by Brian Lumley
Clarke looked puzzled. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not sure myself. I suppose I’m trying to explain why, as the head of E-Branch, I have so much difficulty believing in what we’re doing! And when you confront me with the reality of someone like Harry Keogh … Well, I mean, parapsychology is one thing, but this is supernatural!”
Clarke grinned one of his rare grins. “So you’re human after all,” he said. “Did you think you were alone in your confusion? Why, there’s not a man or woman ever worked here who hasn’t known the same doubts. If I had a pound for every time I’ve thought about it—its ambiguities, inconsistencies and head-on contradictions—hell, I’d be rich! What, an outfit as weird as this is? Robots and romantics? Super-science and the supernatural? Telemetry and telepathy? Computerized probability patterns and precognition? Spy-satellites and scryers? Of course you’re confused. Who isn’t? But that’s what it’s all about: gadgets and ghosts!”
Wellesley was a little happier. He’d managed to get Clarke on his side for once. And with what he had in mind, that’s where he had to have him. “And teleportation?” he said. “Was that one of Keogh’s talents, too?”
Clarke nodded. “That’s what we’d call it,” he said, “but it wasn’t like that to Harry. He simply used doors no one else knew were there. He’d step in a door here and … come out somewhere else. Just about anywhere else. When I wanted to recruit him in on the Perchorsk business, I went up to Edinburgh to see him. He said OK, he’d take a chance if I would. That is, if he was going up against the unknown, he wanted me to taste a little of it too. And he brought me back here through a thing he calls the Möbius Continuum. It was quite something, but nothing I’d ever want to do again.”
Wellesley sighed again and said: “I think you’re right. If he got his talents back, we’d have to offer him my job. You’d like that, right?”
Clarke shrugged.
“Don’t be coy, Darcy,” Wellesley nodded, knowingly. “It’s plain as day. You’d rather have him—or anyone—as your boss than me. But what you don’t seem to realize is that I’m all for it! I don’t understand you or the people who work here and I don’t suppose I ever will. I want out, but I know our Minister Responsible won’t let me go until there’s someone to replace me. You? No, because that would make it look like they made a mistake replacing you in the first place. But Harry Keogh …”
“Harry’s had the best help we can give him,” Clarke said. “We’ve hypnotized him, psychoanalysed him, damn near brainwashed him. But it’s gone. So what can you do for him?”
“It’s more what we can do for him, Darcy.”
“Goon.”
“Last night I had a long talk with the Markham girl up in Edinburgh, and —”
“If there’s one part of this that I really hate,” Clarke heatedly cut in, “it’s that we’ve done this to him!”
“—And she advised me to speak to David Bettley,” Wellesley continued, unperturbed, “because she’s worried about Keogh. Can you understand that? She does have genuine feelings for him. It may be just a job but she is worried about him. Or maybe you think he’d be better off on his own? Well, whichever, she satisfies two needs: one in Keogh, and one in us. The need to know what’s on his mind.”
“The tender art of the mindspy!” Clarke snorted.
“So I took her advice and spoke to Bettley. I got him out of bed to answer his telephone. I would have contacted him anyway, about some of his most recent reports and recordings; because in them he’s given me cause to believe that Keogh is (a) about to develop some strange new talent, or (b) he’s on the point of cracking up. Anyway, in the course of our conversation Bettley mentioned how Keogh first discovered this, er, Möbius thing—?”
“The Möbius Continuum.”
“—Correct. He’d apparently been on the verge of it but needed a spur. Which came when the East German GREPO found him talking to Möbius in a Leipzig graveyard. That did it, triggered his mathematical genius. He teleported—or used the Continuum—to escape from them. That’s why I have his file here: I wanted to check that I had it right. And it’s also why I’m double-checking with you.”
“So?”
