The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Neil gradually recognized the voice as his own. He felt no sense of identity or of belonging. Time had swallowed itself and reversed. In a universe that had jammed somewhere between Creation and Annihilation he heard himself saying, ‘The universe is folded up inside me, can’t explain it, there’s nothing outside me. I’m wrapped round the universe. Infinity has entered my mind.’

  An unfamiliar voice called, ‘What about space? Are you in space?’

  ‘No. Space is in me. But they want me to go back.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘They want me to go back and change something.’

  ‘Change what?’

  ‘Go away. It’s them I’m talking to now. Distorted … garbled! … I said your voices are garbled, running at the wrong speed, don’t you understand? It’s too close to the speed of light! … Careful, careful … Yes! That’s a bit better. What’s that you say?’

  *

  Krister said, ‘You must listen to me more carefully, Neil. You must listen to reality.’

  ‘What do you mean? What I’ve escaped from was reality.’

  ‘No. You are on the brink of cure.’

  ‘But I belong … I belong …’

  ‘You belong here, in my consulting room.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s simple. You’re coming round from a shot of TNA-2. I gave you the shot as an aid to psychoanalysis.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Neil, don’t you know what era you belong in? Ask yourself. Really ask yourself!’

  Neil exclaimed suddenly, ‘My God! She’s going to get inverse brain-ops!’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Celandine!’

  ‘There is no such thing as inverse brainops.’

  ‘But you’re due for it yourself! We must get away! Fast!’

  Krister said, ‘You don’t need your paranoia. There is no threat.’

  ‘But … the Regime!’

  ‘I know … You’ve explained the whole thing. You’ve also told me a lot of history … some true, some terribly distorted.’

  Neil blinked at him. ‘Where are those ruby lights?’

  Krister offered him a harmfree. ‘You are very confused. It will take quite a long time for you to sort out the difference between fantasy and fact. But we’ll be doing it together; and I do mean together. This is no patronizing relationship between doctor and patient. You have thrown new light on Phrenia. You have opened the whole subject up to question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you have shown how there are several meanings to it. The life you’ve been living, these last few months, never took place.’

  ‘But … the Samaritans! And the village of Clearwater … the whole business of Foren … Forenthritis, no, Foren —’

  Krister jotted something on his pad. ‘Forenthoris. Yes. You told me all that. In sharp detail.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me it didn’t happen?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you you stopped it happening!’

  Neil said angrily, ‘Look, doctor. Either I’ve been ill or I haven’t! It must be one or the other!’

  ‘I don’t think so … I’ve done some checking myself. I’ve gone right back through the history of what was known as G Block … Do you remember G Block?’

  ‘No. Where?’

  ‘We’ll go over it again, one day. The point is they were doing some experiments, based on a false premise. Luckily, despite some abominable government pressure, someone had the guts to examine the printouts. A flaw in the entire program was spotted. So — after one hell of a row — they abandoned the whole thing.’

  ‘Where do I come in?’

  ‘I’m not sure we’ll ever be certain of that. Nano is certainly not the time to discuss it. The only thing we should go into at present is the matter of you and Celandine.’

  ‘But, doctor! I know she exists! I made love to her!’

  Kin smiled. ‘That was the turning point, for you. But your relationship with Celandine — and I must say I hope it thrives — didn’t occur in a terrorized community called Central Pool … Or to put it another way, it no longer is history that you made love to her there. Because there’s no such place. Not on this Möbius level, at any rate.’

  ‘PONEM! That word means something, surely?’

  ‘Indeed it must, Neil. But I’m not sure what. There is a building — exactly where you located it — which was the very hub of almost everything you’ve said under therapy. When you’ve fully come round from the injection I’m going to take you there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why. That’s kind of hard to explain. Let’s just say I believe in your mission.’ Kin looked at Neil hard. ‘There is something you came here to prevent.’

  ‘I see. So you do believe that everything has … two explanations?’

  ‘I didn’t say everything. Some of it. You may never work it out. For instance, how will you ever explain — even in terms of your “interschizoid thinking” — why you featured in one Phrenic’s fantasies and she featured in yours — despite the fact that more than a century came between?’

  Neil said, ‘I can only suppose that things aren’t quite as simple as sane people seem to think.’

  ‘You know who I’m talking about?’

  ‘Ann Marie. What’s happened to your right hand — have you been in an accident?’

  Krister looked down and flicked his fingers. They felt stiff. He said, ‘Don’t say I have a touch of arthritis! You do accept the essence of what I’ve been saying, Neil?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  Krister got up and walked to the window. Visible was the building that Neil had so often referred to as the PONEM. For the first time he observed that the building had the tawdry smack of the twentieth century. In the architecture there was a certain hollowness, a lack of style — a sort of abandoning of hope about it … like some of the old high-rise buildings that presented the worst slum problem in history.

  Krister stood there for a few moments — a statue of the future set against the jaundiced remnant of the past. ‘God’s Printout! — I must have been overdoing it a bit. I feel so damn stiff.’

  ‘What did you mean? — the essence of it all?’

