by Dave Stone
For the moment, though, the Mind decided It was hungry. It was hungry for a particular kind of sustenance. Dealing with the individual mind that had been first affected by the appearance of the new phenomenon - the creature which had called itself Norman Manley - had only whetted Its abstract appetite.
The Mind now searched the confines of the world for individual minds that were still awake enough to give It what It needed.
Ah, yes. There was one. The Mind had made use of it several times before. It was like an old friend...
Michael Newbegin put his body through the postures and motions again: ten-second sweep of the room, catch and hold an eye for five and smile, forcing both sides of the mouth up simultaneously. Lopsided grins look cool on Elvis and on louses with a heart of gold in the movies; in real life they just look like the smile is a lie. Looking at thirty from the wrong end and feeling every minute of it, Michael was, he reflected, getting too old for this. The darkly handsome, slightly dangerous-looking face reflected back at him from the mirrored panes behind the bar was looking just that little too lined and desperate, the eyes just a little too red-rimmed and hollow. He could remember when this had been fun.
The Blue Lagoon was crowded, more for its legal status as a club, which had it staying open and serving after two until six, than for its attractions as a bar. It was a place for people to get toasted and hook up without braving the doormen and prices of a nightclub that wasn’t one in name only. They definitely didn’t come here for the ambience, for the ratty remains of Hawaiian flora crawling on the walls of the stand that hadn’t seen a band in years.
Off to one side of the scarred copper counter, under a malfunctioning, flickering UV-strip, a demure-looking girl in a minidress of sporadically blazing white inclined her hips and simpered at a guy in a tired-looking executive-type suit.
Probably one of the wannabe-but-never-wills from one of the companies over in the business quarter, out on a bender to forget his sorry excuse for a life, totally out of place down here on the Lychburg Wharf and trying not to look pathetically glad that somebody was taking an interest.
Good luck there, guy, Michael thought, recognising the girl.
Lorna something. Into hippy crap like crystal bioaura massage and people keeping their actual hands to themselves.
He remembered the riveting night he had spent with Lorna something, hearing at great length about how love was a beautiful, sharing, spiritual and above all conceptual thing. He remembered catching a glimpse of her bed through the crack in a door on his way out: piled with throw-rugs and a heap of stuffed, fluffy toys. There had been something odd about them, something about the way their various fur-covered limbs had been carefully positioned, but he had not quite been able to fix it in his mind.
Michael always seemed to attract girls like that. A lot of it might have been to do with the fact that he had attracted them in the Blue Lagoon, which by its run-down nature tended to attract the freaks, the dangerous and the crazy. The problem was, increasingly he was tending to attract the girls who were dangerous and crazy without being any fun. He ordered another hit of bourbon from Moe the bartender, dropped the bills on the counter and turned away - to find himself staring briefly into the narrowed and somewhat predatory eyes of a tall electric blonde in something tight, black and synthetic. Oh jeez, he thought, recognising and remembering her, she’s on the loose again. She’s gonna land on some poor sap with both six-inch spikes.
Something special, Michael thought, the bourbon finally taking hold and turning him more maudlin. Someone special.
Someone, he added to himself, catching sight of a chick dressed up in a real-life approximation of Morticia from The Addams Family, who doesn’t consider a surreptitious attempt to inject you with her own blood a basic and unremarkable part of foreplay...
‘Excuse me?’
Michael realised that he’d been staring glumly into nothing but his empty glass for quite a while. He turned towards the sudden presence by his side. Plain black two-piece suit, worn with simple and unaccessorised elegance. Mid-twenties, ash-blonde hair swept back in a ponytail. Level, steady, sympathetic eyes. Just general sympathy, as a person, not sympathy for any loser she might be looking at.
‘Listen,’ she said, her tone casual, the most natural thing in the world as she glanced around at the Blue Lagoon. ‘I know the men are supposed to talk to the women, but you looked sorta lost and nice and better than this. Do you want to ask if you can buy me a drink?’
