by Brian Lumley
There had been few people about—one or two couples slowly negotiating a rough ramp cut in the cliff’s face down to the beach, and a scattered handful on the beach itself—but that was just exactly how Garrison had wanted it. This had been his prime purpose in coming out to Rhodes in the first place: an escape from the rush and bustle and pressures of a life which, for the last year at least, had seemed to catch him up like an insect in the cogs of some vast machine. But an insect of carbon steel, which could not be crushed and without which the machine itself could not function.
For Garrison controlled—no, he was—that machine. Not quite self-made but certainly self-sustaining, self-servicing. Even the finest machine needs a little oil, however, and this holiday was to have been just that: light lubrication for the gears of a life suddenly grown vastly complicated. More than that, it was to give him time to consider his future. To ponder what best to do with the powers his multimind controlled—those powers which, with each passing day, he felt weakening in him, draining from him like the slow trickle of sand from the glass globe of an hourglass.
Vicki had been silent, dwelling a little introspectively on her life with Garrison, happy just to sit beside the calm, apparently greatly relaxed and benign figure of her companion—at least until she heard the clatter of pebbles and the indolent slap, slap of sandals which announced the arrival of the two Greek boys. At that she sighed.
She had known then why they had been followed, taking little pride in the knowledge that her own brown and beautifully proportioned body was the magnet which had drawn these adolescent islanders after her. She felt only a niggling annoyance. She was skimpily dressed, true, in a tiny green halter, green figure-hugging shorts and white sandals—but surely these lads could find themselves a pair of girls more their own age to ogle? While it was still fairly early in the tourist season, still the village was full of just such apparently unattended young ladies: English, German, Italian, Scandinavian. Or perhaps the youths had mistakenly suspected that Vicki and Garrison had something other in mind than merely sitting in silent contemplation in the shade of the rocks?
Garrison, too, had noticed the approach of the boys and for a moment he had grinned good-naturedly. He had of course immediately guessed their motive, and a glance—the merest peep—inside their minds had confirmed it. Well, boys are boys and Greek boys are Greek boys, and no complaints there. But then, as the youths had taken seats upon rocks in the middle of the pod-bearing plants and openly stared at Garrison and his lovely companion—particularly and pointedly at Vicki—the grin had quickly slipped from Garrison’s face.
One of the minds his own had touched upon was a distinctly unpleasant one, whose strong sexual overtones were warped and vicious. He was full of animal lust. In Garrison’s brief glimpse inside the youth’s head he had found him savagely assaulting Vicki. Slimy with sweat and sex, the attack was unnatural as it was murderous. Nor were these mind-scenes mere fantasies but repeats of an earlier assault, a real assault, but with Vicki’s face and figure superimposed. The youth was, or had been, the author of a rabidly cruel rape!
And as Garrison’s face had hardened and taken on a grimmer aspect, so he had slowly risen to his feet. Drawing Vicki up with him, he had hissed in her ear: “That older boy’s a rapist!”
“What? But how could you possibly—” she began—and paused. For of course she knew that if anyone in the world could know such a thing, that someone was Garrison.
“And when he can’t do it he likes to think about doing it,” Garrison’s voice had turned to a snarl. “Doing it to you!” His face had twisted in rage, its color rapidly draining away.
Vicki knew that behind Garrison’s heavy sunglasses with their built-up sides, his golden eyes were burning bright. “Come,” he said. “Wir gehen!”
He half-dragged her from beneath the shade of the rock, hurriedly picking a way through boulders and coarse shrubs and grasses back to the path. Stumbling behind him, she had known fear. His being was in flux, its change betrayed by a voice which retained very little of Richard Garrison’s true nature. There was a certain harshness about that voice, and those words he had spoken in German—
He paused to fill his lungs, drew her up alongside him. His fingers tightened on her side, digging into the flesh of her waist. He glanced back—and his face was no longer Garrison’s. Not quite.
“Thomas!” Vicki whispered.
