Psychamok

 

The hospital was set in fifteen acres of landscaped gardens, its three floors spaciously appointed, its many-windowed, fresh-air appearance belying the conditions existing within. Not the physical conditions, for they could not be better-- not in the circumstances. But the twelve-foot tall tight-meshed wire security fence surrounding the entire estate spoke all too ineloquently of its function. Tucked away in belts of shrouding pines and oaks, still that fence could not be hidden completely--neither it nor the fact that it was not there to keep people out.

Typical of dozens of similar retreats the hospitalwas new, had been standing for less than five years, was wholly state supported--and was filled with inmates. With poor mad people who had heard and heeded The Gibbering. The hospital had a name, Calm Lawns, but the lawns were the only calm things about it.

It was a sunny Saturday, early June of 2004 when the Stones made their eleventh monthly trip seventy miles north from their Sussex home to Calm Lawns in Oxfordshire, for it was just a month short of a year ago that their son, Richard Stone, had been committed. The thing had first come to him on a hot Friday night last July.

A tall, well-built youth of previously sound physical and mental strength, he had suddenly got up from his bed to prowl the house and complain of a sound in his ears: a faint murmur like the beating of waves heard in a sounding shell. A susurration of whispers growing ever louder, a tumult of tiny voices in chaotic conflict. In short, he heard The Gibbering.

The symptoms were unmistakable, their development inevitable. Before the eyes of his stricken parents Richard Stone's deterioration had accelerated with demonaic speed. Friday night the first shaking of his head, as if to dislodge some leech of the brain, to still the murmuring in his ears; Saturday his reeling and rushing about, and the sickness, the bile, the maelstrom of mad winds or waters howling in his skull; and Sunday Sunday his imitation of those imagined sounds, the gabbled cries of souls in torment. The Gibbering.

Snatched aloft by unseen harpies, by Monday Richard had been a candidate for the straitjacket.

Heartbroken, they had visited him every third day through that first month; following whichtheir visits had been restricted. It was known that too much proximity tended to induce the symptoms in certain people, and Phillip Stone was secretly glad when their trips to the asylum were curtailed by medical restrictions. Vicki had been almost "out of her mind" since Richard's committal; her husband did not want to see that condition become permanent.

He had even tried to persuade her that the monthly visit was too much--protesting that it could only damage her already ravaged nerves, or at best increase her unhappiness--but all such arguments had gone unheard. She loved her son, as did Phillip Stone himself, and she could see no harm in him express or implied, neither deliberate nor incidental. Heartbroken she was; faithless she could never be. She would always be faithful: to her son's sanity, to his memory as he had been. He was not the same now, no, but he could recover. She ignored the fact that no one--no single victim--had yet fully recovered from The Gibbering. Richard was different. He would recover. He was her son.

And there had been a girl. Vicki could not forgive her. Lynn had been the love of Richard's life. He had lived for her, and she had seemed to live for him. But the plague had taken him and she had visited him only twice before her father stepped in and forbade it. She had her own life to lead. She must forget Richard Stone and leave him to his padded cell and his gibbering

Phillip Stone's large expensive car purred up to the gates of Calm Lawns and stopped at the security barrier. The guards were gray-uniformed, carried rifles that fired tranquilizer darts, wore helmets that filtered out all sounds except face-to-face conversation. In addition to filters the helmetscontained radios tuned in to the hospital's security computer; through them the guards could "talk" to the computer, and to each other. The other function of the helmets--some would have it the main function, quite aside from communication--was isolation. No one, not even the doctors, liked to listen to The Gibbering for too long. For which reason Security and Staff alike worked in staggered six-hour shifts, and no one lived permanently within the Calm Lawns perimeter except the inmates themselves.