The public hall of the precinct house was filthy and smelt decidedly overused in several senses, Victoria thought, but at least it was a definite improvement over the cage-like cell in which she had spent a large part of the night. The other occupants, not to put too fine a point upon it, had been rather more uncouth than otherwise. And several of the young - she hesitated to even think the word ‘ladies’ - had been quite frightfully immodest and familiar, in dress, word and manner of comportment.
At length, though, a burly female officer had removed her and told her that she was free to go, though warning her that neither she nor her friends would be allowed to leave town.
The officer’s demeanour had bordered on the insulting, but Victoria had wisely counted her blessings and decided not to make a deal of it.
The Doctor was standing by a telephone apparatus affixed to the wall and thumbing through a thick yellow gazetteer of addresses and numbers. Jamie was with him, sporting a new bruise under his left eye, but other than that seemed to be in much the same physical state as when she had seen him last. ‘Yon lads had it in their minds to try a bit of monkey business,’ he told her, ‘but they thought better of it when I showed ‘em my dirk.’
Victoria looked at him. ‘You did say dirk, didn’t you?’
‘Ochaway, girl. I had it concealed about my person, no bother. It’s amazing how some people take away from searching too close on what they think is a man in a dress.’
‘That’s the place for us!’ the Doctor said, suddenly, jabbing a finger at an entry in the gazetteer. ‘I’ll order us a cab.’
He frowned with a slight air of puzzlement for a moment, as though trying to work out what he had forgotten, or at least got in the wrong order. Then he looked up to regard Victoria warmly.
‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ he said seriously ‘And now, I think we all deserve somewhere safe and comfortable to spend the rest of the night.’
Her name was Susan Barquentine and she was a legal executive in a business quarter law firm, which amounted, so she said, to being a glorified secretary and coffee-bringer. she wasn’t a regular on the singles scene - or at least, the singles scene so far as it was encompassed by the environs of the Blue Lagoon -
but she was heartily sick of the bar downstairs from the offices in which she worked, where all the lawyers gathered and attempted karaoke after a hard day’s high-paid legalistic bitching.
She was funny in a way that didn’t take its own sense of humour seriously. It was just fun to talk.
‘I had years with this kind of ideal guy in my head, you know,’ she told Michael some time later, sipping a horrid concoction with fruit, little plastic flamingos and a name which would have been hard pushed to dignify itself as a single entendre. ‘I could see him in my head, like he was there before me. I could see him all the time and measure every man I met against him.’ She shrugged. ‘I still see him in people, flashes of him, sometimes. The shape of his ears, the way his hair falls. I mean your eyes...’
She reached out and laid a finger, lightly, against his temple. ‘You have wonderful eyes.’
The cab drove away after the driver had spent an inordinately long time checking the rumpled notes and change the Doctor had produced - after some ferreting around in his pockets to give him the exact fare.
Victoria looked at the establishment in front of her, which appeared to be a collection of tumbledown huts in which the occasional light burned, revealing signs of nocturnal activity even this late in the night. She looked up at t
he shabby, illuminated sign overhead.
‘The Shangri La Fantasy Motel,’ she read aloud. ‘Fifty-three Themed Rooms for You to Live Out Your Wildest Dreams. Maid Service on Request. Major Credit Cards Accepted.’
‘Well, it sounded nicer in the telephone book,’ said the Doctor, a little dispiritedly.
The tenement block was on the bad side of town; garbage on the street, the occasional shell of an abandoned car, a number of ominously dark windows in the sides of otherwise inhabited and lit buildings.
‘This is where you live?’ Michael asked.
‘I know,’ Susan said, answering the unspoken rather than the spoken question as they picked their way through warren-corridors, almost entirely unlit by such infrequent, fizzing neon utility-tubes as remained within their lag-bolted wire cages. ‘It’s pretty bad. I don’t live here all the time. It was Arranged for me by Continuity, and I had to take what I could get.’
