‘You’re crazy,’ Davo told him.
‘And you’re going to prison for murder,’ Fox retorted.
‘No. I’m not going to let you get away with this.’
Davo sprung out of his seat and dashed around to the professor’s side of the desk. He clasped the loose ventilator tube in one hand and tried to refit it to the oxygen tank, but the connecting valve was missing.
‘What have you done, you crazy old bastard?’
‘Better run, David. They’ll be coming for you. I’ll be coming for you.’
Davo let the tube slip from his fingers. Something about the professor’s last words terrified him. There was a genuine threat in his tone of voice. I’ll be coming for you. What did he mean?
As Jackson Fox lost consciousness, the temperature in the room dropped by ten degrees. Davo was locked in a room with a corpse, but he could not shake the feeling that he was not yet alone. He could feel another presence in there with him. It was something both insubstantial yet malevolent.
He ran to the door, which did not budge. Remembering the professor had locked it, he searched around for the key but it was not in the lock. This meant it would most likely still be on the professor’s body. Hidden amongst the clothes and effects of a dead man.
Davo was reluctant to go near the body. Something about Fox’s death was not right. It had been too quick. Too clean. Life never ends without putting up a fight and Fox of all people should have gone down fighting. It was as if the old man had simply willed his life away.
After quickly assessing the situation, the mechanic concluded that the window provided a much more tempting option than searching the corpse. Getting out of the building was not the hard part, however. Davo only made it as far as his car before Fox, now wearing the body of Captain Mike Peters, put a bullet into his back.
The old man went on to kill dozens more before he was forcibly stopped by Emmy, with the aid of some of her recently deceased friends. Like Davo, Jackson Fox then found himself transported back to a pivotal moment in his life. And like Davo, it was to an event that he would never be able to change.
Felicity had never been the same since the night of the accident. The joyful flame of youth had been extinguished. At first, Jackson blamed himself. It was not right that a bright and beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her should have to give it all up in order to help a pathetic, crippled old man. Then he discovered that he was not the source of her melancholy, after all.
Shortly after the accident, Felicity had got back together with a former boyfriend she had dated throughout her time at university. The relationship had originally broken down as so often is the case with young love, but when she had needed somebody to confide in during such a difficult period, she had let George Rayne back into her life. Upon discovering that she was pregnant, they wed not long thereafter.
With Felicity as his bride, George could not have been happier. The same could not be said for her. She knew she had married the wrong man right from the start. For the sake of keeping up appearances, she dutifully played the role of a loving wife, but inside she was longing to be with another. She wanted to be with the man, who unbeknownst to her husband, was the real father of her baby.
‘You are lying,’ said Jackson, when she had told him the news. ‘You would seriously jeopardise everything you have with your husband for that deadbeat.’
‘David is not a deadbeat. He has prospects - he’s going to be a mechanic.’
‘That merely qualifies him to fix your car – not to be a husband, and certainly not a father. I refuse to believe that my granddaughter came from his loins. You are just trying to cause trouble. Why – I cannot begin to guess.’
‘Marrying George was a mistake. It was what you wanted, not me. I realise that now and I have to put it right. I’m going to tell him the truth. I still love David.’
‘You will do no such thing, child! I will not let you throw away a perfectly agreeable marriage on something as frivolous as love.’
‘Agreeable – is that what you call it? My God, isn’t that just what every girl dreams of – finding an agreeable man! Tell me – did you ever love Mom or did she merely fit with your social standing?’
Jackson clenched his fist with impotent rage. If he could have stood, he would have taken the back of his hand to her face.
‘Do not dare bring your mother into this. She knew what it meant to be a loyal and dutiful wife; unlike you. If she were here, she would try and talk sense into you just as I am. Have you not let that scumbag, Armareth, cause enough trouble already? Do I have to remind you why you ended it with him in the first place?’
‘The crash was an accident – I see that now.’
‘Accident! It was no accident. He came here that night to extort money from me. He knew the pair of you had no future so he tried to get what he could whilst he could. He asked for fifty thousand dollars to leave you alone.’
‘Do you seriously take me for that much of a fool? If you could have bought him off, you would have done. You think everybody has a price.’
‘They do. Now tell me yours. What will it take to stop you from making the biggest mistake of your life? If Armareth really is November’s father, how much will it take to keep that between us?’
Felicity smiled. It was a smile that Jackson knew all too well because it was one he had displayed many times himself. It was a smile born of the knowledge that one has the upper hand.
‘I don’t have to tell him,’ she said. ‘He already knows. He has always known. The most useful thing that George ever gave to me was his name. It offered me the perfect chance to send a message. The night our daughter was conceived David and I shared our first kiss to a song titled November Rain.’
Fox slammed his fists down on the arms of his motorised wheelchair.
‘Enough!’ he bellowed. ‘If you will not respond to incentive then I have no option other than to see just how much you are prepared to lose. Continue to pursue this ridiculous path you are on and I will cut you off completely. Both you and my bastard of a granddaughter.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘For once, I accept your terms.’