The Stones had visitors' passes but even so their prints were checked at the security barrier. Then, with their passes stamped, the barrier went up and they were allowed in. And while they drove through patrolled gardens--along gravel roads between lawns and fountains and low, rocky outcrops of moss-covered stone, where shrubs and rose bushes luxuriated and vines crept on arching trellises--Security alerted the hospital of their coming. At the car park they were met by a helmeted receptionist, a girl who smiled and checked that the doors of their car were locked, then gave them headphones that covered their ears and issued soft, calming background music; following which they were led into the hospital complex itself.

Richard's cell was on the second floor. His parents were taken up by elevator and led along a rubber-floored perimeter corridor where dust-motes danced in beams of sunlight through huge, reinforced glass windows. There were many, many cells; their inhabitants did not need a great deal of room. And while the soothing music was fed to the Stones through their headphones, they plodded on behind their guide until they reachedRichard's cell--his "room," as Vicki termed it, but it was a cell like all the others.

Its door had a number, 253, and there the guide paused, smiling again as she tapped out the three digits on her electronic wrist-key. The door hissed open, admitting them to a tiny antechamber no bigger than a cubicle. Inside were three chairs, one of which the girl in the helmet took out into the corridor, leaving the Stones on their own. Just before the doors hissed shut on them, she said, "I know you've seen him in a straitjacket before. It's for his own good," and she nodded sympathetically.

"Are you ready?" Phillip Stone asked, his voice a little shaky. His wife half-heard him, half-read his lips, nodded and took off her headphones. "Vicki," he pleaded, "why don't you leave them on?"

"I want to speak to him," she answered, "if I can. And when--if--he speaks to me, I want to hear what he says."

Her husband nodded, took off his own phones and hugged her. "Have it your own way, but--"

She wasn't listening. As soon as he released her she turned to the inner doors, stared for a moment at a slip-card in its metal frame, read the words she had come to dread through many previous visits:

"Richard Stone--No Positive Improvement."

Then, hands trembling, she reached toward the doors, reached for the handles which would slide those doors back on well-oiled rollers. An inch from grasping them she froze. The flesh of her cheek quivered. She glanced at her husband. "Phillip?"

"I hear it," he said, his color gray. "It's louder this time. Not only Richard. It's all of them. Youcan hear it coming through the walls, the floor. They're gibbering, all of them!"

"I I feel it more than hear it," she said.

"Feel it, hear it," he shrugged defeatedly. "That's why they give you headphones."

"Ma! Ma!" came a bubbling, rising, tormented scream from behind the doors. "Oh! Mamaaaaaaaa!"

Hissing her horror from between colorless, twitching lips, Vicki grasped the handles and rolled back the doors. On the other side a wall of lightly tinted plate glass separated the Stones from their son, who lay on the thickly-padded floor coiled in a near-fetal position. He was in a jacket, as they had been warned he would be, with a white froth drying on his lips; but his face was turned toward them and his eyes were open. Open wide and wild. The eyes of a terrified animal, a rabid dog, their gaze wasn't quite concentrated, their focus not entirely correct. There was a vacancy, a nameless distance in them.

The antechamber and padded cell were audio-linked. "Richard!" Vickie reached out her arms uselessly toward him. "Oh, Richard!"

"Ma?" he repeated, a query in his voice, a half-prayer. "Ma?"

"Yes," she sobbed, "it's me, son--it only me."

"Do you understand, son?" Phillip Stone asked. "We've come to see you."

"Understand? See me?" Richard's eyes were suddenly awake, alert. He rolled, sat up, hitched himself across the floor by inches, came up close to the glass--but was careful not to touch it. On his side the plate's surface was electrified. In the early days he had used it deliberately, when things got too tough, to shock himself unconscious.Since then he had learned better. Learned the lessons of any poor dumb trapped animal.

"It's us, son--Ma and Da," his mother told him, her voice close to breaking. "How are you, Richard? How are things?"

"Things?" he grinned, licking his lips with a furred tongue. "Things are fucking bad, Ma," he said matter-of-factly, rolling his eyes.

"Son, son," his father gently admonished. "Don't talk to your mother like that, please."

