The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  “That was something that impressed itself deeply upon me, the number three. It sounds strange, I know, but it’s there in his future, in the future of the entire world, and it’s there with a capital ‘T.’ Three. In a single instant that number was emblazoned on my mind: ‘Three!’ But only Three. And while none of it makes much sense, I’ll tell you what else I saw in those flickering, chaotic seconds:

  “A mountaintop, all snow and ice, in places hollow, with manmade tunnels and caverns . . . a huge machine, like the barrel of a gun, all metal and plastic . . . with heavy, golden bullets racked as high as the ice-cold ceiling . . . electronic circuits, computer screens . . . white-smocked workers, afraid and toiling without knowing what they toiled at . . . and Death himself, the old man with a scythe, coming and going as at the beck and call of—

  “But of who, or what, I couldn’t see. Finally, it all went up in flames, everything, a colossal explosion that shook me to my roots and took it all away from me. And if Anna Marie hadn’t been there, clasping my hand, I believe I might have fallen. It felt very real, Ben. Felt like . . . like Anna Marie’s ‘planetary devolution,’ and I know that it will be very real!

  “But again, the one thing I sensed above everything else was that the Branch won’t be a part of it, not in the thick of it. We may be there on the periphery, but this is his business, St. John’s. Our future may well depend on its outcome, but it’s his fight, him and his group, just the ‘Three’ of them, yes . . .”

  After several long seconds, Trask said, “On the periphery? You’re saying we can only wait and watch?”

  “That’s the essence of it, yes,” the precog answered. “As I concentrated on St. John, that was made very clear to me; it dawned on me as bright as day. I mean, I’m not a telepath, Ben, yet I would swear I heard these words:

  “ ‘If you should sense anything strange, keep your distance but try to explore it.’ Those were the words I heard and I know—or believe—that they apply to us. We can explore St. John, his background, life, whatever it is that makes him what he is, but we can only do it from a safe distance. We can neither help nor interfere; we can’t be a part of what he’s doing. But don’t ask me why, for I don’t know. We are . . . peripheral, yes. We’re not needed. Not yet, anyway.”

  Trask shook his head as if to clear it. Despite what he’d promised he now seemed undecided. “You’ve told me, both of you, that there’s a threat to our world,” he said, glancing first at Goodly, then at Anna Marie. “Yet we can’t interfere? We’re here, in E-Branch, to handle precisely this kind of work, and yet all we can do is sit and watch? And if I’m to deal with this as you suggest—which is to say not deal with it—it will be on your say-so, your word alone?”

  “No, not quite ours alone,” said Goodly. “For when we got back from this business with St. John I found a note from Paul Garvey on my desk.” He fished out a crumpled slip of paper and passed it across the table for Trask to read.

  Ian—

  What’s all this? Are you messing with my kind of stuff now, or have I been working too hard? This morning, some time after 10:00, I had a thought that wasn’t one of mine. It was a “voice” in my head, but it had your fingerprints, your aura, all over it. It said, “If you should sense anything strange, explore it from a distance.” Something like that, anyway. Of course it could have come to me from anywhere—I am after all telepathic—but it felt so much like you! Could it have anything to do with the Scott St. John case? I wonder. Any ideas?

  Paul G.

  Trask looked at the precog, who again said: “So then. Not quite our say-so alone, eh?”

  And Trask said, “So what do we do? We can’t do nothing!”

  “We can check him out top to bottom,” said Goodly. “All of us. We check St. John’s entire history, his where and his when, his then and his now . . . because we already know something about his future. We find out what makes him tick, what’s happened or will happen that’s going to make him fight. And maybe that way we’ll learn what he’s fighting against, and who is siding with him. But we must do it from a distance, going nowhere near him. We can’t afford to compromise him.”

  “Compromise?” Trask was quick to pick up on the word.