  Kin turned round … an awkward, lumbering manoeuvre so unlike his usual coordinated movements. ‘I mean that the raison why Phrenia isn’t totally curable is that it isn’t totally invalid.’

  ‘But how can I know which bits are valid and which are not?’

  That’s precisely it — you can’t. It’s a changing pattern impervious to proof. You argue from one standpoint only to expose a hole in another. You shore up that one and another appears. It’s a problem — as we discussed once, though you probably don’t remember … that turns up in physics. Physics is not the ordered world of Newton: it’s the nonsense world of Alice in Wonderland.’

  Neil looked at Krister, startled. It was unlike the man to be drunk. Yet the diction was unclear, laboured, and so slow. ‘And the other me, Kin? The Neil Prentice who is … who was lying on the couch of an operating theatre?’

  Krister seemed to be talking through a slit in his face. ‘We have to accept the possibility that he did exist. If he did, he must have … died in the fire. That would explain why the biography you’ve so often mentioned doesn’t —’

  ‘Kin! Your face! Oh, God … your face. You …’

  They both understood at the same instant. It was a moment so terrible that in a stab of self-knowledge Neil realized that the trip to the dump with Ann Marie must have had some validity; that they had somehow talked and laughed in Cathedral Square; and that, on some weird, frightful level, she must have known about this moment to come.

  The solidified, living statue of Kin Krister crashed to the ground. And the eyes, the frozen eyes of the victim, stared upward, still seeing, knowing — and demanding of his maker, why?

  *

  Dazed, Neil was aware of the rushed, frantic activity around him … the wail of sirens from the police mags;
the men from the ambol — who didn’t even need a stretcher because the body was so rigid; the quiet sobbing of Juls.

  Juls and Neil slowly became more conscious of one another. And in studying Juls’ face Neil could see that the mythical disease of Forenthoris, if mythical was quite the right word, had been some kind of hallucination on his part. Juls still looked like the subject of a Renaissance painting … a frail, super-sensitive classic with narrow aquiline features and wild young hair; but he was healthy, not sick, suffering only from the pangs of loss that Neil shared almost equally. Neil asked shakily, ‘Does Penta know?’

  ‘Not yet.’ The boy stood almost to attention. It was a gesture of pride — and something else too, for his voice hardened a little as he said, ‘I shall tell her … Ironic, isn’t it? The one thing you were right about was what killed him. I should hate you.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘Because it was with you Kin went to the plastic dump. You insisted on seeing it — had some crazy hangup about an old village you were trying to find. Clearwater — a place they blew off the map decades ago, testing bombs. Your people went in for bombs … destruction … hate. That’s the only thing that stops me from hating you. I don’t want to be like them.’

  ‘But didn’t he …?’

  ‘We tried to make him take the serum. We did try.’ The boy folded his arms, suddenly seeming to grow up a little: not from any Forenthoric decay but from the first rung on the ladder to manhood. ‘There was too little to go round. So he faked his immunization. The syringe had nothing but pure water in it. Penta knew. She broke down one day and warned me.’

  Neil averted his eyes. ‘Yet he gave me a shot.’

  ‘You weren’t to know. But that’s not all.’

  The boy spoke with such fury that Neil found himself stammering. Once again, the presence of Juls was a million meganodes. ‘Not … all?’

  ‘Until you arrived on the scene there was no such thing as plastic cancer. It took them just three days to arrive at a serum — but only a few precious shots. You came here trying to solve one problem — your own problem, for all I know — and you created another … This PONEM you kept on about … that derelict building yonder. See it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ve asked the police to take us in a mag to see it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m a musician, not a scientist. I think I want to make sure it’s dead. You understand? Dead!’

  *

  Neil wasn’t even sure he’d ever been in this vast hollow of a place, where footsteps echoed a hundred times. It didn’t feel evil, as the boy had supposed it would. It seemed curiously neutral, as if no known emotion could go with its structure.

  When Juls spoke his voice reverberated around the steel and concrete, like a choirboy’s voice in some insane cathedral. ‘What do you feel, Mr Prentice?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Has it gone? — whatever it was?’

  At first Neil thought it had. Then he remembered some of the things Kin had said, just before he died. It wouldn’t be true or fair to tell Juls there was just nothing. If Krister was right, there couldn’t be a nothing.

  Neil took a few paces toward the centre of the arena, and looked up.

  The voice he heard was — he told himself — aural hallucination. Nevertheless, he heard it …

  I see cunim in your eyes, now …

  The voice seemed vaguely familiar, like a half-forgotten dream. The accent was French; the voice very clear and compassionate.

  Juls’ voice rang out. ‘Well? Are we free from whatever it is you … you conjured from this crazy place?’

  Neil said, ‘I think we are free. I think they are not.’

  Juls saw his tears. ‘I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.’

  Neil shook. He managed, ‘We’d better get out of here. My God, what have I done?’

  *

  Ann Marie said, ‘Jane, I’m reporting for treatment.’

  Jane Schuber hardly heard her. She was intently watching the eyes of the emptied body before her. ‘Still breathing. Yet he’s gone.’

  ‘I do not quite understand you, Jane.’