Her companion’s eyebrows formed a frown, drew together, dipped down in the center behind his special glasses. His gaze was upon the pair of youths where they stood now amidst the patch of pod-bearing plants. For their part they stared back, the face of the older one wearing a contemptuous grin.
“Swine!” Garrison/Schroeder said, but the word had sounded more like Schwein to Vicki. She had known instinctively that he scanned the youth’s mind. More deeply now.
“Richard,” Vicki had clutched his arm. “It’s not your business.”
“But it has to be somebody’s!” he told her harshly. “And you are my business—and that bastard’s thinking things about you! He needs a lesson.” And again his eyebrows had drawn together.
At that very moment Vicki had heard the sudden yelping of the youths. She had followed Garrison/Schroeder’s gaze—and behind her own special sunglasses her golden eyes had gone very wide. She gasped at what she saw.
The younger Greek was stumbling jerkily out of the patch of pod-plants, backing away from the other youth until he came up against the white rock of the cliff. The older boy, the unwitting subject of Garrison’s manipulation, stood as if rooted to the spot—while all around him the sprawling bed of vegetation went totally insane!
It was a scene of madness, an alien scene, or one perhaps from Earth’s prime, when the flora could more ably match the fauna in ferocity. The plants tossed and churned, each leaf violently flapping, pods straining, swelling and bursting from their stems with sounds like muted machine-gun fire. And their juices—concerted, directed—fell upon the Greek youth where he stood wildly wind-milling his arms, his feet apparently mired in the now sodden earth. Then, in a final frenzy, a last burst of vegetable violence, the entire patch ejaculated into his eyes.
The youth screamed and clapped his hands to his face. His hair, the skin of his face, his entire upper torso was drenched in plant fluid—but at last he could move, and now he commenced a grim, hopping dance of agony.
“No!” Vicki had cried. “Nein, Richard! Bitte, blind ihm nicht!”
Garrison had glanced down at her. In his face she had seen something of him, also a lingering trace of Thomas Schroeder—but mainly the blunt hardness of Willy Koenig. Garrison’s third facet had surfaced, the most ruthless facet of all.
“As you will,” Garrison/Koenig’s voice rasped. “And you’re right, of course, Vicki—for we know what it’s like to be blind, don’t we? But—” His gaze fell once more upon the terrified youth.
The pod-bearing plants were dead now, wilted and shrivelled, black and stinking. Their stench wafted to Garrison and Vicki on a breeze suddenly blown up from the sea. The Greek youth’s agonized dance had slowed to a moaning stagger, his feet stumbling in the slop of decaying vegetation. He still clutched at his face but, in another moment, stood still and tentatively took away his hands, peering gingerly, unbelievingly all about him. The pain went out of his eyes and blotched face and he began to laugh hysterically. But only for a moment.
“A lesson,” Garrison/Koenig repeated—and with his words the Greek youth’s eyes suddenly stood out from their sockets. He gave a great howl, threw his hands down as if to protect his groin, bent forward and fell face-down in the rot of decay. And there he lay, his body threshing spasmodically upon the putrid earth.
Garrison climbed up on to the path and turned towards the village. Vicki ran after him, her red hair flying behind her. “Richard, you didn’t—?”
“No, I didn’t,” he answered her unspoken question. “I didn’t ruin them, merely kicked him in them. A sort of forever kick.”
He nodded. “I simply put another kink in his mind—a kink to counter those already there. From now on, whenever he looks at or thinks of a woman that way, like a beast, he’ll feel like he’s just been shot in the balls!”
“But in effect that’s—”
“Castration? Right! But it’s less than what I’d have done to him if you hadn’t stopped me…”
Chapter 4
That had been yesterday, and by the time they got back to their rooms Garrison had been himself once more—or as much himself as he ever could be. There was an aftermath, however, inevitable in the wake of any resurgence of his Schroeder and Koenig facets: a scratchy, unreasoning irritability.
