches, a great glutted bat in hibernation.

And it would be a long time before Wyatt ever unlocked the door and entered that room again…

T
hree and a half years later; the end of February 1980…

Full years for Garrison, they were nevertheless gone in a twinkling. His wife Terri (she had married him only three months after their first meeting) had also found them full; of newness, excitement, some strangeness, even sorrow. The latter had been occasioned by the death of her father—dead, she had used to claim, of a broken heart, though the doctors had diagnosed a brain tumour—but its pain was largely over now; and this only a short while after Garrison had stepped in and bought up a majority of supposedly worthless shares in Miller’s company, which now gave him the controlling interest. Moreover, under his guidance the company had recovered arid prospered; he had made and was still making a great deal of money from it, as well as from his other ever-expanding business ventures.

Koenig, of course, was bound to see Garrison’s success in so many fields as increasing evidence of his beloved Colonel’s continued presence and influence over Garrison, and in this respect he was happy with a situation which so far agreed precisely with Schroeder’s (or rather with Adam Schenk’s) forecasts. If only Schenk were still alive to throw some light, as it were, upon the events of the immediate future. For as time passed both Koenig and Garrison were ever aware of the approach of that deadline, that last enigmatic entry on Garrison’s horoscope:

‘Machine. Time-scale: to eight years. RG/TS… Light!’

Eight years from the early summer of 1973; in other words the summer of 1981; which in turn was only fifteen or so months away.

‘Light!’—which Garrison could only take to mean the return, by some miraculous event or other, of his sight. And ‘RG/TS’. Richard Garrison—Thomas Schroeder. Schroeder’s return, his reincarnation from beyond the grave, into Garrison’s body. A metempsychosis, a sort of sharing: which transition Koenig obviously believed was already well underway…

Three and a half years. Full years but far from easy ones and, quite apart from the death of Terri’s father, not even completely happy ones. She had disliked Koenig from the start; or rather, from the moment she had recognized the strength of his influence with the man she had supposed to be his master.

At first, perhaps not unreasonably, she had tried to oust the German from Garrison’s affections, only then learning something of the unbreakable ties between them, the fact that the past bound them together. She could never know—of course not—that the future also was just such a binding influence.

And so she had learned to tolerate Koenig, and knowing the problem, for his part he kept out of the way as best he might. But in all truth their friendship grew despite Terri’s obvious (though now controlled or restrained) opposition.

One more thing Terri did not know, and one Garrison never saw fit to tell her, was that Koenig was a rich man in his own right. Garrison’s feelings for the German were hardly made any less by this fact, of which he had been aware for some time, that his ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, was, like himself, a man to whom money posed little or no problem. Thomas Schroeder had seen to all of that; so that in fact Willy Koenig could leave Garrison’s ‘employ’ whenever he wished, could go and live where and how he desired. Except of course that he had no such desire.