"Fucking, cunting, arse-picking, shit-stinking bad," Richard ignored him. "Why don't you get me out of here? Why did you put me in here? Do you know what it's like in here? Do you realize that I can hear them every second of every minute of every hour of every day and night? Did you know that, Ma?"

"Richard!" his father snapped. Then, less harshly, "Son, old chap, try to control--"

"Son?" Richard's eyes had shrunk down to yellow pinpoints burning into his father's through the tinted plate. Perhaps it was only a trick of the colored glass, but Phillip Stone could have sworn those pupils pulsed like a pair of amoebas, brimming like blobs of molten gold. "Did you say son?" Richard shook his head, his eyes fixed in their stare. "Ah, somebody's son, yes! But not your son, 'old chap!'"

Vicki could no longer hold back her tears. "Richard, oh my poor, poor boy! Oh my poor love, my lovely boy!"

Her husband threw an arm about her shoulders. "Vicki, don't. He understands nothing. We shouldn't have come. It's too much for you. He doesn't know what he's saying. He's just gibbering!"

"Mal" Richard screamed again. "Maaaaa! I dounderstand, I do! Don't listen to him. He's not my father. You don't remember, do you? No, but I do. Ma, you named me after my father!"

His words seemed to conjure something within her. For the merest moment mad, impossible memories seemed to burn upon the surface of her mind's eyes--only to be brushed aside. The Gibbering was, after all, infectious. "Oh, son, son!" she collapsed against the plate glass, going on her knees, her face only inches from his and wet with tears. "You don't know what--"

"But I do I do I do!" he insisted. "Oh, I do! I'm the only one who does know!" He rolled his eyes again, the yellow pupils going up, up until the white showed. And slowly, slowly his lips drew back from his teeth in a horrific lunatic grin, and the saliva trickled and bubbled thickly from his gaping jaws. In mere moments his face had become a total nightmare.

"No want in all the world," he said, the words breaking glutinously through phlegmy foam like oily bubbles rising in mud. "No wars, no misery, no fear--except the misery of this, the fear of this! No prayers where there's nothing to pray for. Religion dead, faith dying. What use faith when the future's assured? No famine, no flood, no pestilence--except this pestilence! Nature herself bows to Man's science but does she really? Peace and plenty? The land of milk and honey? A perfect battleground! With all the lesser evils out of the way, the field is clear for the greatest Evil of all. And it's coming, it's coming! The Gibbering is only the advance guard, and we are the fathers of the New Faith!"

The white balls of his eyes rolled down, seemed almost to click into place, like the reels of somesentient slot machine. Their yellow pupils blazed and then a further deterioration.

The Stones had seen this twice before, this abrupt and still more hideous alteration in their son, which must invariably terminate any visit in which it occurred. It was a transformation from sub-human to complete alien. Without warning his cheeks, all the flesh of his face seemed sucked in, shriveled, wrinkling like a paper bag with its air extracted. The yellow fires behind his eyes flickered low. His head wobbled upon his neck, jerking and twitching without coordination. His color became chalk-white--a pale amber as seen through the tinted glass--then rapidly darkened to a purplish blotching. The rise and fall of his chest beneath the straitjacket slowing, stilling. Breathing coming to a halt. And the purple spreading. His wrinkled, monkey-face darkening, tongue protruding. And finally the blood trickling, then spurting from gaping nostrils as his mother screamed: "Oh, Richard--no, no, no! Noooooo!"

In another moment consciousness fled him and Richard toppled face forward against the glass partition. The charged plate galvanized his muscles, flinging him back from its field. He tossed for a moment, then lay still upon the deep-padded floor, his face turned to one side and shiny with blood.

Vicki had instinctively jerked back from the tinted pane, lay half-fainting on the floor, her hands propping her up. Phillip went down on his knees beside her, wrapped his arms about her, rocked her to and fro for a moment as she sobbed. Then the door behind them hissed open and their receptionist-guide was touching his shoulder. "I'm afraid--" she gently began.

