Brian Lumley - Psychomech 03, page 9
'Very well, a sign:
'Stigmata! - the marks of my faith, the proof of my devotion! For have I not - have we not - suffered and been crucified upon the cross of Psychomech? And are we not risen up, as it were, from the dead and enabled to walk among sane men?' Craig strode around the table, used his palms to hold back the greying, locks of hair at his temples, displaying on both sides of his head a red stipple rash as of countless tiny teeth. Beneath his grey jacket he wore a thin black polo-necked pullover, whose neck he now yanked down to show marks in his own neck worthy of a drug-addict's arm. And rolling back his cuffs, he revealed morevjnarks of Psychomech's hypodermics on the insides of his wrists.
'And are these not signs?' McClaren's eyes went wide. His own neck felt sore, his ankles, too. He glanced at his wrists. Fresh punctures were white as bee-stings! He stared . . . and started violently as Craig's hand fell upon his shoulder.
'Andy, you are one of us now. The Lord has set a plague upon the Earth and the nations of the Earth shall die - but you will be saved. We shall all be saved, all of us here . . .
'And when the world reels and totters and screams in its madness, we shall wait. And when at last the holocaust is at an end - for The Gibbering is a great holocaust, destroying all unbelievers and idolaters, a fire of the mind, as was prophesied - then shall we go out and take the Word of the Lord with us unto the chosen few. Oh, some shall be spared, whom He finds worthy, and we shall seek them out in all corners of the world. And there shall be tribes upon the face of the Earth, and we shall be the priests in His temples, and in the Great Temple I shall be priest of priests, and Psychomech my Oracle. And woe unto him who breaks the Laws of the Lord!'
At this point, as at a signal, the other eleven had risen to their feet, repeating as once voice: 'Woe unto him who breaks the Laws of the Lord!' Following which Craig took McClaren by the elbow and drew him up. He smiled at him and nodded knowingly.
'Go home now, Andrew McClaren, and think on the things you have seen and heard. And think well on these things. God will not suffer unbelievers. The choice is yours: accept the faith and be saved, deny it and be cast out to die gibbering, insane, your brain melting in your skull. Say nothing now, but phone me tonight and give me your answer.' He turned away from McClaren, spoke to Edward Bragg:
Take him home - let him ask what questions he will -answer them for him.' Then he addressed everyone else. 'Ladies, gentlemen, friends . . . you have your^work and I have kept you long enough. I too have much to do; there has been an accident, further proof that the plague is indeed upon us and gathering momentum. Only remember: you are the chosen, the Elect!'
As they left the boardroom by an exterior door and went out into PSISAC's massive complex, Craig had these final words for his twelfth and last disciple:
'Andy-welcome!'
Chapter Seven
Stone stood alone once more in the neglected graveyard beside the plot with the white marker. Soaked, he stood there - stood waiting - with the rain plastering his short hair to his head and streaming in a torrent from his chin. Already the waking world was forgotten; this was his world now, as real in its way as the conscious world from which he had so recently fled. And no jot less menacing.
Sombre thunder rumbled and threatened overhead, and the occasional flash of lightning scarred the drab sky with golden fire. One such flash was very bright, leaving the mark of its lash seared upon Stone's startled retinas. He closed his dazzled eyes and the flash remained, slowly fading into the darkness behind his eyelids. Fading with it, he glimpsed and tried to hold on to a set of strange symbols whose meanings were forgotten along with the world which spawned them:
Key and manacles, tower. . . and tree . . . and . . . ?
And what? Something else?
Like a man rising up from sleep and seeking to remember a dream, Stone sought to remember the waking world. But just like a dream, it was gone. A pointless exercise anyway, meaningless. Better simply to stand by the grave in the rain and wait.
But wait for what?
It seemed to Stone that someone had asked him that selfsame question, and recently. But he could not remember who.
The rain came down heavier than ever, but a clinging, clammy rain now, as if a lake of sweat was leaking through the skin of the sky. It was difficult to breathe; a man might drown in rain such as this!
