Watson, Ian - Novel 10

by Deathhunter (v1. 1)

  “Have you much experience with the death-trance?” he asked Ananda.

  “All the time, Jim. Every minute.”

  “No, I mean have you ever practised the death-trance state? What I really want to ask is: have you ever detached yourself — your consciousness — from your body? Have you experienced . . . that kind of detachment?”

  “Where would my consciousness go to? It is here, I am here. Here is everywhere — and nowhere.”

  “Those are just words.”

  “Which is precisely what is wrong with them. They establish a whole menagerie of ‘somethings’ all over the place, where really there are none. Even ‘nothing’ is a lying word — as is ‘death’ too. We have a word ‘death’, therefore it is ‘something’. If we didn’t have the word ‘death’ ...”

  “Then we’d all be out of a job,” joked Marta, “and what’s more, we wouldn’t even notice it.”

  “What are you really trying to ask me, Jim?”

  Jim drank some wine. “Oh, I’m not.”

  “Oh, you are.”

  “Well, maybe, but . . .” Did he want to ask Ananda to sit in tonight? And Marta too? No, he couldn’t bear to think of it. Ananda and Marta were far across a gulf from him, and it was a far wider gulf than the one that separated those two from the tangled intercourse of Mary-Ann, Resnick and upright Alice Huron, whoreswoman with the invisible whip . . .

  “No,” said Jim.

  “You must find your own way,” said Ananda, “to the place which is no-place.”

  This sounded so shockingly perceptive that Jim’s hand jerked against his wine glass, upsetting it. A bloodstain spread across the tablecloth, soaking in. Ashamed, Jim hastily gathered his napkin over it.

  “Let’s get back,” suggested Marta tactfully.

  FIFTEEN

  Jim slept soundly till eight that evening and woke with a slight headache. He hunted in his valise for the hypno-tape which Mike Mullen had made back in Gracchus. Slipping the cassette into his pocket, he went down to the duty attendant’s office.

  Tonight the man on duty was Neilson. Or was the name Martinson? Jim couldn’t remember. Somebodyson was reading a magazine which he hastily shuffled from sight as Jim came in.

  Weinberger, in miniature on the only active monitor screen, lay abed reading a magazine too. Or at least he turned the pages now and then. Icebergs still floated in the wall vista. In the little screen they looked much closer together: about to shut their jaws on Weinberger. Had Somebodyson been reading the same magazine as Nathan? Maybe the attendant had been told to spy on Weinberger’s every thought — but this was the only way he'could work out how to do it.

  “I'll be requiring privacy for most of tonight, starting around eleven. This might go on for a long time, so don’t worry. I need a cassette player too —“

  “Over there, sir.”

  “And a bridge-switch and some cable.”

  Somebodyson pointed.

  While he was about it, Jim deftly removed the pass-key for the pharmacy.

  He went to the pharmacy next and unlocked a drug cupboard, from which he filched a handful of conditioner pills out of a jar labelled Neo-Harmaline-MDA.

  The popular name ‘conditioner’ was perhaps a little misleading. The untailored Harmaline alkaloid produced relaxation and withdrawal and vivid archetypal imagery; while MDA heightened insight and communication and reflectiveness, promoting too a sense of social concern — in this sense MDA was a ‘truth drug’, a drug which made one search for truth within oneself.

  The chemically retailored package was somewhat milder in effect and side-effects than the source drugs: there would be no risk of vomiting or other upsets. Used therapeutically in the Houses, in the way that Jim had several times used it with disturbed clients, Neo- Harmaline-MDA produced a pleasurable feeling of detachment from life, an acceptance that this was the true course to follow, and a sense of the social importance of following it.

  It should serve equally well to prepare Weinberger and himself for the suggestions of the hypno-tape without ruining their grasp on reality in any hallucinatory fashion. Too, it should help to protect them from any risk of actually dying when they reached the ‘thanatos* rhythm stage, because it would condition them to accept the taped commands to shunt themselves from the oceanic ‘thanatos’ state into the out-of-the-body state. There would be sufficient thanatos to turn on the pheromone tap and lure Death; but not enough for Death to be able to carry them off. Instead, they would hunt Death together through its own domain.

