The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  “But I can tell you, show you where he is.”

  She had given her head a frustrated shake. “If I had been there, or anywhere close, then I could go there. My device records coordinates at a touch.”

  “So how is it you were able to come here, to my house, on your first visit?”

  At which Shania had sighed impatiently. “Scott, I thought you understood that. I had been watching you, and so knew this place.” And seeing his frown she’d quickly added: “I had to be sure of you! There were so many things I had to know about you before I dared to approach you! But this I will say: I can now find you, if not Wolf, anywhere! It’s your aura; it is that we are two of a Unit. And if there are major difficulties in this place, this, er, Zak—?”

  “Zakynthos, or simply Zante.”

  “If there are major problems in Zante, then I may be able to help you. But not until you’re there. Once you’re there you will be like a beacon. But please remember, I can only help if there are problems!”

  “And how will you know there’s a problem? I mean, won’t it be a case of radio silence?”

  “Radio silence?” She looked puzzled. “Your pardon?”

  “Keeping low, shielding ourselves from the Mordri Three.”

  “Yes, they are a real danger. But you’re now aware of that danger. Together and unshielded, the Mordri Three might pick us out, it’s true. But we will not be together, except in an emergency, and from now on we’ll keep ourselves at least minimally shielded at all times. Wolf isn’t such a worry; his skills are rather more specialized, and his thoughts are not . . . they are not what the Mordris have become accustomed to.”

  “Not human?”

  She sighed and shrugged. “I didn’t want to say it, because I myself—”

  “You’re very human,” Scott had told her. “And I’m sorry if I’m asking a lot of questions, but they’re all things I need to know if I’m ever to fully understand. For example: if the Mordris can’t read Wolf because he’s a wolf, how come we can?”

  “I don’t know. Because he’s one of our Three Unit? Perhaps that’s the answer. Because he has been enabled? That would seem more likely. But as to how, why, or by whom he was enabled—or how and why you were, for that matter—who can say?”

  Then, during a few moments’ silence, and while he searched for other questions, Shania had asked him, “Do you really think that I’m . . . that I’m very human?”

  “You are a very desirable, very lovely, very human woman,” he’d told her. And before he could stop himself: “But I wish I could be sure that you would be permanently so . . . er, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean, and the time is coming when I will, when I must be permanently so. For Earth is my world now. I can journey no farther and I no longer wish to. I’ll stay here with you and Wolf, if you’ll have me and if we see this through . . .”

  Which had pleased him inordinately.

  And lost now in his memories of last night, lulled by the dull drone of the plane’s engines, Scott relaxed a little and relived something of the rest of that strange conversation . . .

  “Fill me in on some basic stuff,” he said. “Tell me how you got here. You said that your world was—or had been—billions of light-years away. Well I’m no scientist, as agreed, but still I know that nothing can travel faster than light.”

  “On this three-dimensional level, that is correct,” Shania told him. “But on certain timeless sublevels that law of physics doesn’t apply. Only drop to such levels in a grav-ship, and there ride a gravity wave that has lasted forever and which has already gone on forever, and the light-year—even the billions of light-years—become as nothing. In fact, from my last location, it took me less than a month to get here; which is to say in local measurements of time. But I know of certain far places which would cost a year of journeying even on a massive wave. My Shania Three Unit spent ten months out on one trip, and another ten back again to Shing.”

  Scott shook his head. “I’d probably go out of my mind with sheer boredom!”

  Shania smiled and said, “No, for you wouldn’t have time to be bored. Even at light-speed time stands still for the traveller. On those far journeys my heart didn’t beat once, the last breath I breathed stayed fresh in my lungs, my eyes never blinked, and I did not age by a single second of time; well, not until the grav-ship returned to ‘normal’ space-time—if there ever was such a place. The entire trip was easier than taking a single step, and took no time at all. Not my time, anyway.”

  Again Scott shook his head. Such concepts! “Where is your vessel—your, er, grav-ship—now?”