  ‘Then look closely at the eyes … You see? It isn’t possible, is it? As soon as you look, traces of the Earthless Quake … the Thoughtquake … start to interfere with your vision.’

  ‘With my soul.’

  Schuber said, ‘I am very afraid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why. He told us we must make a building. But when he started to describe it, I realized at once that he was describing that peculiar place they are erecting across the Bowl.’

  Ann Marie’s voice was a whisper. ‘So it must be a … a PONEM?’

  ‘The beginnings of one.’ Schuber went, as always, to her filing cabinet to try and conceal her true feelings. ‘Only yesterday I asked the architect what it was for. Some instinct made me do it.’ She turned. ‘I swear he didn’t even know. He was confused and embarrassed and then extremely hostile … A minute ago I phoned him again, and asked him the same question, having told him what this … patient … said.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He said that though the patient must undoubtedly be suffering from future-shock there was “something in what he said”.’

  ‘What did Neil say?’

  ‘He said, “You must be ready. You must learn to concentrate laser power. Otherwise there will be the Coming”.’

  ‘Judgement Day?’

  ‘Translate it how you like, Ann Marie. But I’ll say just this: The patient is watching us through some medium we know nothing about. It is … like someone looking through a slit from some other world. And he knows that we know.’ Schuber looked hard at Ann Marie. ‘And yet you come to me for treatment! Me! And look at the patient now. See what I mean?’

  Ann Marie said quietly, ‘Yes. I do. He has departed.’

  Without a further word, Ann Marie left the building for the Chapel.

  *

  Father Stillwell came quietly into the operating theatre. He gave the patient only a cursory glance. To all intents and purposes Neil Prentice wasn’t there. Stillwell said, ‘I feel as if —’

  Dr Jane helped him out. ‘As if something has changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jane crossed to the window and looked out past the Bowl toward the Chapel. ‘If you’re right, we’ve paid a high price for it.’

  ‘You mean Prentice?’

  Her look was very frank. ‘Not really. I knew he was latently psychotic the whole time … No, I mean Ann Marie. I’d be willing to swear there was no evidence before that schizophrenia might develop.’

  Stillwell said, ‘The disembowelled rabbit in the Chapel?’

  ‘And other things. It was, of course, quite unnatural that she should suddenly have revoked her faith.’

  Stillwell said, ‘Or has she?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I mean.’ He dropped the subject. ‘What are you doing?’

  Jane shrugged. ‘Case notes.’

  ‘They’ll make pretty odd reading.’

  ‘Not,’ said Jane firmly, ‘if I write them!’

  ‘You haven’t … altered your view of what schizophrenia means?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Dotty ideas about time and space are grist to the psychotic mill.’

  ‘I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed in you, Jane.’

  She turned, smiling thinly. ‘You’re a bit of a sentimentalist.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. But you know as well as I do that something has shifted position … Neither of us can describe just what. But you’ll cling to classical explanations or bust.’

  ‘You’re quoting my patient.’

  ‘Maybe. Still … there is one very interesting fact I’ve prised out of Dr Braknell. You may have noticed all the activity below, in the Bowl … Concrete mixers, cranes, bulldozers … the lot.’

  ‘I think I know what’s coming.’

&
nbsp; ‘Brack usually sniffs out what the backroom boys are up to, around here. And the new building interested him a great deal. He saw the blueprints and decided the nature of the building was distinctly … odd. When he asked about it he didn’t get much sense back, either. What’s the matter? Have you a cold?’

  Jane was sniffing. Then she shrugged and flipped over the page of her notes. ‘No. Go on.’

  ‘They told Dr Braknell it was some kind of a “precaution”.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘No one seems to know … except there was some gibberish about a point of neutral effective mass.’

  ‘I’m not so sure it’s gibberish.’ She tilted her face and sniffed again.

  ‘What is the matter — hay fever?’

  ‘No. “Point of …” ’ She stared, then grabbed a pen.

  Father Stillwell smiled very slightly. ‘ “Point of neutral effective mass” — Try putting the initial letters in capitals.’

  Jane began to say something, then got up suddenly and ran to the window. ‘I can smell burning. Something’s burning, Father. That is what’s wrong. God. The place is on fire!’

  Stillwell seemed curiously calm as he picked up the phone and dialled the emergency number. As he did so he said, ‘A fire … yes. As you say, Jane, a very high price.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He indicated her case notes. ‘We aren’t in a position to know. But they’ll know. In time, from what you have just written.’ Quite calmly he called the fire brigade and informed the duty room.

  To Jane he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s begun somewhere in this building. Quite a blaze. We’ll take the fire escape on the south side.’

  She stared at him. ‘So calm?’

  ‘Of course. Why not? We didn’t get out in time anyway.’ He reached for her case notes and flung them out of the window. They fluttered down toward the Bowl, where already the blaze had been blown across to the G Block bungalow. A shower of sparks ignited the roof.

  Some of the sheets were sucked into the fire. Others cleared it and landed, slightly scorched, on the grass.

  And there below, lost in the horror of flame, Ann Marie tried to reach the Chapel to find sanctuary.

  She was not sure what was happening; she did not entirely know who she was. Her name seemed to be inseparably intermeshed with the name of Clare.