“The way I see it,” Wellesley continued, “Keogh’s like a computer that’s suffered a power failure: the information he requires—and which E-Branch wants to use—is no longer accessible to him. Oh, it’s probably still in there but it’s jammed in limbo. And so far we haven’t been able to shake it loose.”
“What do you propose?”
“Well, I’m still working on it. But the way I see it, if we apply just the right spur … with a bit of luck it could be Leipzig all over again. You see, Keogh has been having some bad dreams lately; and if what you say of him is true—oh, I don’t doubt it, but nevertheless if—then any dream awful enough to frighten him must be really bad. But perhaps not quite bad enough, eh?”
“You want to scare him silly?”
“I want to scare him almost to death. So close to death that he escapes into the Möbius Continuum!”
Clarke sat still and silent for long moments, until eventually Wellesley leaned forward and quietly said:
“Well, what do you think?”
“My honest opinion?”
“Of course.”
“I think it stinks. Also, I think that if you plan to fool with Keogh you’d better take out extra insurance. And finally I think that it had better work, because if it doesn’t I’m up and gone. When this is finished, no matter how it works out, I won’t be able to work with you any longer.”
Wellesley smiled thinly. “But you do want me out of here, right? And so you won’t… hinder me?”
“No, in fact I insist on being part of it. That way I can be sure that if Harry has any breaks coming, he’ll get them.”
Wellesley continued to smile. Oh, he’ll get his breaks, all right, he thought. Broken all the way through, in fact!
And he was one of only a handful of men in the entire world who could think such things—especially here in E-Branch HQ—and be certain that no one could hear him doing it.
VI: Sandra
SANDRA MARKHAM WAS TWENTY-SEVEN, POSSESSED A beautiful face and figure, and was a neophyte telepath. As yet her talent was a fifty-fifty thing; she had very little control over it; it came and went. But where Harry Keogh was concerned, that might be just as well. Sometimes, in Harry’s mind, she’d read things she was sure had no right to be there—or in any sane mind, for that matter.
She and Harry had made love only an hour ago, and afterwards he had at once fallen asleep. Sandra had come to know Harry’s habits well enough: he’d stay asleep for three or four hours, which for him would serve as a full night’s rest. As for Sandra: she would have to sleep tomorrow, at her own place in Edinburgh, making up the night’s deficiency.
Staring right into Harry’s pale, relaxed, almost little-boyish face, she saw no sign as yet of the rapid eye movements which would tell her that he was dreaming. So for now she too could relax. It was Harry’s dreams which most interested her. That was what she tried to keep telling herself, anyway.
She worked for E-Branch. Sometimes she wished she didn’t, but she did. That was how she earned her daily bread (the meat and gravy, too), so she really shouldn’t complain. And in fact there hadn’t been too much to complain about, until Harry came along. At first he’d been just another job—a new friend to get close to, learn about and try to understand—but then she’d got in deeper. It had “just happened”, and afterwards she’d wanted it to happen again, and again. Until in a little while he wasn’t just a job but more a way of life, not only “on her mind”, as it were, but under her skin as well. And finally she’d started to suppose, and still did, that she was in love with him.
Certainly working on Harry’s case (she hated thinking of it like that, but it was the truth however she dressed it up) had been more interesting than being a human divining rod on cases the police couldn’t solve. That was how E-Branch used he
r, usually: to eavesdrop criminal minds—the minds of prisoners in their cells, too tough for the law to crack—looking for those damning clues which more orthodox methods couldn’t turn up. Which would be satisfying enough work in itself, if only she didn’t actually have to go in there. Because minds like those were often cesspools, which frequently left her knowing how sewers smell. And sometimes, especially if it was a brutal murder or rape, the smell could linger for a long, long time.
Which was probably the reason she’d fallen in love with Harry Keogh. Because his mind was a field of daisies … most of the time. In fact he had the gentlest mind she’d ever come across: not soft, no way! Not even naive, though there was something of that in him too, but just … just gentle. Harry wouldn’t much like hurting anything, or anybody.