"It's all right," Phillip Stone cut her short, staring almost unseeingly up at her. "We'll be leaving now."

"Mr. Stone," she smiled concernedly, reached up a hand and tapped her clean pink nails upon the plastic casing of her headphones, "you really should wear them, you know."

"Yes, of course," he automatically answered, helping Vicki to her feet. Then his eyes focused. He stood stock still, his arm about his wife, holding her up. His air was that of a man who listens intently for something.

The girl looked at him questioningly. "Mr. Stone?"

"No need for the headphones now," he told her. "Can't you feel it? It's quiet as a tomb in here. They've all stopped, for the moment at least. They've stopped gibbering"

Résumé 1:
Psychomech
 
 
For each force there exists a counterforce, and every action has its reaction. For darkness there is light, for day night. Time is measured in space and space in time, and neither may exist without the other. These are Laws of Nature which apply to all matter, to every living creature in every biosphere, and to every psychic emanation—every thought—in the great Psychosphere which encompasses all the worlds of space and time wherever life exists.
And the Principal Law is this: There Shall Be a Balance. For laughter there shall be sorrow, and for life death. That is to say: for every birth or emergence there shall be a life or existence, running its course and coming to an end. With time tipping the scales, even mountains die and turn into sand.…
…Except that in 1952 a man was born on the planet Earth who would break that Prime Law. His name was Richard Allan Garrison, and his destiny was immortality.
* * *
Garrison’s childhood was never easy, rarely happy. Life’s knocks were hard; he was shaped on an anvil of pain. Finally the loss of his mother, the only one who ever cared or mattered, finished the job. Dipped naked in his sorrow, he emerged case-hardened. Cynical, a little—a rebel, somewhat—and bitter, yes. But not completely.
Garrison’s flesh was weak as all flesh, but his will was unbendable. He had taught himself a trick: he could take disappointments, hurts and frustrations, and absorb them, drown them in the deep dark wells at the back of his mind. A trick, a defense mechanism. One which would serve him well.
But there were other tricks in Garrison’s mind of which he was unaware…until September 1972, in Northern Ireland. By then he was a Corporal in the Royal Military Police, a “target,” as he and every other soldier out there thought of themselves. Boots and a uniform, a flak jacket and a Sterling submachine gun, and eyes in the back of your head if you fancy a pint in the mess tonight.
September 1972, and a dream—or nightmare—that persisted in bothering Garrison. A warning, an omen, a glimpse into a strange future, the dream had concerned a man-God, a dog and a Machine…and Garrison himself. And it had ended with a bomb. While its repetition worried him he could hardly hope to recognize it for what it was; in Northern Ireland many men dreamed of bombs. But Garrison’s bomb was real.…
Thomas Schroeder was in Belfast, too, on business. Millionaire industrialist, ex-Nazi, arms manufacturer, international financier, he was there with his aide, Willy Koenig, and with his family. Schroeder’s young wife, their baby son and the child’s nanny, had rooms in a hotel in an assumed “safe area” of the city. From there, upon conclusion of his business, they were to fly to Australia; a holiday in the sun. That holiday never happened.
Garrison was on duty when the bomb warning came, was there at the Europa when Schroeder and Koenig returned from certain “business” talks with the IRA (whose proposals they had viciously rejected) to find the building cordoned off and in process of evacuation. In an effort to get Schroeder’s wife, child and nanny out of the hotel, Garrison had killed two young terrorists—after which he had been caught in the bomb blast. He was blinded, Schroeder crippled, the nanny killed outright. But Schroeder’s wife and child were saved unharmed.
At the last, however, when the blast came, Garrison had expected it. He had known it was coming and also that it would blind him—as it had in his dream. He later remembered Schroeder’s face from that dream, too—the face of the man-God.…
* * *
In early 1973 Garrison accepted schroeder’s invitation out to his estate in the Harz Mountains. There he became aware of the man’s consuming interest in ESP and the “fringe” sciences, theories and beliefs—especially reincarnation and immortality.