  “Just something else that got lodged in my head,” said the precog with a frustrated shrug. “But don’t ask me where it came from. It seems logical, though. For if St. John is about to go to war against dangerous unknown enemies, we don’t want to let our presence alert them to his activities.”

  Trask shook his head, rubbed his chin, and said, “I don’t know. It still seems very vague and somehow unreal to me.”

  “I know,” Goodly answered, nodding. “Oh, I know.”

  “So how long do we have?” Trask asked then. “Couldn’t you at least gauge that much?”

  “No.” Goodly shrugged again. “But for all that these were fleeting images, still they were very insistent. So whatever it is, it can’t be too far off.”

  And finally the Head of Branch was convinced, which transformed him into his usual assertive self. “Very well, let’s get to it,” he said. “And right now! Ian, I want you to call in all our people, everybody who’s available. We’ll hold an O-Group in the Ops Room, in ”—he glanced at his watch—“an hour’s time? Is that enough? Can you do that?”

  The precog nodded. “Consider it done,” he said . . .

  Scott St. John cried out and started awake in an easy chair in the little upstairs room that had been his wife’s study. For a moment or two, uncertain of where he was, he imagined it to be the hospital in central London where Kelly had died.

  He had been dreaming—no, actually he’d been nightmaring, and monstrously! Then, as an involuntary shiver shook his body, convinced that the time would be 3:33 A.M., Scott looked at his watch. But no, it was 6:25 in the evening.

  The evening of a totally weird day at that! he thought, as he gradually stopped trembling and came more surely awake.

  Scott didn’t remember coming up here to be close to Kelly again, something he used to do all the time in the first couple of months. He supposed that he’d been worn out, physically and emotionally exhausted by the inexplicable things that were happening to him, and that he had wandered up here “instinctively” to see if he could find her again. Dumb really, because he knew where she was, the precise location of her plot in the Highgate Cemetery. But he couldn’t go there anymore because when he did he didn’t want to leave.

  In his dream Scott had been with Kelly, sitting in a chair on the right-hand side of her hospital bed in her private room, holding her shrivelled little-girl’s hand. Now, fully awake, he knew there was something he should remember about that hand . . . Kelly’s fragile left hand.

  She had been conscious but too weak to speak to him, or to do much of anything else for that matter. But her eyes had been huge and unblinking in her parchment face. He had seen her like that on many occasions in the last few days of her life; except this time, in his dream, Scott had felt some kind of urgency in Kelly’s mute gazing, as if she had been trying to tell him something.

  Her huge eyes had kept straying from his face to the hand Scott held in his hand. This had never happened in life he was sure—in fact, he’d only ever sat on the left side of her bed, holding her right hand—but in the dream Kelly had seemed to be trying to redirect his gaze from her face . . . to her hand?

  Scott forced himself to remember—

  —No, not to her hand, to her wrist! Until, answering her silent directions, finally he’d looked where Kelly required him to look.

  Her pure white smock had partly concealed . . . what? A mark or blemish on her wrist? Yes, Scott remembered now. Like a very faint bar code a shade paler than her flesh, the mark or brand had consisted of four white near-parallel bars that crossed her wrist at ninety degrees. Maybe it was some kind of identification for the doctors and nurses, like a tag on your toe but less conspicuous and far less emotive and gruesome. A fanciful idea, which he didn’t for a moment believe. Kell
y had been in a private room; her details had been there on a clipboard at the foot of her bed; how could anyone not know or mistake her identity?

  But those marks, they rang a bell. Where had he seen them before? And suddenly Scott remembered something else: how Kelly had scratched that wrist repeatedly while he was driving her to the hospital. That was on the morning of her collapse, when she had tried to get out of their bed and just crumpled up. She had thought the itch must be an allergic rash or something . . .

  Remembering Kelly’s collapse brought Scott’s dream back to mind, giving him the shudders again. She had also “crumpled up” in his dream, though not in the same way. No, for the dream had been . . . oh, something else. Something else entirely!

