Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 5
So the crystals, or the buxom woman who had brought the food, or the things they were going to visit when they were well, might easily consider that the cult of Arlan represented a majority view. Hmm. Redfern felt a pointer there. And then, with a fresh shock, he realized he had automatically bestowed intelligence upon the crystals. Maybe —there would have to be, wouldn’t there?—there had been people in those shining enormous gems.
Of the two ideas, that these people had their own Gates to the dimensions, or that they were working on a majority belief, Redfern wished he could opt for the former. It would be less complicated.
So that meant, inevitably, that it would be the latter.
He had only carried the Springfield for a short time; yet already he missed the hard bumping feel of the rifle on his back.
Toilet facilities were available in a small annex through an alcove behind a dilating irised door. Tony and Nyllee were gone a good long time; they came back laughing and happy and flushed. Redfern smiled in sympathy. But he took care not to go into the showers when Val was out there. Not yet, he had to tell himself against the pressures he now recognized as urging him on to a loving relationship. Val was nice, but…
Against force he had always felt resentment. He had had many jobs, as a symptom of that rebelliousness. Certainly in the importance of personal relationships he would not allow himself to be pushed.
Go on, man! A voice seemed to whisper in his brain. She’s warm and vibrant and desirable! What does it matter? She will love it. Go on—enjoy yourselves. …
He stayed under the shower for a good time. He didn’t know if he wanted to cool off or if he Hoped Val would come back.
When the buxom woman brought their second meal he was already feeling the strain intolerably. Whatever pressures were being screwed down on them, Gait and Mina had succumbed easily; but for them it was the renewal and fresh finding of an old magic. For Tony and Nyllee it was all new and wonderful.
Then Val smiled at him and touched his hand. She lifted an eyebrow. He stared at her, at her brown body and laughing face, her shining brown hair and the wonder of her hazel eyes. He wouldn’t last out much longer and he knew himself to be a fool for fighting what seemed absolutely natural. Yet a stubborn orneriness in him kept fighting back, telling him that this was not natural.
For some reason they were being manipulated. First hate, then love. What next? Death?
Along toward evening the feeling of imprisonment curdled his brain. He wanted to scream. They’d been shut in this room all day. The desire for a breath of fresh air choked in him.
The third meal was not brought by the buxom woman. For some reason that Redfern didn’t at first comprehend, Mother Haapan stood up, smiling, and went toward the strongly-built man who pushed the cart. He left the food in the center of the room and extended an arm to the frail, white-haired woman. She seemed less fragile now, Redfern noted, as though—impossibly—flesh had grown on her thin body during the day, had filled her out, firming her breasts, plumping her cheeks, giving her the semblance of middle-age again. The man took her hand and, all in silence, led her from the room.
“Well!” said Mina explosively.
She, too, Redfern saw, had grown more youthful, so that her lost beauty was once again blooming. The changes he saw in the women should have taken months of geriatric treatment, if they were at all possible. Yet they had been accomplished in a day. Even Nyllee was less doughy of face, and Val was more splendid than ever.
“They mean to make us make love!” Redfern said hoarsely. “And we mustn’t! I don’t know how I know—I just do!”
“It is right!” declared Gait. He, too, had become more youthful, less toughly bullying. “Look at my Mina! She is growing back into the incomparable beauty I married!”
Tony chuckled and grabbed Nyllee. Together with an increase in beauty had come also an increase in performance. Still Redfern refused. Val looked languorously on him, sighing, and he realized that whatever strange forces were at work had almost broken her down.
The food wagon stood in the center of the room. The door opened and the buxom woman beckoned to Gait and Mina, to Tony and Nyllee. She glanced at Redfern, shook her head and then beckoned to Val. Without a word, much as Mother Haapan had done, they went out silently.
Redfern and the food wagon were left for company together.
He sat down and tried to think what to do, and all he could think of was what a damn fool he was.