With Sandra’s looks it would be strange if there had been no men. There had been men, a few. But her talent wasn’t something she could just switch on and off. Indeed that was its one big drawback: without so much as a by your leave, it came and went. Tonight a man would wine and dine you, take you home and kiss your hand on your doorstep, and ask to see you again. And as you were about to say yes his mind would open like a book and you would see him in there like some great rutting satyr—and you’d be in there with him. Not all men, no, but enough.
But that wasn’t all; there was also the deceit; the fact that people lie. Like the neighbour in the flat next door who smiles and says, “Good morning,” to you on the stairs, when she’s actually thinking: Piss off and die, you ugly bitch! Or the hairdresser who makes small talk while he does your hair, and you suddenly hear him thinking: God, they pay me nine pounds an hour for this! She must have more money than sense, the stupid cow!
Oh, there had been men, all right. The good-looking ones who only worried how they looked. And the not-so-good lookers whose minds seethed with jealousy if anyone else even smiled at you. And then, having got safely through an entire week of evenings with a “perfect” companion, to have him make love to you and lie there beside you in your bed, wondering if he’ll have time for another and still catch the last bus home.
It was life and Sandra knew it, and she’d learned to live with it ever since her middle teens when the thing had first started to develop in her. But it hadn’t left much room for “love”. Not until Harry, anyway.
He was such … an anomaly.
She’d read his file, as well as his mind. He had killed men, a great many. That’s what it said in his file. But it didn’t say he remembered and regretted almost every one of them, or how every now and then he’d get the urge to go back and tell them he was sorry, but really he’d had no choice. It didn’t say he still had nightmares about some of the things he’d seen and done. And anyway, Sandra really couldn’t believe half of the things credited (credited? Or better perhaps, ascribed?) to him. Her own talent was paranormal, yes, but what Harry could do—what he’d used to do—was supernatural. And he’d used his powers the best way he knew how. He had killed many men with them, but he’d never murdered a one.
Sandra knew how murderers thought, and they didn’t think like Harry Keogh. Their thoughts were deep and dark as red wine, but tumbled as a rough sea, and full of shoals and eddies; while his were clear spring water over rounded pebbles. Oh, his mind could be sharp, too; there were plenty of daggers in there, if you gave him cause to whet them; but they were clearly visible at all times, not hidden away, neither afraid of themselves nor of detection. No, there were no dark corners or mean streets in Harry’s mind. Or if there were, he wasn’t the one to dwell on or in them.
And in that same moment, lying there beside him, Sandra knew how she’d defined him. He was, could only be, one of two things: either completely amoral, or naturally innocent. And since she knew there was no lack of morality, that made him an innocent. A bloody innocent, but nevertheless blameless. A child with blood on his hands and on his conscience and in his nightmares, which he had chosen to keep to himself except when they were unbearable, when he went to Bettley. Well, she wasn’t sure what that made Bettley—a Judas-priest? A father confessor who told?—but she couldn’t be happy with what it made her. And the most terrible thing of all, she believed he half-suspected. Which would explain why he was never completely at his ease with her, and why he couldn’t seem to enjoy her the way she wanted him to, the way she enjoyed him. Christ, to have found a man like Harry, only to discover that of all men he was the one she probably couldn’t have! Not the way she wanted him, anyway.
Suddenly angry with herself—wanting to throw off all the covers and leap out of bed, but caring enough that she wouldn’t disturb him—she carefully removed his hand from where it lay draped diagonally across her and slid sideways out from between the sheets. And naked she went to the bathroom.
She was neither warm nor cold nor thirsty, but she felt she had to do something. Something ordinary, to herself, to change herself physically. And that way perhaps to change her mood, too. In the daytime it would be the simplest thing: she would walk to the park and watch the smallest children at play, and know that something of their worlds of faerie would soon find its way into her own far less Elysian existence. And when that thought came, she knew for certain that for someone who was usually so positive, she must now be feeling pretty damned negative. That she should need someone else’s innocence to balance the weight of her own guilt.