  If, thought Jim, Mike Mullen’s tape worked as promised . . .

  But it would. Oh it would. Mike had been a man of superb insight.

  Jim offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Mike’s dead soul, dissolved (so he hoped) in the ocean of unity — since he had nothing else to pray to. And a muted vow of vengeance too, since if Nathan was right then Mike Mullen, playing possum, had become one more victim of the Death parasite. But a moment later Jim withdrew his vow. ‘That,* he thought, ‘remains to be seen. And thanks to Mike (bless him) we two shall see it tonight.’

  As though warding off evil, Jim made the sign of the rosette: the circle of life, completed; the flower, gathered.

  Gathered — by what?

  On the pretext of collecting a time-switch, Jim returned to the monitor room and replaced the pharmacy key without Somebody- son realizing that it had ever been removed. Then he took the elevator down to the blue room in the basement to rejig Weinberger’s cage for full operation from inside.

  By now his mild hangover had disappeared.

  Jim collected Weinberger at quarter to eleven, and together the two men went down to the blue room.

  They both stripped to vest and shorts for comfort, Weinberger draping his yellow robe over one of the two chairs, Jim folding his sandy suit, shirt and unravelled bow tie over the other.

  Weinberger, who was to wear the thanatos skullcap, preceded Jim into the cage and rolled across the rubbery waves to the far side. Jim hunched his way inside on hands and knees. Turning, he pulled the door of the Faraday Cage till it was almost shut. With the cord he had connected earlier, he tugged the glass wall till it clicked into position — it was already opaque from the outside, a mirror from the inside, as were the other walls and roof panel. Then he closed the wire door tight.

  Jim fed low power to the cage, then fed himself one of the heartshaped orange pills. Weinberger accepted a pill, though he had trouble summoning up enough saliva to swallow it. He chomped his jaws as noisily as a wine taster before, with a wriggle of his Adam’s apple, the pill slipped down his craw.

  Now the hypno-tape was playing. Mike Mullen’s lilting, lost- forever voice instructed them like a lullaby composed not to send the listener to sleep but to transport him to another mode of consciousness. Persuading, evoking . . .

  Jim felt himself drift out among the multiple images of himself in phantom-land. He was all of those Jim-reflections; they were all him. He raised a hand in salute; each of them raised a hand. But whose will and whose intention raised that hand? ‘The third Jim to the right,’ he thought whimsically. If they were all identities, did they think thoughts too? In which case, what did they think about him lying here — in the prime dimension?

  What was a ‘person’, anyway? A person was a cluster of different minds — different mental systems — each with its own unique spectrum. A person was a constellation, and his physical body was a cluster of different organs in symbiosis, and all the cells in those organs were descended from a primitive symbiosis long ago — from the mutually advantageous union of organisms which were originally independent. Just as the body died constantly throughout life, its cells replacing themselves, so did the mind die too, replacing its mental systems with new ones. A person’s mind seemed to be continuous in time but it wasn’t really continuous at all. On the contrary, it was quite often discontinuous. Why shouldn’t he achieve a new sort of discontinuity right now? Why shouldn’t he invest his awareness, his point of view,
in Domain B, or C, or D instead of here in the prime domain? For a moment he had no idea which domain ‘he’ was really in. Inevitably he, as observer, would seem to be at the centre of all the other domains — wherever he ‘really’ was . . .

  So many other ‘Jims’, curving away from ‘himself’ in the mirrors!

  Multiple Weinbergers curved away too, and he felt a growing sense of fusion with the other man: an interleaving of their bodies, lives and minds.