He didn’t hear the girl come in; but he looked up suddenly to see her standing by the door, which was just irising shut. He gaped.
She was everything beautiful he had ever imagined in a girl. Every young man carries an ideal girl in his mind, whom he will never meet in this sinful world, and now Scobie Redfern was face to face with his ideal, plucked whole from his mind and set down in the flesh before him.
Here she stood, half-smiling at him, her hair a glory, her body tall and slim and straight and curved in subtle pulse-hammering loveliness. He recognized an insubstantial dream incarnate. He took half a step forward, conscious of his own body, of the blood thudding in him, of the close-packed roaring in his ears. Everything outside his immediate circle of vision vanished so that he stared only at her, only her face visible to him, gorgeous, supplicating, appealing, demanding. A nimbus of roseate clouds isolated her. Her lips curved into a deeper, more welcoming smile.
He put his hands on her shoulders and the feel of the silkiness of her skin overwhelmed him. Any thoughts of being pressured, of forces working on him, vanished.
The jeweled band in her hair glinted. He pulled her closer, feeling the warmth pouring from her body.
He looked down on her, knowing himself lost and drowned in her.
He looked down into her eyes.
Her eyes…
He saw into those flat lenses. He saw their blankness, their uncaring objectivity, their unawareness of self.
Those eyes had never belonged to a human being and in their mechanical inhumanity he could see only horror.
As he looked he seemed to be sucked into those eyes. He saw bleak landscapes, burning cathedrals, floods and famine and pestilence. He saw a microcosmic representation of that infamous twentieth century Shield of Achilles.
Her hot breath fluttered against his face. Her hands touched his body, groping. He felt abruptly the bones of her shoulders as angular constructs through the soft flesh he so savagely gripped.
He staggered back, nauseated.
“Get away!” he yelled, gagging.
She followed him, crooning softly now, her red tongue darting out, her lips curved, her whole body a voluptuous and blasphemous invitation.
He fell back over a pallet, sprawled on the floor. On one elbow he inched back, his skin crawling, his hair alive with static. Beneath each pallet he could now see thick black and red coaxial cables running away under the pillow across the floor and through outlets in the wall.
He only had a flashing glimpse of them before the girl who was not a girl had flung her hot naked body on him, her furnace mouth seeking to devour him, her passion consuming him.
VI
Even in that shrieking moment of twisted passion with the warm soft naked body of the girl clawing all over him in lush abandon, Scobie Redfern could summon the meaning of what he had seen in this quasi-girl’s eyes to his assistance.
Those red and black coaxial cables fitted in. He remembered what the squat people from Thothtoreth had said. There was manipulation here, a stealing of the psyche, a single determination to bend the will. He could believe near enough anything now, after going through the Gates to the dimensions, after all he had seen.
He pushed his left forearm against the girl’s throat and levered back. Spittle spattered from her mouth. Her tongue darted. Her teeth shone too whitely, like crude TV advertisements. Her soft body pressed against him, yielding as it thrust, and he twisted aside and half rose. She followed him, clawing.
Her hair rippled and waved about him. Strands caught against his teeth like silicon ropes. He put up his right arm as he fell back again, and pulled her hair savagely.
Yet still she did not cry out. Only her deep hoarse gasping as she breathed in passionate determination gave any indication that he was communicating with her. He pulled again, frenziedly, desperate to get away.
The hair came off. A glorious wig, it hung from his hand to reveal a shining domed pate from which every hair had been shaved. The girl bent toward him again, her throat hard and ridged against his forearm.
The jeweled band from her hair fell, tinkling, onto Redfern’s sweaty chest.
He made a last convulsive effort and thrust her back.
She clutched his legs as he rose and he bent to drag her clinging fingers free. The jeweled band slipped down and he grasped it, used it like a knuckle-duster to hit her flush along the jaw.
The blow had no effect.
