Psychomech (36 page)

‘No!’ he denied the man-God yet again. ‘No, there has to be a way out.’

WHAT WAY, RICHARD? IF YOU ARE NOT CRUSHED YOU WILL SUFFOCATE. YOU MUST LET ME HELP YOU. AND I CAN ONLY HELP IF YOU LET ME IN.

‘No!’ Garrison shook his fists at the closing walls, the lowering ceiling. No, he would not submit to the man-God. Not yet. And—

The man-God’s own words, ‘Let me in,’ had sparked an idea in his mind. Certainly the contracting leaden cube would crush and maim flesh and blood, but would it be able to crush the hard metal and plastic of the Machine? Even inert, Psychomech had massive strength. And after all, lead was a soft metal and malleable. The man-God had wanted to get inside of Garrison… but what if Garrison were to get inside the Machine?

He found a gap in the Machine’s ribbed, flanged and riveted metal side, a space into which he might squeeze his trembling frame. With a little effort, frantically wriggling when he thought he was stuck, he forced his head and the upper part of his body into the aperture, then drew in his legs and curled himself into a tight, foetal shape. Only his right hand and arm protruded, but when he felt the contracting lead wall touch his fingers he managed somehow to draw these inside too. Then, as the last flicker of light was extinguished, he huddled down and hugged himself in the darkness, and trembled long and shudderingly.

THAT WILL NOT WORK, RICHARD, Schroeder’s voice echoed hollowly. EVEN IF THE MACHINE IS NOT CRUSHED YOU MUST SOON RUN OUT OF AIR. IS THIS TO BE THE END? DARKNESS, SUFFOCATION, DEATH? IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

I’m not dead yet!’ Garrison sobbed, already feeling the air growing thin in his lungs.

The ceiling came down and the floor came up. The walls pressed in. The cube exerted its weight upon Psychomech. The Machine groaned and Garrison held what little breath he could find to hold.

And again the groan of tortured metal.

And again…

The cube squeezed, squeezed—to no avail! Psychomech held.

‘Air!’ Garrison gasped. ‘Air! There’s no air!’ His lungs were on fire, sucking uselessly at the crushing darkness. He was a miner trapped in a cave-in; a submariner falling many fathoms to where the weight of the sea would crush him flat; Poe’s victim of a premature burial. ‘Air, for Christ’s sake! Air!’

Teleportation… The ability to move something, perhaps even oneself, instantly from one place to another, without physically crossing the distance between.

‘Air!’ Garrison screamed again. And: ‘Aaaiiirrr…!’

No air… Suffocation… Crisis… Teleportation!

He moved!

Psychomech too, they both… moved!

They moved from inside to outside the cube. Gulping air, Garrison flopped out from the Machine’s cold womb of metal and plastic and fell to his knees in the dust of the river’s dry bed. He was just in time to see the great cube of lead crumple in upon itself, imploding with a whoosh, a soft tearing sound and an almost sonic bang. Dry crusts of mud and a shower of pebbles and dust were thrown up from the bed of the river, and when they settled the cube was no longer there.

Garrison was jubilant. He laughed hoarsely and shook his fists in the air. He had won. This time he himself had won. On his own, without assistance. But—

On another level, in another place, the fear-stimulation controls on Psychomech’s control panel were still jammed wide open. And, though he was not yet aware of it, Richard Garrison had merely moved himself from one crisis to another…

8.45 A.M.

Wyatt had let Terri in and taken her up to his bedroom. He had not yet been in to see Garrison and now steeled himself for that task. Wyatt’s sleep had gone a long way towards replenishing him, but still he looked better than he felt.

As for Terri: she was radiant. She had slept a deep, satisfying, dreamless sleep; and she had known that when morning came all would be well. For a woman scarlet with guilt, she looked creamy cool. In Wyatt’s bedroom—their bedroom, as she liked to think of it—she turned to him and took his hands, guiding them to her breasts. Her dark eyes were lovely in a face full of expectation.

‘It’s over?’

He did not answer immediately but averted his eyes. When finally he looked at her his face was serious. ‘It should be.’

‘Should be?’ Her face fell. ‘You haven’t been in to see him yet?’

‘I’ll go now. It’s just that—’

‘Yes?’

‘He should have been dead yesterday, yesterday evening, last night. He should have been dead many times over. I’m beginning to wonder if he’ll ever die! And some funny things have been happening.’