  Shifting his head, he stared up at the reflection of himself above. The single reflection, since the bed he lay upon was not a mirror. Or did he stare down at himself, from above? He no longer knew which. He stared into his own eyes, which returned his stare. He understood that his astral body was already waiting up above, just as Mike Mullen promised that it would be. His eyes began to close. It seemed to him that the eyes of his other self stayed open, still watching him.

  ‘I’m dying,’ he thought; or did the tape tell him this? ‘Descending. Sinking through myself. Rising into that other self, too . . .’

  “Detach yourself. . . Flow iny flow out...”

  The blue basement room no longer existed. The world had gone away. All of his life was coming to a climax here — and the life of another person too, knotted with his. Surely this was the very first time in the history of the world (but where had the world gone?) that two people had shared the very same death instead of dying separate deaths . . .

  “Like breath departing . . . ebbing . . . the breathing out of the whole world . . .”

  Reflections. And their cousins, shadows . . .

  The spirits of the dead used to be known as ‘shades* — because they were shadows cast by the living person upon some hidden screen: shadows which continued to exist and move about even when the living person had died . . .

  A reflection must be an intermediate state between the living and the dead, between the substance and the shade . . .

  He began to sense a zone of shadows beyond the world of walls and rooms and buildings, beyond the world of living bodies, grass and trees. But that shadow zone was light, not dark.

  Perhaps, through his mind’s eye, he saw that zone in photographic negative. For it seemed to him that the real world had grown very dark while that other world grew bright.

  Rapture glowed in him. It was the same rapture that he had known when he drowned, and which he had recaptured once in Gracchus . . .

  Ah, he was drowning on this water bed . . . Quite suddenly the three episodes of rapture linked up with each other. They were one and the same, and it was the only real moment in his life. They — or it — encircled his life in a stream. And into that stream he swam.

  Rapture: it was as intense as an orgasm, so that his whole self drained into that rapture. But it wasn’t localised in any one part of him . . .

  He smelt a salty sweetness like spilt semen. The smell was in his mind. He was smelling the pheromone of death . . .

  “Wow. Do not die. But shunt. Leave your body alive behind you. Leave it waiting for you. It will be linked to your spirit by a silver cord. That cord can stretch for a million miles and never snap. Ease your feet out of your flesh-feet, as you would ease them out of shoes. Ease your hands out of your flesh-hands, as out of gloves. Unpeel the jacket of your arms, roll down the trousers of your legs. Strip the vest of your chest. Free the butterfly from the chrysalis — let it take wing!”

  Jim opened his eyes.

  He understood that Weinberger had also opened his eyes at the same moment.

  Together, they gazed down upon themselves — and the selves on which they looked down did not return their gaze. How still and mute those two corpse-selves lay below, with eyes closed.

  To right and left he could see no reflections of their bodies, but only empty boxes defined by faint, waxen, gilded membranes which presently melted into a golden fog. The two men were afloat in a honeycomb with a black floor. And the cell walls of this honeycomb? Those were the electrical forces of the Faraday cage, reflected and reflected: a network of energy.

  In the next moment the red creature, Death, perched upon Jim’s chest below. And the golden walls intensified like sunrise. He heard the bee-hum of the increased power.

  Death vanished momentarily. It reappeared upon Weinberger’s chest and made a foray towards his neck, then leapt back. It seemed confused, disorientated, as it would be by finding the same death doubled — shared and synchronised — and this not even being a genuine death. No wonder it was perplexed. Appearing and disappearing, it shuttled from one man to the other. But it was more in existence than out of it. It was probably present all the time now. Its flickerings and shiftings were quantum jumps from one location to the next with no real interval of nonexistence in between.

  ‘Where have all our own reflections gone to?’ wondered Jim. ‘We’re a sort of reflection now, ourselves — and a reflection can’t see another reflection. It only sees the substance — the original. But we can still see all the cages. So Death’s still trapped. By us, and by the electricity.’

  Death did not look so frighteningly rapine tonight. There was an eerie, unearthly beauty about the creature. Though surely a cruel beauty.