Like any vastly rich man as he grows old, the German loathed and feared death’s inevitability. His intention had been gradually to transfer his own mind and personality into his child. A man is after all “reborn” in his son; but Schroeder had been intent upon a far more substantial rebirth. Now, however, it could not be. The boy was as yet a baby, his mind unformed, and Schroeder was dying as a result of the bomb. If he had had ten more years…but he had not even one.
On the other hand, he did have Richard Garrison.…
Under Schroeder’s tuition Garrison began to discover and practice the hidden talents of his mind, finally coming to believe that indeed a man might achieve immortality! They made between them a pact, which was this:
If Schroeder could return from beyond the grave—if there was any way in which his psyche could subsume or Gestalt itself within Garrison’s—then that Garrison would accept him, become host to another’s mind. In return…
Schroeder numbered among his friends the world’s greatest seer, Adam Schenk. Schenk plumbed the future for Garrison and it was seen he would become rich and powerful beyond all dreams of human avarice. But money and power were not everything, there would be much, much more. The future was never lucid, ever misty; but there would be…a machine, the Machine of Garrison’s dream. And through the Machine his sight would be restored to him.
His pact with Schroeder was sealed.…
During his stay in the Harz Garrison met Vicki Maler. She, too, was blind and already beginning to burn bright with a rare cancer. But they loved each other, however briefly and intensely, before he lost her. Since she knew she was dying—unwilling to burden Garrison—Vicki simply went away.
Within six months Thomas Schroeder was dead, and not long after that Vicki Maler, too. Schroeder was cremated; Vicki’s ravaged body was cryogenically “suspended” at Schloss Zonigen in the Swiss Alps. This latter had been Garrison’s wish and he had his reasons—even if he did not fully understand them.
Meanwhile, much of Schroeder’s wealth had passed down to Garrison. Along with it came Willy Koenig, to look after the blind man as he had once looked after his beloved Colonel Schroeder; for Koenig believed that something of Schroeder had already found its way into Garrison. And there was also a dog: Suzy, a black Doberman bitch.
Years passed and Garrison married. Perhaps he loved Terri initially, it is doubtful that she loved him; there had been a man before Garrison and eventually she would turn to him again, though not for some years yet. He was the psychiatrist Gareth Wyatt, into whose hands had fallen a certain machine. A machine called Psychomech, a mechanical psychiatrist.
Wyatt was desperately in need of funds. His practice, once flourishing, was almost defunct; to make matters worse, there was a problem of a far more serious nature. Wyatt was a murderer. His victim had been the war criminal Otto Krippner who deserved death (even if he did not die for his crimes), and the weapon Wyatt had used was Psychomech.
Perhaps ironically, Psychomech had been built by Krippner, a man whose origins, background and ideals were as far removed from Thomas Schroeder’s as the dark side of the moon. Krippner had been a psychiatrist in a so-called “remedial medicine unit” of the SS. Certain of his practices there had guaranteed his name’s later appearance on the world’s most-wanted lists of war criminals. Some years after the war, with the help of an organization known as Exodus, he had made his escape from Germany to England.
Wyatt, of sympathetic persuasions, had been recruited by Exodus in Germany while a student of psychiatry. When Krippner’s escape was planned, Wyatt was contacted and instructed to “employ” the man and assist with his absorption into his new identity and environment. There was no way he could refuse (Exodus would take such a refusal very badly) but things would not be so bad. Krippner had been, still was, a brilliant psychiatrist in his own right. There was a great deal Wyatt might learn from him.…
And so, after his many years of fear, flight and evasion, Krippner settled in to work—ostensibly as a gardener in the grounds of Wyatt’s large but largely untended country home in Sussex—and at first he had seemed more than grateful. He displayed his gratitude, again ostensibly, by slowly constructing Psychomech in an empty upstairs room of Wyatt’s house.