Vicki, totally aware of Garrison’s Jekyll and two Hydes existence and as well versed as could be expected in such matters, had coped with the problem in a manner tried and trusted. Namely, she had plied Garrison’s senses with a bottle of dirt-cheap brandy!
Strange how this simple device always seemed to turn the trick, or perhaps not so strange when one thought about it.
Bad brandy had been Garrison’s tipple ever since his Cyprus “initiation,” when on occasion, usually after several losing hands of three-card brag, a bottle of one-star had been all he could afford to buy! And so he had actually come to like, even to prefer the stuff.
On the other hand, but of equal consequence, bad brandy had certainly not been Thomas Schroeder’s drink, whose taste had always been impeccable and therefore far more expensive. Nor had Koenig, a born Schnapps drinker (though when the mood was on him he could generally drink anything), ever greatly fancied Garrison’s favorite.
The way brandy worked, Vicki suspected, was simply as a stabilizer: it helped him stay “in character”—or helped his character stay in him. On this occasion Lindos, too, had helped, for the old Garrison had been very “Med-conscious,” had loved the Mediterranean from first sight; and a third stabilizer (Vicki liked to think of it as the most important) was their sex.
Even though their affair in that earlier time had been brief, it had been intense. She had remembered his preferences and, in the two years flown since her resurrection, had practiced pleasuring him until she was expert. No woman knew or had ever known Garrison’s body or the way it responded to sexual stimuli better than Vicki Maler. As for the Schroeder and Koenig facets: their tastes were entirely different. Moreover they respected Garrison—so far, at least—and they had never intruded or in any way attempted ascendence in this respect.
For that Vicki was naturally glad; but in another way, and however paradoxically, she was not so glad. She was fairly sure that Garrison himself was faithful to her, but there had been more than a few occasions—always when he had found it necessary to let one of his alter-facets take ascendency—when his body had absented itself from her bed, often for two or three nights at a stretch. Twice she had found evidence of his visiting high-class London call girls; and she was well aware that a onetime “secretary” of Thomas Schroeder, one Mina Grunwald, now lived in Mayfair where Garrison (or rather Garrison/Schroeder) was in the habit of seeing her.
This then was Vicki’s problem, the reason for her…yes, jealousy: that while she knew that the Schroeder/Koenig facets respected Garrison’s privacy, she could not be one hundred percent certain that he respected theirs. After all, his was the original, dominant facet, and it remained housed in its own body. Vicki was not yet quite used to the idea that when the subsidiary facets were in ascendence they could use that body to sate their own sexual appetites. Fortunately neither one of the subsumed or adopted characters had been overtly sexual in their own bodies, else Vicki might not have been able to live with her own feelings and emotions. But then again, what could she have done about it? She knew for a certainty and quite literally that she could not live without Garrison. Or so she had been led to believe…
At any rate, her ploy had worked yet again, when the cheap brandy, her own body, and the Greek island atmosphere had all combined perfectly to dampen Garrison’s excitability and bring about a complete resurgence of his true identity. At eight in the evening he had desired to go out; they had eaten in the village’s best taverna, where he had consumed a little more of the local brandy; following which they had found a disco and danced the night away, so that the stars had already started to fade in the sky by the time they had returned to their rooms.
Garrison had been tired by then, perhaps too tired to sleep, and it was plain there was something—perhaps many things—on his mind. Things he must talk about.
Having changed into cool night clothes, the pair had sprawled themselves upon a wide, raised Lindos bed to talk and sip coffee. And after a while Garrison had asked: “Vicki, how much have I told you? Ever, I mean? You never asked me a hell of a lot—never pushed it, anyway—but how much have I really told you?”
“Some things you told me, Richard. Some I guessed. After I woke up—I mean when I lived again—you told me a lot of things. You didn’t really say anything, not in words, but I was made to understand a lot. You remember?”