  “Whatever is it?” Jim whispered. He spoke without stopping to wonder what medium would carry his voice. But he heard his own words clearly. As did Weinberger, who gestured impatiently.

  “We’re up and out, Jim. We made it!” he crowed.

  Weinberger seemed less concerned with the nature of the creature than with the bliss of hanging above it like a hawk about to drop on to another bird which had got grounded, tangled in a wire trap. He spread his scrawny arms as though soaring in the thermal above his own body heat. His out-thrown hand buffeted Jim’s floating body, but softly. If it had been moving more swiftly his hand might have passed right through Jim, their substances mixing like amoebas in reverse.

  By partly shutting his eyes, Jim thought that he could make out a silvery thread tethering Weinberger, kitelike, to his possum body. A similar thin thread seemed to link Jim to the ‘dead’ original below.

  Just then a sudden change came over their surroundings. The time switch must have cut the power to the cage.

  No longer were they adrift in a honeycomb of translucent golden wax. There was fogginess, still, but it was a white fog which filtered light from beyond it — ‘beyond* being on all sides, though perhaps more so in one direction than another. It wasn’t really a fog at all, decided Jim. It was simply an out-of-focus quality as though he was a short-sighted man who had suddenly lost his spectacles. By moving closer, in whichever direction, he ought to be able to see the nature of that foggy light more clearly . . .

  At the same time he was aware of shadows too: a whole pyramid of shadows. The House of Death loomed over them in the ordinary world. Beyond its shadowy bounds was Egremont. Beyond Egremont was the rest of the shadowy planet.

  Jim realized that he could choose to fly into those shadows of reality, or else he could fly into the white fog. Both were present. Both were separate and distinct.

  If they chose to fly off into the shadows they could range throughout the ordinary world, visiting Lake Tulane or Gracchus or anywhere else they desired. They could pass through shadow walls into locked rooms. They could spy on ardent lovers. They could let themselves be drawn to old haunts, to old friends. They could be voyeurs, spectators — unseen and unfelt by the living who were inhabiting their ordinary bodies. The silver threads would be their lifelines, however far they ranged.

  It was very familiar, that shadow world. With its power of familiarity it drew them. Because they were alive.

  But if they flew into the fog, towards the source of light rather than towards familiar shadows . . . where to, then?

  It was so much easier to concentrate on the shadows of the things they knew! The shadows drew, the fog was out of focus.

  Red Death hopped from body to body, below. With its sharp little beak or the scalpel hooks on its faery wings it might cut their silver threads of
life! If it could find those threads. If that was what it was hunting for . . .

  It had quit hunting now. It had stopped its questing from one body to the other.

  As though aware that it was no longer caged it flew up suddenly, flickeringly, towards them. Weinberger grabbed for it. It darted to one side, avoiding him. Its crystal eyes glittered at the two floating reflection-bodies: registering them, discarding them from its attention. It flew off into the fog. Not into the shadow.

  As it winged fog-wards it seemed to stabilize. No longer did it flicker. Out ‘there’ it was more real and permanent. Yet it flew with a curiously veering style of flight, arcing this way then the other way as though incapable of flying in a straight line.

  Weinberger thrashed his empty hand about in annoyance. It was with his left hand that he had tried to snatch and bait the creature. Perhaps the nerves in his right hand still remembered all too painfully what had happened last time.

  “Give chase, Nathan! We mustn’t lose sight of it!’’

  Already the creature was passing out of focus. Already it had become less of a definable ‘something’ and more of a reddish anything swinging from side to side like a pendulum bob which got smaller with each swing.

  The two men moved as one into the fog, without thinking how they moved, merely willing it. They clove the fog as sleekly as two seals.

  SIXTEEN

  Very soon they found that they could no more fly a straight course than the creature did. What seemed to be fog was actually an enormous clutter of prisms and polyhedra of many different shapes and hues, afloat in all directions. These ‘fog crystals* were all approximately the same size: just a little smaller than the cage for Death itself. They were great jewels, drifting, jostling and rotating within the ether of their flight.