‘What?’ said Michael, an uneasy chill running through him from some source he could not name. ‘Continuity...?’
He realised that she had fallen, slightly and silently, behind him. ‘susan?’ he said. said what -’
A slim, dry hand clamped itself over his mouth with surprising force and violence. A warm, soft body pressed itself close to him, and then he was wrenched around. He felt the muscles straining in his neck.
He found himself looking into eyes in which something had appeared - no, in which something had gone, in the way that to add a negative number is the same as to subtract, leaving dead black holes that sucked his mind and consciousness, quietly and without fuss, into oblivion.
Victoria looked around at the various devices and...
accoutrements that bedecked the cabin. They were reminiscent, from what she could only surmise, of the goings-on in a scandal from her own time concerning a house in Cleveland Street, and of certain rather puzzling passages in a periodical called The Pearl, which she had once found in her mother’s dresser drawer.
All of a sudden, certain comments made by the concierge as the Doctor had booked them bed and board for the night became clear. Victoria blushed furiously and choked; she thought for an instant she might expire on the spot from apoplectic seizure.
Jamie, for his part, was casting about with a kind of fearful, white-faced snarl.
He came from a time, Victoria supposed, when... fixtures of this nature were used in extremely businesslike and ultimately fatal ways. The fact that this room had been ‘themed’ to resemble what was thought of as a medieval castle, though in fact it was more akin to a Jacobean one, could hardly help matters.
‘Why did you...?’ Words failed her. Victoria swallowed hard and tried again. ‘Why did you only arrange one room?’
‘I’m sorry?’ The Doctor had been puttering around and peering amiably at the various items on display, as though admiring the handiwork and ingenuity without having the first clue of what all that effort had been for. ‘Why one room?’
‘And you could at the very least,’ said Victoria pointedly, anger to some extent overriding her embarrassment, ‘when the gentleman asked, not have said that yes, of course we were going to make full use of the facilities, share and share alike, and we’d let him know if we needed an extra hand...’
The Doctor looked at her, genuinely and absolutely at a loss as to her meaning. ‘I thought it would be best if we all stayed together, until morning at least,’ he said. ‘I learnt some quite distressing things during our short stay with the police.’ He turned his gaze to the window, over which had been affixed a set of stout-looking medieval bars. ‘There’s something out there, something dangerous. Something, I think, that might be very nasty indeed.’
‘Michael?’
Formless shapes spun in front of his eyes: grey and black and white and skin-tone pink.
‘Michael?’
The spinning forms cohered. A relieved Susan Barquentine smiled down at him, sweetly, like a happy child. Her eyes were dead.
‘Hello, Michael,’ she said. ‘Are you feeling better now? I thought you’d died. I was worried, for a while.’
Michael Newbegin tried to speak and failed. His mouth was filled with something globular and rubbery secured, by the slip-tacky feel of it, with coils of electrical flex.
His head was free enough to move - if he didn’t mind the sharp agony in the tendons of his neck - and as he moved it he got a sense of his surroundings. A cramped but scrupulously neat one-room apartment bare of any ornamentation, such furnishings as there were arranged with absolute, Euclidian precision, their straight lines parallel or perpendicular to all else. He was on his back, slightly reclined, secured to a surprisingly comfortable and expensive reclining chair by electrical flex that was presumably a match for the stuff securing the ball-gag in his mouth.
He was naked. The clammy feel down his back and thighs told him, without his having to strain his throbbing neck to look, that the surface of the chair itself was covered with polythene sheeting.
‘I only did it so you’d stay, Michael.’ Susan Barquentine was by the narrow, single bed off to one side, rooting absently through a large holdall in which things clattered and clunked. ‘You have to believe that! There was something bulky on the bed, covered by a quilt. ‘I didn’t think you’d understand. It was your eyes, you see. Your eyes are, ah...’