  In his dream she had nodded at Scott, an almost imperceptible up and down movement of her head, her way of saying “yes,” when she knew he’d seen those marks on her wrist. She had even managed a faint little smile—following which she’d collapsed, but literally! And Scott had seen her fold up on herself like a little-girl-shaped crepe paper bag with all of the air suddenly sucked out! Which was when he’d come starting awake and crying out in his horror. God!

  Scott went downstairs, made a pot of coffee, took it into his study. It was gloomy in there, even with the sunlight slanting in across the garden; but then again it was gloomy almost everywhere now. More than three months worth of fine dust, disturbed by his movements, glowed faintly in the filtering beams like so many miniature galaxies. It was his study and familiar, of course, and yet there was something strange here. Something missing? He gave an irritated shrug of his shoulders. Whatever the problem was, he would probably solve it sooner or later . . .

  Slumped in an armchair sipping his coffee, Scott wondered about those marks that he had dreamed of on Kelly’s wrist: had they perhaps been real, something he’d experienced in real life other than Kelly scratching herself during that hospital drive? They rang a bell, those marks, and every time it rang it got a little bit louder.

  What was it that his mystery woman had said he should do? He should “think about his loss coldly, without anger, pain, or passion”? Maybe she’d simply meant that he should try to think more clearly. Well, that’s if there had been any meaning to it at all and she wasn’t just a crazy woman!

  Now Scott snorted in disbelief, and laughed aloud in self-derision. What in the . . . ? Had he actually started to take what she’d told him seriously? But then he quickly stopped laughing, because what with his dreams and all—and everything else that had been happening to him—yes, he’d been taking it seriously, and for some time now! Why else would he have tried to find her this morning?

  But whoever she was, and crazy or not, she’d advised Scott to empty his mind and think clearly about his loss—even about investigating his loss—which had to mean there was something about it that required investigation . . .

  Except he couldn’t think clearly, not even here in his own study! He felt too far removed from Kelly here. Her study would be the place to, well, study! Perhaps that was why he’d gone up there in the first place: to try and think things through, only to fall asleep and have that oh-so-real nightmare.

  Taking his coffee back upstairs, Scott left one dusty room for another. Dusty, but well ordered. Unlike her husband, Kelly had always been the tidy one and wholly organized, particularly where her work was concerned. She had kept records, memos, notebooks, and diaries, a filing cabinet full of newspaper clippings and photographs . . .

  Photographs? That set the bell ringing again. Had he seen something in a photograph that Kelly had shown him? In connection with . . . with . . . with Simon Salcombe? Some job she’d been working on? Possibly. And in some of her previous journalistic columns she’d as good as called Salcombe a charlatan, which he probably was but still wouldn’t have been too pleased about.

  But had there been something more recently?

  Yes, Scott remembered it now: it was back in January when he had been preparing for a trip to Berlin to work as an interpreter at a conference on Germany’s possible future reunification. And by the time he’d returned from that Kelly was already terminally ill.

  Opening the lower drawer of the filing cabinet and checking under “S,” Scott soon found what he was looking for: two manila envelopes labelled with Salcombe’s name, one fairly bulky—old work from 1988, 1989—while the other was dated January 1990. That would be the one he was interested in, the work Kelly had been doing right up to her decline. Now he recalled something of what she had told him about it:

  She had been freelancing, or “paparazzing” as she’d called it, trying to get photographs of camera-shy Simon Salcombe. She had wanted to get some good shots of her own, but had agreed to distract Salcombe, make him turn toward her and expose himself to the cameras of a team from the BBC. Kelly had an arrangement with her BBC friends that if they should fail to get any worthwhile footage they might make her a decent offer for her stuff, if she managed to obtain some good still shots. It was unlikely that they would try to cheat her, for Kelly was very well known among the newshound pack and admired for her work, but if they did she could always sell her pictures to the daily newspapers.