She shook her head, looked bewildered, completely dispelled any last doubts Wyatt might have entertained about her own possible involvement in the strangeness. ‘What do you mean?”

‘Things are happening, Terri. Things I don’t understand. I was starting to think someone was monkeying with the machine, but that’s downright impossible. I mean, I also think that your husband has been fed—but how could he have been? And the machine itself, Psychomech, is—’

‘Yes?’

‘Acting up. I don’t know…’ He shook his head-

‘Listen,’ she said with urgency. ‘Go in and see him.’ She gripped his arms. ‘Maybe it’s all over.’

She was suddenly aware of
his
nightmare, aware of Wyatt’s personal torment. Anything he displayed outwardly was for her. Possibly a little of his show was for himself, a pillar to lean on, but mainly it was for her. He had made himself totally responsible for this thing, while her part had been so small. But now… she was aware that if she weakened, he too might crumble. She did not know what had happened here, did not want to know, but she knew one thing: that she loved him. And she knew she must tell him so, and just exactly how she must say it.

‘Gareth, I love you. No matter what, I love you. I can’t help it, it’s the way I am. Whatever you find… in there, come back to me and love me. If we can’t be pure any other way, at least we can be pure that way.’

He knew what she meant and nodded. He somehow managed a smile, however wan. ‘Sweet oblivion, yes. But… it
will
be OK, I’m sure.’ He nodded again, closed the door after him…

The Machine was dead again and all Garrison’s mental tugging and pushing, all his desperate tongue-lashing, couldn’t move it. And what a place to be stuck. Below him, a ^lab-walled ravine going down to eternity, and before him—a viaduct. And the Machine completely inert, lying where it had come to rest upon old and rotten railway ties bearing twisted, rusty rails, the line stretching away towards the dry river valley he had left two or three miles in his wake.

He stared again at the viaduct, its arches sagging where they spanned the unknown depths. Somehow in some tiny corner of his mind, Garrison had the spark of an idea that if he could only cross this decrepit viaduct, then his strength, and that of the Machine, would be restored. The viaduct was a barrier to his quest, an obstacle placed in his way to frustrate him. Cross the viaduct, remove the obstruction, continue the quest.

Easy…

Garrison’s overalls were ragged at the knees and elbows. He wondered about them. Overalls?

As a boy he had worn denim overalls. Yes, and there had been a derelict viaduct, too. He had always hated the crumbling brick arches of the thing, which had seemed to him ready at a moment’s notice to topple disastrously. It had been like a dead and rotting old man. A corpse no one would bury. But useless and dangerous as the structure had been, for some reason the viaduct had stood there, tall and gaunt and trembling, for long years after it should have been pulled down.

And yet for all its disuse and decay, still it had served a purpose. One which had brought terror.

An initiation test, that’s what the viaduct had been, means of entry into an exclusive club. The other members had been a year, two years older than Garrison’s ten or eleven, and bullies all. But better to be a member of the club than a target for its constant cruelties, and Garrison, being big for his age, was invariably a prime target.

The fine details of that earlier ordeal escaped him now—except that he had been called upon to cross the viaduct, leaping the gaps in the rotting ties where sections of rusty track had long since decayed, broken free and tumbled to oblivion in the depths. It had seemed easy at first, until, as he had reached the centre of the perilous structure, the president and a couple of club members had sent an old bogie rolling upon him from the far side, rumbling and swaying as it sped by him and sent him reeling. Then, as Garrison had tripped and fallen—only saving himself from certain death by hanging on to a length of projecting, rusty rail-the old bogie had taken out yet another section of rails and ties to go plummeting into the abyss, falling hundreds of feet to crash and splinter and cartwheel down the steep wooden slope below.

Somehow Garrison had hauled himself to safety, and somehow he had completed the ‘initiation test’; but after that he had wished nothing more to do with the club, and one by one he had picked off its members in bloody fist fights. And they had troubled him no more.

—Since when he had thought the incident long forgotten. And forgotten it might have stayed, but that was where he had first learned the meaning of vertigo.

Vertigo, yes, a fear he had managed to kill off in his mind. Except that now—

This viaduct of dreams, this bridge of darkest nightmares

In his ragged overalls, on feet clad in a pair of worn, badly scuffed shoes with crepe rubber soles, Garrison set about making the crossing. It was evening and he must get across before the fall of night, to the other side, where a waterfall tinkled and splashed.