  “I was low on fuel. I had hoped to refuel on a moon of the last world I visited. But that moon no longer existed, and the world itself was a shell. Of its cities and myriad inhabitants, nothing. The Mordri Three, yes . . . Almost empty, I came on here, emerging from subspace over the Atlantic Ocean where my ship’s antigravs lowered it to the wild surface. By then, seeing that land was in sight however low on the horizon, I had exited. In something of a frenzy I miscalculated the coordinates and got wet for my pains; but finally I stood on solid ground. It was Scotland.”

  “And after that?”

  “By trial and error I survived. Having followed the Mordri Three to this star system, as soon as I was established I commenced covertly to discover their works, always searching for a means to dispose of them; which never sat well with me, for the Shing’t of latter years were the most peaceful of people. There were lunatics, of course, deviants as in any society, but these were cared for in secure places—at least they had always been thought of as secure. As for the ordinary folk of Shing: we had trained no troops, waged no wars since time immemorial. Scholarly academic argument and scientific discussion in halls of highest learning: these were as close as the Shing’t ever came even to quarreling!

  “Also, and if I would try to kill them, how to accomplish it on my own? They were a mad, evil Three Unit, while I was all alone. Years passed while I watched them and pondered the problem, while I practiced to become more properly a female of your world. Physically that was nothing; I am female, and humans and the Shing’t have a great many similarities. But mentally it was hard. While I am no longer totally, er, ‘alien,’ I find a great many human female traits totally alien—to me, anyway. Not in every case, you understand, but in many. And to be truthful, it seems a majority of your men are even worse.”

  “Trouble with our women? With their traits?” Scott raised an eyebrow.

  “They are frequently full of deceit, often with too high a regard for themselves and too low for others of their sex.” She was very open about it.

  “And the men? You’ve had problems? You told me you knew no other men.”

  “Nor have I known men . . . but be sure I could have! For on several occasions ‘the touch,’ as you call it—my transmutative talents with organic plasms, flesh—has delivered me from severe embarrassment! But I prefer not to go there . . .”

  “But I do want to go there!” said Scott. “The Mordri Three also have this talent or so-called skill, ‘the touch,’ right? And they use it to kill?”

  “All Shing’t have it,” Shania answered. “It is their birthright! Why, for long and long the Shing’t saw themselves as the universe’s single formative species, from which all other sentient Mammalia were destined to spring. But they were not unique in this and similar precepts; what of speciesism, the human conceit or assumption that man is superior to all other creatures, and that they only exist to serve man? Anyway, it helps explain why the Shing’t ‘interfered’ with the fauna—and sometimes the flora—of other worlds.”

  Scott was relentless. “Okay, I’ve got that,” he said. “But the Mordri Three: they use it to kill, right?”

  Shania hung her head. “I am ashamed of them—of anyone of my race—who would use their skills in this manner. You have a voice: do you use it only to curse? You have eyes: do they look only on evil things? You have hands: do they only defile, torture, murder? No,
for these things were gifted to you by who- or whatever governs life! And so were the Mordris gifted, but they are mad! Yes, they use them to maim, to change, disrupt, deform, and . . . and kill! Mordri Two, now called Simon Salcombe, killed your Kelly. He murdered her, Scott. But it could have been much worse!”

  “What?”

  “He used ‘the touch’ in a way that killed her slowly, with only so much pain, and in a way that could never be traced back to him.”

  “I traced it back to him,” said Scott, grimly.

  “Yes.” Shania nodded. “Aided by some unseen power, enabled by it, you did. And I know you’re capable of much more, if only we knew what that power was. But I can feel it growing in you, and given time I’m sure it will burst out. Let us hope that it happens sooner rather than later.”

  “Tell me what you meant about Salcombe and this murderous skill, ‘the touch,’” said Scott. “How else can the Mordris use it? How could it have been worse, for Kelly?”

  “Disruption, deformation, mutation. He didn’t have to kill her. He could have made her an abomination, something which you couldn’t even bear to look at!”

  For long moments Scott was silent, then said, “Those kids at St. Jude’s: they were just a cunning advertisement, to draw others to his list of clients. But Kelly . . . why did the morbid Mordri bastard have to kill Kelly?”