Felicity stormed out of the room. It was the last time that Jackson saw her alive. Later that night, both she and her husband, George, were killed in a car accident. The official report concluded that they had been driving home in the dark and swerved to avoid an animal, causing Felicity to lose control and flip the vehicle. Only Jackson suspected differently.
George had spent that night at the Sly Fox drinking with some friends. He had been celebrating the birth of his baby girl. Except that she was not really his baby at all. Fox surmised that Felicity had told George the truth shortly after picking him up. It was the resulting argument that caused her to lose control of the vehicle, not an animal straying into the road.
Every day Jackson thought about that night, and then after his death; every day he relived it. The cycle of misery and regret was only broken when an old friend, a former employee and his lifetime nemesis had found him.
‘How could Sammy’s Ancestors have helped you?’ asked Davo, back in the present day. ‘I thought you dismissed all that as superstition. If you don’t agree with something, it’s not worth knowing – isn’t that your philosophy?’
Fox knew his foe was attempting to stall him. To buy time – but for what purpose? What use was there in attempting to stall against infinity? The normal rules did not apply in this place. There were still rules, however. And where there are rules there is reason.
‘I figured it out,’ he told Davo. ‘You sentenced me to eternity with nothing but my thoughts. What else was there for me to do? Now is your chance to see if you can be as smart. I will give to you the fate that you reserved for me.’
Davo felt no pain at what followed. One moment he was standing in a never ending desert, facing down the man who had taken everything from him, and the next he was suspended within a never beginning nothing, facing an eternity of despair.
/> He was not alone.
Sammy was with him, but his friend seemed subdued, weakened somehow. He appeared more as a vague shadow of the man he had once been. There was also a third presence with them. It was a being like nothing Davo had ever encountered before and it terrified him.
***
Emmy heard the full story from Lucas. The policeman did not hold anything back. She learnt how he, Sammy and Davo had battled the old man into submission. They had pursued him across his entire time line until he was willing to accept the futility of the fight. All of them were already dead. There was nothing left they could take from one another.
With peace established, they made quick progress. None of them wanted to continue to wallow in the past. It was Fox who was to implement Lucas’ idea of hypnosis. He came up with the technique whereby erasing selected memories along with the formation of new ones they could essentially reduce eternity to just one day. They would forever relive that day again and again, but they would be unaware they were doing so. Each morning they woke up, the day ahead would be as fresh as the one before it.
While Fox schooled Lucas in the art of suggestion (he refused to have any direct contact with Davo), Sammy had been doing some learning of his own. Unlike the other three men, the Aboriginal was deeply spiritual and believed a strong bond existed between him and his ancestors. He spent time apart from the others in what he believed was communication with those ancestors.
Sammy learned much during his meditations. The most important of his revelations was also the least surprising, especially to Davo. Jackson Fox could not be trusted. Ultimately, he would betray them.
The problem arose from the fact that the plan they had devised did not account for unexpected changes. It was designed only to free them from the Hellish monotony of eternity. So long as there was just the four of them and they were completely cut off from their former reality, the plan was flawless. It was the arrival of others and the establishing of a fleeting connection to the material world that would be the plan’s undoing and ultimately lead to the temptation of its architect.
Once the three friends became convinced that the professor would eventually turn on them, they had no choice other than to launch a pre-emptive strike of their own. Fox had not known what hit him until it was already too late.
Chapter 40
The welcome Emmy received upon entering the Sly Fox was beyond anything she could have anticipated. Every person in the bar stopped what they were doing, put down their drinks, ended their conversations, and stood as a mark of respect to the young scientist.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked Lucas. ‘I don’t hear any music.’
‘It’s not needed,’ replied her friend. ‘I built you into every deceit at a fundamental level. You’re this town’s saviour and I wanted to make sure everybody knew it.’
Jimmy had been waiting by the bar and he stepped forward to greet her.
‘Congratulations!’ he said, embracing her affectionately. When his salutation was met with a look of confusion, he quickly added; ‘on the Nobel Prize.’
‘Oh right,’ she said, then added; ‘remind me for what it is that I actually won.’
Jimmy smiled.
‘You built a teleport machine.’
She looked back at him, impressed by the inventiveness of his answer.
‘That’s clever, are you sure you don’t still have your..?’
He shook his head before she could finish.
‘I see things the same as everybody else now. It’s strange, but since crossing over my thoughts are much clearer. It’s like there was a weight pressing against my brain that’s now been lifted.’
‘We’re all a little smarter here,’ added Lucas, whispering in Emmy’s ear. ‘A physical body comes with certain restrains, which we no longer have.’
‘That’s interesting. I’d love to conduct some research into this.’
‘Not enough time,’ said Lucas, nudging her back toward the crowd.