She rose with him, panting, her breasts tumultuous. He staggered back and then lunged forward, hitting her again, seeing a lick of blood from a split lip. Still she urged her body on toward him, gruesome with its shining bald pate. He turned and ran.
He knew enough now to be sure she was no mortal girl. She was no human being. What he had seen in her eyes belonged to nightmares, alien landscapes and schizophrenic horrors out of this or any world.
Redfern didn’t know what he would find if he stripped that warm and glowing flesh from her: sharp metal limbs, transistors and electronic circuits, power packs; he knew with a cold horror that he would never find a human beating heart.
The only door open was that to the showers. He went through at a dead run, still clasping the jeweled band. The naked, buxom woman who had brought the food had called her band a translator. It would be useful. Redfern skidded on the tiled floor and heard the naked pit-pat of feet following him.
He pressed against the wall by the door. The girl—the thing—ran straight on past. At once he darted back out of the door and pressed the stud that irised it shut. Then he raced like a maniac for the far door.
By the time he was halfway there, the far door had irised open. That, he guessed, was part of the pattern. He had refused stubbornly, idiotically, humanly, not to do what he had been pressured into and unlike the others had not made love on the pallets; so now he would face the third alternative.
The door irised shut after him.
So the girl—the thing—had been recognized as a failure. So be it. He had a clearer idea, now, of what was wanted from him.
He put the translator band on his own head. He wanted both hands free.
At once he heard a voice shouting in perfect English:
“As you will! No one is entitled to a single thing without payment! So you will pay in another way—you will pay!”
Before him stretched a continuation of the room, the same height, the same breadth, with the tall windows showing glimpses of the forest and the sky a long dwindling perspective along one side. The room was immense.
Late afternoon sunlight shone through the windows and flung bars of golden illumination across the floor, like a massive succession of stepping stones.
At the far end he saw a patch of color and, looking more closely as he ran, he made out a group of men and women clad in scarlet robes. One stepped out before the others and held up a hand. Redfern looked about for another way out.
“You will go into the forest, you who are called Scobie Redfern. The crystals will not harm you—not yet, not until you have paid!”
He saw a door, a large irised-open door leading out between two windows. A glass-walled anteroom lay at the side. He saw faces pressed to the glass—Gait, Mina, Tony, Val. They waved to him, at first delighted to see him and then frightened and horrified.
He raced toward them.
Not understanding their horror, he at first did not fully comprehend the pitter-pat noise from the side. It was not the naked girl-thing, for she—it was still securely locked behind the irised-shut door.
Then he saw the walking hospital cart, white and antiseptic and covered with chingling chromed instruments. It stalked up to him on eight jointed legs that jerked out awkwardly. It made a high buzzing all the time.
He swerved in his run, but the thing extended a long telescopic arm with a padded hoop at the end and scooped him up. He fought to break the thing’s grip but his constricting fingers could not dislodge the padded ring. A hooded silver cap swooped down on another telescopic arm and covered his eyes and his nose and his mouth so that his breathing boomed like the buried-alive bellowings of a maniac.
He blacked out.
The very matter-of-factness of the operation annoyed and chastened him after the passionate preliminaries.
He awoke as padded metal bands slackened around his wrists and, ankles and a padded grip withdrew from his head. At once he felt a soreness just above and behind his ears. He put up a hand to rub but another hand came in the way, preventing him.
“Not yet. Wake up first.”
He squinted up. A solemn-faced woman wearing a long scarlet robe stared down at him impassively. Her makeup, heavy and obscuring, defied any attempt to read her face. Scobie Redfern knew very well that this was a matter of life and death for him and that his own life meant little in the greater scheme. He had to concentrate and take all this very seriously indeed if he didn’t want to solve the problem conclusively by his own death.
“Now,” the woman said in her calm monotonous tone. “You may touch.”