She drank a glass of water, splashed cold water up under her arms and breasts where their lovemaking had made her perspire, towelled her flesh dry and examined herself critically in the long bathroom mirror.
Unlike Harry, there was little or no naiveté in Sandra. There might be, except for her telepathy. But it’s hard to be naive or innocent in a world where people’s minds are wont to flutter open like pages in a book, and you don’t have the power to look away but must read what’s written there. The other E-Branch telepaths—people like Trevor Jordan—were luckier in this respect; they were obliged to apply, channel their talent; it didn’t just come and go for them, like a badly-tuned radio station.
Angry again, Sandra shook her head. There she went again: great waves of self-pity! What? Pity for herself? For this beautiful creature in the mirror? And how often had she heard it broadcast, from so many of those stations out there: God, but what I’d give to be like her!
Ah, if only they knew!
But how much worse if she’d been ugly …?
She had large, greeny-blue, penetrating eyes over a small, tilted nose; a mouth she’d trained to be soft and uncynical; small ears almost lost in the burnish of copper hair, and high cheek-bones curving down delicately to a rounded, rather self-conscious chin. Of course she was conscious of herself. Other people were, and so she had to be.
Her right eyebrow, a slightly upward-tilted line of bronze, was questioning, almost challenging. As if she were saying: “Go on—think it!” And sometimes she was.
Her smile was bright, rewarding, involuntary on those occasions when she detected complimentary thoughts. Or she might darken her high brow and narrow her eyes to knife-point at some of the other things she “heard”. At a glance, then, Sandra’s face might well be mistaken for the face on the cover of any number of glossy, popular ladies” magazines. But on closer inspection it would be seen that there were boundless tracts of character there, too. Her twenty-seven years had not left her unblemished; there were laughter lines in the corners of her eyes, yes, but other faint lines lay parallel and horizontal on her brow, speaking volumes for the number of times she’d frowned. She was grateful that the latter didn’t detract from her looks overall.
As for the rest of her:
But for two personal criticisms, Sandra’s body would be near-perfect, or as close as she would wish it to be. She was too large “up top”, which gave her a bouncing elasticity she was afraid might type-cast her, and her legs were far too long.
“Well, you might find those things a disadvantage,” Harry’s voice came back to her from a previous time, “but I’m all for it!” He liked
it when, in their lovemaking, she’d wrap her legs right round him; or when she let her breasts dangle in his face, inviting his attentions. Her large nipples, asymmetrical as most nipples are, seemed a constant fascination to him, at least on those occasions when he was all there. But far too often he’d be somewhere else entirely. And now another truth dawned on her: too often she’d used her sex to trap him in the here and now, as if she were afraid that if she released him he’d fly … somewhere else.
Suddenly cold, she put out the bathroom light and went back to the bedroom.
Harry lay just as she’d left him, on his side, facing left, his right arm draped in the hollow she’d occupied. And still his breathing was deep and steady, his eyelids unmoving. A brief telepathic glimpse, unbidden, denned endless, empty vaults of dream, through which he drifted looking for a door. It came and went, and Sandra sighed. There were always doors in Harry’s dreams, revenant perhaps of the Möbius doors he’d once called up mathematically out of thin air.
He’d once told her: “Now that it’s over I sometimes get this feeling it was all a dream, or a story read in a book of fantasy. Unreal, something I made up, or maybe an out-of-body experience. But that brings back all too clearly what it was really like to be incorporeal, and I know that it happened for a fact. How can I explain it? Have you ever dreamed you could fly? That you actually knew how to fly?”
“Yes,” she’d answered, in her mildly Edinburghian Scottish accent. “Often, and very vividly. I used to run down a steeply sloping field to take off, and soar up over the Pentland hills, over the village where I was born. It was sometimes frightening, but I remember knowing exactly how it was done!”