by Brian Lumley
“I’m not sure,” Thomas Schroeder answered. “It is, I suppose, equality of sorts. Not quite what I had in mind.”
“You could hardly be my equal while you were part of me,” said Garrison. “And so I have expelled you. Yes, and Willy too. How about you, Willy? Are you satisfied?”
Koenig’s answer contained a shrug. “I think,” he said, “therefore I am—I think!” And he laughed. “I’ll get used to it.”
“But what does one do?” Schroeder asked, “when one is unbodied, all-powerful and…immortal?”
“You do what you want to do,” Garrison answered. “Do you want to go back to that blob of mud that spawned us? So go, make yourself a body—make yourself mortal! You can do it. You can do almost anything you can imagine.”
“You’re right, of course,” said Schroeder. “So why don’t we?”
“We?” Garrison chuckled. “You, maybe, but not me. I can always do that later, if I get bored. But I doubt it.”
“Bored?” Koenig queried.
“Let me show you something,” Garrison answered.
He showed them THE ALL—or rather, he showed them something of it. To show them all of THE ALL would take forever.
“You see?” he said. “Unbodied, all-powerful and immortal you may well be, but never omniscient. How can you ever know all of space, which goes inwards and outwards forever? Or all of time, which goes infinitely back and inexorably forward? Look again.”
And they saw a sight whose beauty would be unbearable, blinding, blasting to mortal men. A sight which, in a dream, only Garrison had ever seen before them.
“That cosmic mote Earth?” he laughed. “Oh, no! If there’s a place I would be, it’s out there. Who would drink the waters of Earth when he can drink the wine of the universe? The ultimate quest, my friends—and the ultimate destiny! Make up your minds, for Suzy and I can’t wait.”
“Your battery ran dry once,” Schroeder cautioned. “Remember?”
Again Garrison laughed, a ripple in the Psychosphere. “And who could thirst for energy in a great sea of suns?”
For a millimoment Schroeder was silent. “Very well,” he finally conceded, “let the ayes have it.”
And “Aye!” they all three cried in unison.
Then, soberly: “One moment,” said Garrison.
“First…there are several wrongs to right.” He let the Psychosphere wash over and through him, making small adjustments in its matterless structure. And, “There,” he finally said…
“…ELEVEN…TWELVE…THIRTEEN,” SAID GUBWA, HIS EYES tightly shut, his smile a nightmare. Stone was reaching for his pistol, and the albino knew it.
“Oh!” Vicki moaned where she lay, throwing back her blanket as she came awake.
“Fourteen!” cried Gubwa, his eyes popping open as he turned to stare at her, then bugging in his leprous-gray face. His jaw fell open as the girl sat up, young, beautiful, green-eyed—fully alive.
Gubwa’s face screwed up in an agony of terror. Someone else was inside his head with him. A terrible someone. “Garrison!” he screamed.
The machine-gun turned white hot in his hands, melting even as he dropped it from blistering fingers. Foaming at the mouth, his pink eyes seeming to stand out almost from his head, the albino floated free of the floor. He flew forward towards the steel doors, which opened before him. He passed through them out of sight, his last scream echoing back to Stone and Vicki where they hugged each other in that subterranean room of the dead:
“G-a-r-r-i-s-o-n!”
And up the spiralling concrete ramps went Charon Gubwa, doors crashing open at his approach and barriers lifting. Up and out into the night. Up and over the city. Up, up and ever up. His rate of ascent accelerating, his dressing gown leaping into flames along with his hair—only to be extinguished a moment later in airless space, where his friction-cindered shell popped open like a fried grape.
And then, because Garrison had named him for an abhorrence, the Psychosphere simply erased all trace of him.
Several things were erased, changed, rebuilt. For Garrison had been both right and wrong about time. Time is infinite, yes—but nothing is impossible in infinity.
Joseph Maestro and his gangsters were no more, had never been.
Likewise the less savory members of a certain branch of the Secret Service. They had never existed.
Oh, and several other things.
Several millions of things.
And when they were done the Earth became a better place to live.
PHILLIP AND VICKI STONE CERTAINLY THOUGHT SO, THOUGH THEY could not remember it ever having been different.
She looked out of the window of their Sussex home into the starry night sky and found a name on her lips. “Richard,” she sighed—which was strange because she did not know, had never known, a Richard.
“What?” her wealthy, loving husband looked up from his book. “Did you say something, darling?”
But already she had forgotten. “I…I thought I saw a shooting star,” she answered, feeling foolish.
“Then make a wish!” he smiled.
She stepped to his chair, leaned over and kissed him. “I believe I already have,” she said…
Epilogue
One month later…
James Christopher Craig tossed and turned in his sleep. The weird dream was back, bothering his subconscious mind as always. The dream about a man he had never known—a man called Richard Garrison—and about an impossible, insane machine. A dream overshadowed by a commanding voice, the voice of a man dead now thirty days, whose every vestige had been erased with the sole exception of this one psychic echo. A voice like the voice of some strange, sinister god, demanding that Craig remember—and that he build the machine of his dream.
Craig’s agitation increased. The dream was not frightening in itself; the source of his torment lay deep, deep down in forgotten recesses of his psyche. It lay in the darkest vaults of his subconscious mind, which should remain forever locked—vaults which now, at the post-hypnotic insistence of a dead man, were slowly but surely re-opening their doors to him.
And at last Craig stood before the final door, the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Room of Innermost Secrets. And even as he stood there, so the massive doors swung silently open. Within—
Craig saw a machine. The Machine…
He saw it—and he knew its name!
“Jimmy!” his wife, Marion, shook him awake. “Are you all right? What is it? Are you dreaming again?”
Craig sat up in bed, brushed cold sweat from his brow, trembled as he stared about the shadowy room. The luminous hand of his watch told him it was 2:00 A.M. The night was a cool, silent, blanket all about the house. And the dream receding, fading, crawling back down and disappearing in deepest caverns of mind.
“You were shouting something,” Marion told him, drawing him back down into the bed beside her. “One word, over and over again.”
“Was I?” he sleepily mumbled, his mouth furry and tasting foul. “What was it? Do you remember?”
She told him what it had sounded like, then snuggled close and hugged him.
He lay in the darkness of their room thinking about it. He thought about it a long time before he finally went back to sleep. A strange word that, and yet it seemed to ring certain bells…
And drifting back into sleep, Jimmy Craig shuddered. Ominous, cracked, discordant bells were ringing in the back of his mind. They tolled a knell of horror and madness.
A strange, strange word.
A word to haunt him forever.
A word to haunt the whole wide world.
Psychomech.
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN LUMLEY
The Necroscope Series
Necroscope
Necroscope II: Vamphyri!
Necroscope III: The Source
Necroscope IV: Deadspeak
Necroscope V: Deadspawn
Blood Brothers
The Last Aerie
Bloodwars
Necroscope: The Lost
Years
Necroscope: Resurgence
Necroscope: Invaders
Necroscope: Defilers
Necroscope: Avengers
The Titus Crow Series
Titus Crow Volume One: The Burrowers Beneath & Transition
Titus Crow Volume Two: The Clock of Dreams & Spawn of the Winds
Titus Crow Volume Three: In the Moons of Borea & Elysia
The Psychomech Trilogy
Psychomech
Psychosphere
Psychamok
Other Novels
Demogorgon
The House of Doors
Maze of Worlds
Short Story Collection
Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either ficititious or are used fictitiously.
PSYCHOSPHERE
Copyright © 1984 by Brian Lumley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Visit the author’s Web site at www.brianlumley.com
A Tor Book
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ISBN: 978-1-4668-0625-2