She let her eyes wash over the people waiting eagerly for her to address them. Public speaking had never bothered her much, but ordinarily she would have some sort of speech or presentation prepared. Here, she had nothing. She thought back to Jimmy’s prompt. These people believed she had mastered the ability to teleport matter. Since they were all within the astral realm, this was technically true. All she had to do was to convince them to follow her.
‘Hello, everybody.’ She timidly waved at the crowd. Her whole life she had been made to feel like an outcast by those same residents now standing before her. Now she was their most highly esteemed neighbour. Their saviour. This would take some getting used to. ‘I guess you all know why we’re gathered here today,’ she continued, ‘I’m going to give each and everyone one of you the chance to be a part of something special that I’ve been working on.’
‘How do we know it’s safe?’ asked Jack Fareshot, a local store owner.
‘He’s got a point,’ added Bill Valentine, an independent farm labourer.
Emmy gave Lucas a sharp look over her shoulder. There were obviously limits to the power of his hypnotic suggestion that he had not warned her about. Winning over the crowd was not going to be as straightforward as he had led her to believe.
‘That is why I will perform a demonstration,’ she told them. ‘And Lucas is going to help me.’
‘I am?’ asked the policeman.
‘Yes. Now give me your hand.’
She took hold of him and then willed for the both of them to be transported away from the bar. In an instant they were back in Lucas’ office. She let go of her friend and took a seat at his desk. Now that she was away from the townspeople she let out a sigh of relief. A slight movement across the room caught her attention. They were not alone.
Charlie was sitting in the visitor’s chair.
‘I arrived just moments ago,’ he told them. ‘I saw you go into the pub and didn’t want to interrupt. I wasn’t sure what you had planned.’
‘Your timing is perfect,’ Emmy told him. ‘Come on, you can teleport back with us. Then we can start moving everybody out. I assume you have a system prepared back at base.’
Charlie nodded. He then turned to Lucas.
‘Could you give me a list of everybody here - like a town census?’
‘No problem,’ replied Lucas. He pulled open a filing cabinet and withdrew some papers, which he then handed to the scientist.
‘This is great,’ said Charlie. ‘Since being back on the project, I’ve committed the names of each and every patient to memory. The beds have been set up with electronic markers that will be visible even in an astral view. It’s just a case of matching the spirits to the bodies. Is everybody in the Sly Fox?’
‘Most,’ replied Lucas. ‘There are some who aren’t as receptive to the hypnosis. Their trances are too easily broken. I keep them isolated from the others and use more basic scenarios. We’ll deal with those last.’
‘In that case, I’m ready,’ said Charlie.
Emmy extended an arm to each of the men.
‘It’s show time,’ she told them.
***
Of all Jackson’s Hill’s residents, Clive ‘Robbo’ Robinson had been the most resistant to Lucas’ hypnosis techniques. An avid poker player, this man could see right through any bluff. At times, he could see right through the truth too. He suspected everyone and everything. If there was a conspiracy theory working its way around the town, chances are that it will have started with Robbo.
To avoid the sowing of discord among his residents, Lucas had made sure that Robbo was one of the people he partitioned from the rest of the town. It was not auspicious to have somebody spouting tales about aliens or ghosts when trying to shield the population from the fact that they themselves were mere phantoms haunting an alien world in some far flung corner of the universe.
Therefore, a typical day would see Robbo confined to his home under the deceit of a raging dust storm tearing through the town outside. It was a storm that o
nly he could see. He had no choice but to batten down the hatches and patiently wait for it to stop.
It never did.
Today was one such typical day until a hammering on the outside of the front door got Robbo’s attention.
‘Who is it?’ he shouted, reluctant to expose the interior of his home to the storm.
‘It’s Lucas. Let me in,’ the voice called back.
Against his better judgement, Robbo went to the door. It was not polite to leave the town’s only policeman waiting, especially in weather such as this.
‘Come in, quick,’ he said, opening the door.
To his surprise, it was not Lucas standing in front of him but a stranger. The man was young, with a powerful physique but was dressed in a way that did not suit his athletic frame. His coarse cotton suit complete with bow tie looked more befitting of a middle aged academic than a young sportsman in his prime.
Before he could ask any questions, Robbo felt a hand on his face followed by an intense pressure. It was like the head of a vacuum had been jammed into his skull. In just seconds, his mind imploded. All the consciousness being kept alive by his exposure to the psychic radiation was absorbed into Jackson Fox.
***
Once they had witnessed a demonstration of Emmy’s teleportation ability, the dissenters among the crowd were swiftly silenced. The two scientists then got to work returning the townspeople to their bodies.
The plan worked better than either of the scientists could have hoped. When the people woke up on the other side they had no memory of their time spent living an ethereal existence and nor could they recall events directly leading to their illness. A carefully prepared cover story involving a gas explosion was enough to suppress any anxiety or questions they otherwise may have had.
Diamond Sky Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3 Page 87