Stone knew he should find shelter from the night and the rain, shelter and warmth - but still he stood there, alone and shivering and stubborn. Stubborn as his father, Richard Garrison, and just as curious. There was a mystery here and he must fathom it. It was important, perhaps the most important thing in the whole wide world.
After some little time, slowly the storm began to abate. The lightning flashed more rarely and less achingly; the thunder rolled and muttered on hills more distant; the slimy flood from the sky turned back into simple rain.
Stone stood in mud up to his ankles. Close by, a shattered headstone offered solid footing. He lifted his right foot like a muddy club and let the ooze slide off in dark, slithering gobs. He placed his freed foot on the slab and leaned his weight upon it, then repeated the motion. His left foot came free with a sucking sound, as if the earth were reluctant to free him.
The rain was reduced to a mere pattering of droplets now. Heavy clouds scudded low across the sky, like vast luminous bats in the radiance of a thin-horned moon. Stray beams of moonlight found their way into the graveyard, gleaming silver on shattered marble stumps.
Slow as a creeping shadow, an eerie silence fell over the place. A mist crept out of the earth, its knowing tendrils writhing in unnatural languor about the bases of the tumbled headstones and pooling like clotted, scummy milk in small hollows between the plots.
With broken, tottering slabs projecting from the putrid earth like ill-used bones, and the white crawling mist thickening like pus in open sores, the graveyard itself had rapidly taken on the aspect of a sprawling, rotting leprous corpse. Stone crouched down upon his headstone and shuddered - but still he would not leave the place. He knew fear which gnawed at his insides - but still could not flee. Not yet.
He knew in his heart of hearts that what was yet to come would be monstrous - knew that this had all happened before, several times - but that did not satisfy his morbid curiosity.
Morbid? Stone supposed so, but he had to know. He had a purpose now, a way to go. He had... a quest. What that quest was he did not quite know, but it had keys. Keys, yes, and one of them - the first one - was right here. It would be worth all the menace to come, whatever that menace might prove to be, just to get his hands on that key.
He straightened up, sighed his resolve, frowned and pursued that last thought.
A key. . . As if the words themselves were 'a key', Stone felt his mind unlocked - partially. The merest crack. Through the crack in the door he heard again a conversation remembered of some other place and time -or a snatch of conversation. Strangely, one of the voices was his own:
'. . . I stood there, soaked to the skin, waiting.'
'Waiting?'
'For the undead!'
The undead? Creatures that die only to return and live again by eating the substance of others. Vampires who will not lie still in their graves but must be up and about, pursuing their monstrous -
The door closed again, slammed shut, shocked Stone back to the present, to the graveyard. And here he stood, soaked to the skin, waiting for . . .
. . . From the rain-sodden plot at his feet there came a sucking sound as of many bestial mouths. It was that loathsome sound he had heard when he drew out his feet, except that now it was louder and utterly unsolicited.
Stone's hair.stood on end and he gulped air with a sharp, choking inhalation. He cast a horrified glance at the plot before him, at its dark sodden earth - and saw it quaking like a quicksand! His glance was fixed, became a horrified stare; his gaze seemed rooted no less than his suddenly leaden feet.
The steaming, loamy soil of the grave was humping up, cracking open, sliding away from a central bulge which even now thrust itself upwards in jerky, shuddery convulsions. The very earth underfoot was on the move, tilting the fallen slab where Stone stood and forcing him to step back, his feet sinking deep in gurgling ooze.
Amidst a concerted squelching and bubbling, still the central eruption of the grave continued and Stone choked and coughed as bubbles burst and escaping gases eddied the seething mist. The air was filled with an incredible stench, with glutinous burstings and gurglings; but then, as the fetor and the awful sounds of suction reached a crescendo, the great bulk of the risen mass separated itself from the earth and stood free over the site of the riven plot. It stood there, huge and completely motionless, as the sodden soil beneath collapsed back in upon itself and water and mist swirled into a depression greater than the original plot itself.
Stone backed away, staggering and floundering in clinging mud.