  “She opposed him,” said Shania, “called him a fraud and a charlatan. The mad Mordris will not suffer scathing comments or criticism of any sort. Once the deed was done, he would feel no remorse; he would not even deem it worth remembering. They have destroyed worlds . . . what matter a single ‘alien’ individual?”

  “You hinted at mutilation, said he could make her an abomination,” said Scott. “What, with a touch?”

  Again Shania’s nod. “There are touches and touches. Delivered with hatred—and there are various degrees of hatred just as there are degrees of love—a touch can determine the amount and speed of the . . . the alteration. The Mordri Three can turn people inside out, Scott, while yet they live! They can shrivel skin to nothing, dissolve organs or cause them to move, disrupt brains and bring about madness, or reduce their fluids to basic plasms without any sentience at all. He, Simon Salcombe, could have done that to Kelly, but that would have been to risk giving himself away. Mad he is . . . they are all insane, all three of them, but not that mad! When they are enraged, however—if someone or thing crosses them—then they might make mistakes, might be driven to murder, and in the most monstrous of ways. And indeed they have.”

  “When someone crosses them?” Scott persisted. “Like how?”

  “By failing to meet their demands in the matter of payment for services rendered, for example.”

  “You mean money?”

  “No,” said Shania. “Not your money as such, but gold! Gold is the heavy metal we use as fuel!”

  “Aha!” said Scott as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. And then: “But there are heavier metals, surely?”

  “Heavier, and more dangerous, and harder to come by. Shing was rich in gold, which was common there. However, in the planets the Mordris have destroyed, gold was far more rare. I fancy that when they arrived here their reserves were low, as were my own. By use of my device”—she showed her “watch” again—“I detected radiations from their grav-ship in the Swiss Alps, and so knew that this was where they had fallen, probably crashed.”

  “But,” said Scott, “wouldn’t they also have detected you—your gravship?”

  “At the bottom of an ocean? Doubtful . . .”

  And after a long pause, as dawn’s light began to show as a crack on the far horizon: “Tell me more about these Khiff creatures,” said Scott.

  “Ah, no!” Shania answered. “Please don’t think of them as ‘creatures’ or ‘aliens,’ but only as Khiff. As for the Mordris’ Khiff: they are gone beyond redemption. They are one with their hosts, and so are lost.”

  “Okay,” said Scott, “so you’re happy with your parasite—I’m sorry, I mean your Khiff! But . . . what are they for? How do they serve you? What do you get out of it—both of you?”

  Shania fully understood the question, and answered, “Khiff have become like organs of the Shing’t body and adjuncts of the Shing’t mind and personality. I will accept that they are symbiotic, but more as a cat to a human than a wasp to a fruit.”

  “Wasps? Fruit?” Scott frowned. Now it was like she was asking him to be a botanist or biologist! Certainly she was admitting to more than a casual interest in Earth’s biology!

  “Oh, yes, but of course!” She had “heard” the thought. “For in four years I have had time to study all such. Let me go on:

  “Certainly a house cat, a pet, is a symbiont: you feed him and he gives you pleasure—you both derive. So does the olive derive from the fertilization of the groves. But the individual olive, the fruit on the tree which the wasp hollows out for the purpose of reproduction, it can be said to ‘suffer’ inasmuch as any mindless plant may know suffering. Do you see?”

  Scott nodded. “I think so. But a pet cat lives in a man’s house, not inside the man!”

  “True, and a pet cat can’t do what the Khiff does for its host. Scott, we acquire them as children, as I’ve explained and as you have experienced for yourself—or did you consider the visit an invasion? No, don’t answer, but let me continue:

  “My Khiff is . . . she is like a personal diary or an aide-memoire, a storehouse for old memories. Scott, please tell me: can you remember when you were three, four, five years old?”

  “No, my real memories start around six or seven.”

  “But I can—my Khiff can! And my memories reach a great deal farther back in time than yours . . . but do not ask me how old I am!”