“Oh, yes,” he nodded. “I was kind of a god, wasn’t I? I could just get into your mind and make you understand.” For the first time since her reincarnation, Vicki definitely felt his uncertainty. Amazingly, Garrison seemed to be displaying insecurity! His words were all past tense. I was a god. I could get into your mind.
“Your powers are still godlike, Richard,” she told him.
“You mean demoniac!” he replied, but without venom. “My powers, when I use them, are…safe.”
“Safe?”
“They don’t hurt anyone, not much anyway. Not deliberately. But Vicki—” he caught up her hand almost pleadingly, “—when they use them…”
“Oh, Richard, I know!”
“But you don’t know, not everything. Some of the things they’ve done…they go way over the top. They protect me, yes, but they over-protect. They won’t let me run my own life, my own body. Hell, it’s not ‘my own body’—it’s theirs too!” He was nervously massaging her fingers, drawing comfort from her presence.
“How did it come about?” she eventually asked. “I mean, at the beginning.”
Garrison sighed. “Let’s see if I can break it down for you. Thomas Schroeder wanted to be immortal. He was deep into parapsychology, augury, transmigration—all that stuff. 1972, we were in Northern Ireland. Him on business, me as a soldier. I’d been having this recurring dream, about bombs. That wasn’t odd in itself, lots of the boys over there dream about bombs. It’s all part of the job. But my dream, my nightmare, was different. It wouldn’t go away. It came to me night after night. A warning about something I could neither escape nor even avoid.
“So…it happened, my first glimpse of ESP in action. The first hint that maybe my mind was different from the minds of other men. There was a bomb blast. I saved Schroeder’s life, the lives of his wife and kid. They were OK, but he was badly chopped up inside and I was blinded. Afterwards—well, it worked out that he thought he owed me.”
“He did owe you, Richard. I remember all of that like it was yesterday: you coming out to the Harz. How proud you were, how smart in your uniform.”
“Oh, yes, all of that,” Garrison grunted, “but before I got out there things had happened. For one thing, Schroeder knew by then that he was dying. And he didn’t want to stay dead. Reincarnation—in me!”
She nodded. “I knew something was going on, that his interest in you should be so—consuming.”
Garrison smiled wryly. “Consuming, yes,” he repeated her. “Anyway, I had always had a quiet interest in Schroeder’s sort of thing, the paranormal I mean, and I admit he fascinated me. But at the same time I didn’t believe he could do it, you know? It was too weird. I might just have washed my hands of the whole thing. But…th
ere was a carrot for the donkey. That carrot was a friend of Schroeder’s, a guy called Adam Schenk. He predicted Schroeder’s death, yours too, a lot of things. And for me: he predicted I’d see again. This would be made possible through Schroeder himself, and through a machine. What sort of machine…?” he shrugged. “I didn’t know, not then…
“Anyway, out there in the Harz, things were happening to me. Schroeder had a lot of tricks up his sleeve. A whole building full of them. Gear for testing a man’s ESP potential. He tested mine and it was high. Very high. And all the time I was becoming more and more convinced that he really had something. And anyway, how could I lose? All the dice were loaded in my favor.
“I was blind—he offered me sight!
“I was an ex-soldier, crippled—he offered me money. Money beyond my wildest dreams.
“I was a nothing, a nobody with nowhere to go—and he offered me power and position.
“How could I refuse?”
“You couldn’t,” Vicki answered.
“I didn’t. We made…a pact,” Garrison shrugged again. “Simple as that. No big deal. We just agreed that when he died, if something of him remained and if it could find its way to me, then that I’d receive it. He could live again in me.
“In return there was the chance, however remote, that I’d see again; meanwhile there were a couple of tricks to help me find my way around the blindness.
“I had special ‘spectacles’ that worked on sound instead of vision. I had bracelets for my wrists, too, which worked the same way. And I had Suzy. My dear, wonderful Suzy. She’s getting old now, but I look after her. Hell!—and hasn’t she looked after me?” For a moment he grinned. “Damned right, she has!” The smile slipped a little and he nodded. “And of course there was Willy Koenig.