Gobs of filth fell from the fresh-risen Thing, clots of mouldy earth and streams of black water, as gradually its true outlines became visible. A flurry of fresh rain completed the job, washing away sufficient dirt to satisfy Stone's curiosity beyond any further doubt. He knew now who - or what - this undead, this vampire, this risen corpse-thing was. But he did not,know why it had returned or what it would do next!
Finally galvanized into activity, Stone underwent an agony of splashing and floundering before he reached firmer ground and at last stumbled out through the tottering gates of the graveyard. From this point on he would have to rely on instinct alone; but at least he had turned the first key, had passed through the first portal of knowledge.
Horror rode on his heels as he ran stumbling through the night. He clambered over a low wall, paused to gulp at the night air and look back - just for a moment.
In the middle of the sundered graveyard, suspended over a lake of mist and gleaming in the thin moonlight, a squat Machine ~ an intricate thing of metal and plastic and chrome - rested from the labours of its rebirth and felt the currents of the invisible Psychosphere washing over and through its being. It was or had been an engine, a beast, a vehicle, a weapon - all of these things - but at the moment it was mainly beast. And it had sentience, of a sort.
Stone nodded in the shadow of the wall. 'Oh, I know you,' he muttered from under his breath. 7 know you -vampire!'
But then, as strange lights began to glow and pulsate within the bulk of the risen horror, he turned and fled towards his destiny. Where his feet would take him, he knew not, but any place would be better than this. This place was doomed. The plague was here. To stay here would be . . . madness!
A monster was abroad in the innermost dreams of men . . .
Stone came awake with a start, sat up, cast about at once for a familiar landmark. In his first moment of consciousness he had fully expected to find himself curled up on the padded floor of cell number 253 at Calm Lawns, but in the next he remembered his walk with Dr Gorvitch and looked instead for the security fence and the watchtower. None of these things was anywhere apparent.
Instead, he found himself sitting under a hedge with coarse grass up to his shoulders. On his right, a copse of young oaks and ashes stood in open countryside; on his left, beyond the hedge, the grass was neatly cropped where a small playground sported a sandy play-pit, swings, a roundabout and a seesaw.
Stone was exhausted: he felt as if he had been badly beaten. His arms and legs were weak and trembly and his head ached abominably. He^iad recognized the playground immediately, knew where he was but could hardly credit it. It was almost easier to believe that he had succumbed to the final stages of The Gibbering and was even now a prisoner of his own hallucinations, lost in the long, last madness. How else might he explain his presence here? This place must be all of fifteen miles and more from Calm Lawns . . .
Stone's only half-formed but nevertheless harrowing conclusion, that he was now mad, seemed reinforced by an as yet distant, discordant yammer of voices in meaningless conflict; but as his head cleared a little he became aware that this was a far different form of 'gibbering'. For one thing there was laughter, even joy in it: the glee and excitement of children unable to express their pleasure more coherently.
And so finally, gratefully, he accepted the facts of his whereabouts.
He was in the grounds of the Clayton Institute on the Woodstock Road just outside of Oxford. He'd been here before, with Lynn, helping out with the kids. It seemed ironic, somehow, that he should once have had a measure of control over those retarded, mentally disturbed or disabled, or brain-damaged children: a classic case of the blind leading the blind. He remembered how much he had pitied them . . .
It all seemed about a million years ago but in fact it was less than two. And since then ... his life destroyed, his mother dead, and this new awareness inside that in fact these kids were the lucky ones. Since they already gibbered, in their harmless way, might not their shattered minds be safe from the hideous plague itself? And if not, what would it matter to them? As for the rest of mankind: what had Gorvitch said, about the curve being exponential? It seemed so crazy. Didn't the world know it was on the brink? Wasn't anyone doing anything about it?
But . . . Stone knew it was unwise to dwell too closely upon The Gibbering. In any case, right now he felt in finer mental fettle than he had for ... for far too long. A pity he could not say the same for his physical condition! Something had really taken it out of him; but it was probably only temporary. His muscles were unused to this freedom; he had spent too long in that bloody awful cell. And it was obvious that during his escape he'd exerted himself to the point of collapse. All of which would account for the way he felt. But as for the escape itself: he could remember nothing past his conversation with Gor-vitch. Not even all of that. He must have suffered an attack, somehow contriving to make his escape while it was still in progress. But how in hell would he have gone about that?