  “You’re old?” Scott’s face had fallen, if only a little.

  “I’m not that old!” Shania protested. “Not in terms of the longevity of the Shing’t. Why, I’m a mere girl by Shing’t reckoning. And anyway, I said not to ask.”

  “So you do have something in common with Earth women after all.” Feeling that he had scored at least a point, Scott let it go and made nothing further of it. And anyway Shania was moving on:

  “In fact, I remember everything, through my Khiff. And she is—how may I explain it?—yes, like a gleaner-fish. As great fishes in your seas have gleaners, so I have my Khiff. Everyone has disappointments in life, certain things they wish had never happened, occurrences that have gone awry and strayed from what was desired. It is natural to make mistakes, to suffer failures and follies, and in your world—in your mind—you live with these dismal memories, regretting them. Am I correct?”

  “We call it learning by our mistakes,” Scott replied. “And in other instances such memories could be a case of conscience: errors which were deliberate and backfired, or which didn’t but left a bad taste. We do wrong and we think we got away with it; but it comes back to niggle at us, at the back of our minds.”

  “As I have learned.” Shania nodded. “But I am not troubled in this manner. My gleaner-fish Khiff is the storehouse of such negative thoughts or memories, who only calls them to my attention if or when it appears I might make the same error a second time. Also, as humans derive pleasure from their cats and other pets, so I am aware of my Khiff’s constant attention. Not aware of a presence so much as a friend; but a silent one, unless she is required. As I’ve said: she is like an organ, a second brain. And as the placenta sees us through our prenatal stages, so the Khiff sees us through life.”

  “An organ that can leave you at will . . .” Scott mused.

  “But at my will, knowing that she will always return.”

  “Put it this way,” said Scott. “My organs don’t have minds of their own, and I don’t have any that I can simply eschew!”

  “I could argue that point,” she answered at once. “What of your tonsils, your appendix?”

  “My appendix?” Scott laughed out loud. “My appendix is unnecessary, a relic of some forme
r epoch of human evolution that dates back millions of years!” It sounded good. But:

  “Aha!” Shania also laughed, and clapped her healer’s hands. “And the Khiff could be your future evolution, when your men of science finally plumb the gravity layers and so discover them!”

  Again Scott was momentarily silent, then said, “But things sometimes go wrong, eh? As in the case of the Mordri Three?”

  “A unique case,” she answered in lowered, suddenly subdued tones. “And a terrible one. By their delvings, the Mordri Three were driven insane. And in the evil that ensued it must be that their Khiff have followed suit. Now their Khiff store memories of uttermost horror, and their counsel can only be corrupt!”

  Scott had fallen asleep again. A fat elbow dug in his ribs when the man in the seat beside him struggled erect. And:

  “ ‘Ere, mate.” That one loomed over him, touched his shoulder. “Wakey-wakey. We’ll be landing in a couple of minutes. Me, I’m off to the loo. Time for a quick pee and then we’re there.”

  We’re there, thought Scott, giving himself a shake. Zante, where a wolf of the wild is in hiding, waiting for me to rescue him. Now we get to see what’s what.

  Now it really begins . . .

  22

  As Scott St. John’s plane touched down on the airstrip in Zakynthos, and as Scott himself stepped out into blazing sunlight and Mediterranean heat, at E-Branch HQ, in the heart of London, Ben Trask had called an O-Group, a meeting of his ESPers. 3:00 P.M. in Zante, but the day was two hours younger in the Operations Room in London where Trask’s people convened following an early lunch.

  Once his agents were settled in their seats, Trask wasted no time in getting down to business. Speaking from the podium, he said, “I think you all know why we’re here. In the last few days we’ve been concentrating our efforts on the Scott St. John case, which isn’t proving to be an easy task because we’ve been doing it under our own internal security umbrella; so covertly, in fact, that it’s quite outside previous Branch experience. We are gradually learning more about what’s going on here, but all we definitely know right now is that St. John—who apparently has or is developing parapsychological skills as good and maybe better than any of ours—has somehow got himself involved in some kind of threat to our entire planet.