She selected an implement from the holdall, regarded it critically for a moment and then set it aside for later. She turned her vacant, smiling face to Michael again, gesturing with a hand towards a thing on the bed. ‘I made it myself, in the way that Continuity said it had to be made. It was quite difficult. Look.’
Her hand pulled the quilt aside with a dramatic flourish, like the hand of a conjuror performing a trick. A bloated thing lay there, stitched together from any number of other bodies. A scar across its abdomen had burst the stitching and its mouth hung open, filled with a crusted fluid of corruption, but all things considered it seemed to be holding up relatively well.
‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ Susan said. ‘He’s just like I imagined him. I made him. I can’t make him move and some of him has rotted, but that’s OK. I can make that better...’
‘When he can see me, Continuity will wake him up. He can wake up and love me when he has eyes.’
Chapter Ten
Cheating the Reader
...trapped and caught and falling head over heels with my heart in my mouth and juju shadow bogeymen are latching at me with jagged claws the light behind their ragged eyes burning like the... hurts to breathe and blood and sick slick mucus on the walls and I think that
something
is happening to
my...
she was falling through what seemed to be a cavern of pale marble, its walls shot through with rose and glittering quartz deposits. The effect was that, although the cavern walls were patently rock, they seemed organic, with veins and capillaries. There were vast cracks in the walls and in the darkness within, as she fell, she thought that she could make out dusters of ghost-like, insubstantial faces.
Her stomach freefall-yawned inside her as she fell... and something seemed to be happening to her flesh: skin, muscle and viscera seemingly turned loose and painlessly gelid, sloughing and transforming into something metallic and mercurial, streaming from her bones like -
She hit the cavern floor and shattered it. She felt the force of the blow in its entirety but, once again, the sensation was strangely painless. Dazed and completely disorientated, the consciousness that had once been Katharine Delbane rolled her shining metal body over and hauled itself to its hands and knees.
Human hands burst from the cavern floor, sprouting through the cracks of impact like fungus flowers. The hands moved in a unified tangle, clutching for her, grasping at her with a blind and cloying intimacy.
The consciousness that had once been Katharine Delbane made her mouth scream:
‘Amarathma ne da somon rakthra moli damon su la tomankath...’
And a light came out of her, a ball
of white-hot plasma lashing out from her like a reflex-sting, blasting the human hands away and burning them to fractured, scattered bone.
For a while the consciousness that had been Katharine Delbane just sat there in the smoking pool of solidifying grease and bone, looking around at the glittering vastness of the rose-shot cavern. Slightly later she realised that, without somehow quite noticing, she had transferred her postures of attention to her hands which she was holding up in front of her face. They were of perfectly natural, perfectly sculpted mirror-bright chrome, as was, she realised, the rest of her body She transferred her attention again, became aware that her reflex-sting explosion of plasma (she had no idea how she’d done that but, then again, she could not have sat down and explained, precisely, how she made a hand move to pick something up) had knocked a new hole in the cavern wall.
There was something behind it.
The consciousness that had once been Katharine Delbane made her bright and shiny new body rise and, although she wasn’t aware of it, her feet not touching the ground, she drifted towards the opening.
Beyond it, as she moved closer, was a gulf shot through with a single, crystalline structure of massive complexity, a mechanism the nature of which the mind, by its very nature, could not so much as begin to comprehend. As she drew closer to it, however, as the interplay of it became more distinct, she began in some small part to see how it might –
* * *
‘Are you all right?’ Katharine Delbane looked up into the muzzle of an automatic rifle and at the dark shape beyond it. Her first thought was that she had been momentarily stunned, that the monstrous figure who had attacked her was now going for the definitively terminal kill. Then she saw the peaked, checked-band cap and the word POLICE printed in white across the bulletproof vest. The minor variations from the standard Metropolitan Police uniform told her that he was one of the department’s Special Branch unit.