He shook his head, tried to work out his thoughts before they dissolved into total chaos or panic. Now that he was out, he had better make plans. A plan of action, maybe - contingency plans - before things got bad again.
He was surprised by his own enthusiasm, his last-ditch determination. For if he really faced up to it, surely the whole thing was hopeless - wasn't it?
'Plans,' for God's sake! That was a laugh! Not only was he a fugitive - and a potentially dangerous fugitive, at that - but at any moment his own traitor mind might betray him. The first time he lost control and gibbered in public would be the last! So what to do? Where to begin? And what was the meaning of the sudden wild excitement he felt rising inside himself? Or was that, too, just another symptom?
There again, maybe things weren't so bad after all. Gorvitch had thought he was different, and maybe he was. He had escaped, hadn't he? - even if he didn't remember how!
But there were things he did remember, and vividly, even if their sources were often obscure. Fixations they might well be - complexes, obsessions? Possibly - but they didn't feel that way. So while he could, for however long he had left before the authorities or The Gibbering caught up with him, Stone would explore the possibilities. Call it a quest. Certainly he had nothing to lose.
Oh, there were things against him (he snorted at the innocence of that last thought, its naiveti, its understatement), but just as surely there were things going for him. Some things that he felt reasonably sure of, others he didn't even begin to understand. Like how he got here, for one.
He stood up, brushed leaves and twigs from his clothing and peered through a break in the hedge. Most of the leaves were off the trees now but the hedge was of privet. He would not be seen from the other side.
Beyond the playground an extensive, flat-roofed, single-storey building of timber and glass sprawled in gardens of close-cropped grass. A place of trellises and vines and crazy-paving paths, with an aviary to one side and a shallow, willow-shaded fish-pond in front. Emerging from a long, open-ended, glass-roofed porch or conservatory, a small crowd of children made their way along one of the paths towards the playground.
It was their distant tumult Stone had almost mistaken for The Gibbering. He looked at the crowd of kids and his heart gave an extra kick inside his chest. Tall in their midst - Snow White with her strange, misshapen, hooting, jabbering dwarves - Lynn smiled and gently chided, reassured and guided her awkward charges along the path. She was one of the few people who ever got through to them. Stone had been another . . .
He knew the routine here: knew that, after 'lessons' and weather permitting, the kids were normally allowed half an hour in the playground before the bus came to take them home. The time must therefore be about 4:30 p.m. Lynn usually finished and locked up about five. Sometimes she had help but today she would be on her own. With older children there were sometimes problems, but this was a small bunch and the eldest could be only seven or eight years old.
Stone was at the back of the place. Slowly, carefully, he began to pick his way round to the front. The tall hedge completely surrounded the institute; he should make it without being seen. As he went, he thought some more about the time:
4:30 p.m. Two and a half hours since they'd given him his own clothes and put the manacles on him back in Calm Lawns. Except that Calm Lawns was more than fifteen miles away! Had he run all the way here? Was that possible, over rough, open country? What had guided him? And how about those manacles?
This loss or partial loss of memory, occurring as it did whenever he underwent the mental stress of an attack, was very frustrating. That was the trouble with The Gibbering: he remembered vivid clarity of thought on certain subjects -amazing revelations and fleeting glimpses of powers or senses other than the normal five - awareness of his own strange identity or destiny - but could not remember what these subjects were or where these areas of reasoning and revelation lay. It was like being a novelist who dreams a tremendous plot and wakes excited, only to see the plot fade away and dissolve before he can put pen to paper. Instead of a story, all Stone had left was a couple of vague and ill-defined chapter headings, which in his jumbled mind had now attained the dubious status of fixations. Fixations, yes ... obsessions. But more than that, he felt that they were clues: keys to a Great Riddle.