  On this occasion, however, it appeared she may have killed two birds with one stone—or one camera. For when Scott tipped out the envelope’s contents onto her desk, not only was there a set of five six-by-four photographs but also a newspaper clipping and an eight-inch strip of coloured BBC film. Perhaps there had been some mutually advantageous horse-trading here.

  Choosing at random, he picked up the strip first, slotted it into a viewer from Kelly’s desk, and held it up to the light from the window. And scanning it frame by frame, he could see at once why this section had been edited out: it showed a much better picture of Kelly than of Salcombe! There she stood with her camera at eye level and one hand on Salcombe’s arm. He was looking the other way, keeping his face averted as he made his way through a small crowd of reporters and passersby. His minders, a pair of broad-shouldered heavyset types, were clearing a path just a few feet ahead of him. Kelly must have held back to let the heavies pass her by before moving in closer.

  That was the first frame, but then things speeded up. The sequence of Salcombe’s movements became very jerky, indicating his rapid reaction to Kelly’s sudden close presence, her unforeseen intrusion. Which is to say that while the frame-by-frame motion of Salcombe himself appeared spasmodic, everyone else’s seemed far more fluid and natural. Now, following the sequence, Scott saw how the man shook Kelly off, how he caught her wrist to free himself and thrust her away. But not before she’d managed to snap at least one picture as he turned angrily toward her.

  It had all happened in less than a dozen hazy frames, but it had set Scott’s eyes flickering even as the still scenes had seemed to flicker; as if he’d been viewing them in some seaside peep show, through the viewer of one of those ancient “What the Butler Saw” machines. Also, it left him feeling anxious that he was missing something. But he could check that out later. As to why this sequence had been edited out of the BBC’s coverage: in Scott’s opinion it was unusable, a poor piece of blurred, badly jostled film, that was all.

  Setting the footage aside, Scott picked up the photographs from Kelly’s desk. Undated, the first showed three sick-looking children in a hospital ward. Scott hadn’t seen it before but it did bring something back to mind, something that Kelly had told him. He had been busy, preparing for Berlin at the time, and so hadn’t paid too much attention. Now, however, sensing that this was important, he forced himself to remember.

  “Those poor sick kids,” she had said, shaking her head. “As if anyone could do anything for them at this late stage, or any stage for that matter. Not with what they’re suffering from and as sick as they are. But of course, their poor parents would do anything. They had tried everything else, so why not this faker Simon Salcombe? They must have felt they were drowning—grasping at straws—but how could it do any actual harm? He’d told them he wouldn’t exp
ect payment for his ‘services.’ Huh! It was like he was doing some kind of benefit or something! The damned faker! That bloody awful creep!”

  Scott knew this wasn’t exactly what she’d said; his memory of the conversation wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.

  Laying the photograph to one side, he took up and looked at three more. These were of the same kids but taken individually, perhaps some time before the group shot, because despite what Kelly had said about their illness they weren’t nearly as sick-looking as before. But that could be the lighting; so far all of the pictures had been dark, of very poor quality.

  The last photograph was of Salcombe himself: Kelly’s snapshot, taken just before he pushed her away. And Scott knew what she had meant when she called the man a creep. He looked almost reptilian! With sallow, sunken cheeks, snarling lips drawn back from little fish teeth, eyes of black marble sunk in that waxy, skull-like mask of a face under the bony, bald-shining dome of his head . . . not so much Scott’s praying mantis as some kind of leprous cobra! As for his reaction at being touched, surprised like that: it was hardly a natural one. He wasn’t just shocked but furious, as mad as hell! He looked hateful—yes, full of hatred—for Kelly!

  And now, glaring back at the picture, agreeing absolutely with his wife’s assessment, Scott thought, You fucking creep!

  But on the other hand, maybe Salcombe’s expression wasn’t that significant after all. Maybe it was a trick of the camera; there had been something wrong with the light, or Kelly’s flash had failed. Whatever it was, something had certainly gone awry. Badly focussed, distorted, and grainy, the picture wasn’t nearly as good as her usual work . . .