Reaching up a tentative finger, he explored his own skull. Bulky cold objects had been attached to his head just behind the ears, and wires led aloft to the crown, where a mast rose to support small aerials. His mind cringed. He felt again that defiling sense of being used. He shut his eyes for a moment, holding himself down.
“What have you done?”
She moved away with a rustle of drapes. “You must pay for what you receive. It is the prime law. You refused to pay in the most simple and pleasant way; now you must pay in a less simple and less pleasant way.”
Redfern shook his head wearily, the appendages and aerials scarcely impeding his movement. Without touching them he wouldn’t have known they were there.
“Pay?” he said. “Pay what? Money? Blood?”
She allowed her caked facial skin to wrinkle in disgust.
“Nothing so primeval. You wear a translator band in your hair. You have been fed and given shelter and protection. You naturally wish to live with us. So you must pay. Pay for what you have had and in advance for what you will receive. We are very fair. We take only what we, in our turn, pay for. You see?”
“No.”
He reached up again and grasped the aerial rod, preparing to yank it free.
She shook her head swiftly. “No. If you try to pull it out you will think the top of your head is coming off. Similarly with anything else we have attached. They are there only temporarily, of course; but you cannot remove them without harming yourself.”
“What are they for?” he shouted angrily, scared.
“So that you pay.” She gestured and a young man wearing a blue robe began to help Redfern off the hospital cart. Redfern pettishly struck away the helping hand; but then he nearly collapsed as his knees jellied and he was glad to grip the strong supporting arm. He glared at them.
“Am I your slave now, then?”
They looked as though he had mentioned the contents of a sewer in a drawing room. “We are not like some others of the Dimensions,” the woman said tartly.
“Oh! So you do know about the Gates and—”
“We know; but we have as little to do with them as possible. We of Senchuria keep ourselves to ourselves.”
Swaying, Redfern stood on his own feet. He felt a little better. The sun had completely sunk now and long drapes filled the windows. Lights glowed in profusion from the roof panels. In the glass-walled annex there now stood only an abandoned table and chairs with a black-robed woman cleaning up with what looked remarkably like a standard U.S. household vacuum cleaner.
“A night’s sleep will set you up, Redfern,” said the woman in a confident, matronly tone. “Go to your quarters.”
“Is—” Redfern swallowed. “Have you got rid of that… thing?”
“The succubus has been returned to storage.”
“Oh.”
When he walked back into the room from which he had fled with such fear, he found only Val, fast asleep on a pallet. The others were—well, where were they? He didn’t know; but he felt so tired and woozy that he flopped down on his pallet at once. He thought about looking beneath for the red and black cables; but he decided to do that in the morning. He keeled over and was asleep almost at once.
As a youngster he had always awoken early, alert, fresh and anxious to get to grips with what the day might bring; the habit had persisted through college and had only recently begun to wane into a hoarded few moments more of pillow before rising. This morning he remembered everything as though a bowl of boiling water had been poured over him. He touched the boxes behind his ears and the aerial. He remembered, all right.
He looked under the pallet. The cables were there, sure enough, coupled up to a connection beneath the pallet head and running away to a hole in the wall. What could they be? He had vague and unscientific ideas. At the moment his greatest interest was centered on the apparatus he wore on his head.
Then Val said something, in a frightened voice, and, turning to her at once he saw that she, too, wore the boxes and aerial on her head.
“Are they going to hypnotize us into something… dreadful?”
He tried to smile at her. He couldn’t say what he was thinking: that they—the strange people of Senchuria—might have placed this weird equipment on his and Val’s head in order to make them obey their will. The force that had yesterday awoken them with love and had during the day rejuvenated them all—even Redfern felt a lot younger and physically more resilient—had today not been used, for he felt no especially intense interest in Val. She, too, regarded him with friendliness, her hazel eyes smiling; but she was not all over him. The door opened and the buxom woman pushed the food wagon in. This morning she wore a demure gown of dark brown. She did not wear a translator band, Redfern, checking, found he still wore his.