The viaduct’s span was perhaps one hundred and fifty feet. It was of a peak-roofed, twin-walled construction with the concrete bed, wooden ties and steel rails suspended between the walls. Most of the clapboard roof was missing now, letting in the light, but in places the boards were almost intact and made the way dark indeed. And the deeps below seemed bottomless.

For all the control he exerted or tried to exert upon himself. Garrison could still feel a sickness growing in the pit of his stomach and a steady increase in the wild fluctuations of his heart. Not wishing to prolong the crossing, he grew less cautious and began to take chances.

Towards the centre of the viaduct, along a section of at least one third of the structure’s total length, the roof was almost entirely missing. Lengths of fallen, rotten clapboard abounded here, tumbled down and scattered all over the red rails and spongy black ties. Here, too, the masonry was damp, moss-grown and crumbly, where many of the topmost courses had fallen, mostly inward, making the way dangerous to the point of lethal. In places this choking with debris was almost in the nature of snow-bridges; where the way looks solid enough while the bridge itself is barely capable of supporting its own weight, and the reverberations of a mere shout may bring all down in a disastrous avalanche.

On two occasions as he worked his way forward inch by inch, Garrison’s front-probing foot set minor masses of stone, rotten timbers and squealing track shifting, sliding, and finally thundering down dustily into the great and seemingly bottomless cavity between the walls. But the third such fall, which occurred two-thirds of the way across, was very extensive. It plunged a great section of bed and track and previously tumbled debris into the depths.

As all of this happened Garrison threw himself back the way he had come, face down on the tracks, where he clung like a limpet until the shuddering and thundering were over. Then, shakily regaining his feet and as the clouds of billowing dust settled, he saw what remained of the section just ahead. And at the sight his despair and feeling of vertigo doubled and redoubled within him.

For nothing remained of the way ahead except the sagging rails themselves and the few ties which kept them fastened together. Why, even a tightrope walker would have difficulty crossing now!

I CAN CARRY YOU ACROSS, RICHARD! came that familiar booming voice from the sky, its echoes causing dust and bits of rubble to trickle from ledges and crevices in the shaken wall where Garrison crouched.

He looked up through a lattice of ravaged clapboard roofing and saw the face of the man-God, luminous in the gathering twilight. ‘Oh?’ Despite his fear his voice dripped acid ‘And at what price?’

YOU KNOW THE PRICE, RICHARD, said the man-God, his eyes narrowing. A PRICE I HAVE ALREADY TOLD YOU: THAT YOU LET ME COME TO YOU, THAT YOU LET ME IN.

Garrison was tempted, but—

‘No? he answered after a moment. ‘Oh, no, man-God! I’ve dreamed of you before, long ago, and I remember that dream now. At the end of my quest there’s a black lake with a black castle, and in that other dream you were there with me and still demanding to be let in. Well, I haven’t reached the lake and the castle yet, and until I do—’

IF YOU DO! ONLY LOOK AT THE WAY AHEAD, RICHARD. IF YOU ATTEMPT THIS, YOU RISK BOTH OF OUR LIVES.

‘It’s a risk I have to take.’

WITH MY LIFE TOO? AND WHAT OF THE THING THAT WAITS? THE THING IN THE SHADOWS BENEATH THE WATERFALL?

“The Thing That Waits?” Garrison’s eyes turned from the face of the man-God to peer nervously across the abyss to the far side of the viaduct. Something gleamed redly in the gloom low down where the water splashed near the foot of the falls. Two red somethings, like the lamps of a train seen afar, or the warning glow of red railway lanterns.

They were wide-spaced, seemed to peer right back at him—and even as he gazed, with the short hairs rising at the back of his neck—

They blinked!

Whatever it was, the Thing That Waited must be huge and heavy and squat and awful. Garrison pictured again that old, careening railway bogie. Like that, yes!

But unlike the bogie, sentient—and utterly evil!

W
yatt came back in something approaching high spirits, at least by comparison with his recent frame of mind. ‘Crisis,’ he reported to Terri. ‘You don’t know what that means, my love, but I can tell you that it doesn’t mean a crisis for us.’ She was in bed. He quickly undressed and got in beside her.

She hugged him close and warmed him with her flesh. ‘Then it really is going to happen?’