Psychomech was to be the culmination of many years of research and experiment, and through the machine Wyatt’s fortunes would be restored to their previous standing. The German did not tell Wyatt that Psychomech was an unfinished Nazi project to create supermen—and that he, Otto Krippner, intended to be the very first of such!
By the time Psychomech was completed in 1976, Amira Hannes and her network of Israeli bloodhounds had already tracked down many of Krippner’s contemporaries; it was only a matter of time before they got him, too. Exodus got in touch with Krippner, advised him to move on. Wyatt was also contacted, told to waste little time seeing Krippner on his way and covering the Nazi’s tracks.
He did no such thing but used Psychomech to murder Krippner, weighed his body down and slipped it into a deep, dark, tree-shaded pool in the grounds of his home. This way Krippner could never be tracked down; Wyatt’s connection with Exodus would never be discovered—
—All of which occurred three years before Wyatt’s second affair with Terri Garrison.
* * *
In 1980 Terri arranged a meeting between her lover and her husband, and Garrison’s ESP at once pinpointed Wyatt as a crucial factor in his future. In short, he “knew” that Wyatt was the key to the Machine, “knew” also that the psychiatrist actually had possession of Psychomech.
Wyatt was still desperately in need of money. He claimed that while Psychomech was incomplete and in need of much more work yet, nevertheless its potential was enormous. It would repay any investment many times over. If Garrison were willing to fund the project, he would surely reap a large share of the eventual profits. Garrison did better than that: he employed an expert in microelectronics to strip Psychomech down and replace bulky, obsolete and dangerous parts with new and compact high performance components.
When in 1981 the new Psychomech was ready to be tested, Garrison demanded that he himself be the guinea pig. This suited the illicit lovers very well. Their original plan had been this: that when Psychomech became a success, Terri would desert Garrison for Wyatt. They would manage a living on Psychomech’s commercial earnings. But now…Wyatt had used Psychomech once to commit a murder. Why not twice? Terri’s inheritance would be vast.
As for the Machine itself, Psychomech was supposed to function like this:
The patient would be caused to dream, to experience nightmares born of his own worst fears. This would be achieved by the stimulation of his brain’s fear-centers. Psychomech would blow up his neuroses and psychoses out of all proportion, simultaneously supplying him with the physical (more properly mental) strength to overcome these fears. The conflicts within the patient’s mind would be utterly real to him; having subconsciously “defeated” his personal, inner demons, he would discover upon awakening that the conscious manifestations of his neuroses were similarly vanquished.
And indeed the Machine might well effect just such cures—but that was merely a spin-off from its primary function, which was this:
That the subject’s mind be utterly cleansed of all fear, and that his ego and potential ESP abilities—latent in all men—be expanded almost infinitely. So that he would emerge a fearless mental giant, a near-superman!
The mad dream of an insane Fuehrer? Perhaps…
* * *
Garrison went on to Psychomech on a Sunday morning in June 1981. Certain precautions had been taken to ensure that the “experiment” would not be interrupted; surprisingly, Garrison himself had been responsible for the arrangements. Willy Koenig had been sent on holiday to Hamburg; Suzy the Doberman pinscher—Garrison’s “familiar”—was safely lodged in the kennels at Midhurst. Be that as it may, both Koenig and Suzy knew the exact moment that Garrison went on to the Machine, and they would later hear and answer his mental SOS when Wyatt tried to kill him.
Wyatt’s method was simple—or should have been. He would magnify fear-stimulation to the full and cut the Machine’s relief systems to their minimum. Garrison would be driven mad and the Machine would not be able to help him; its fail-safe would not function; eventually, in paroxysms of absolute terror, he would expire. The log of the experiment would be falsified, the controls reset. It would all be seen as a terrible accident; Wyatt would sigh, shrug and point out that Garrison had known the dangers, had known that Psychomech was, after all, only a prototype.…
But Garrison did not go insane and he did not die. While his wife and her lover sated themselves, he reached out from his mechanically induced nightmares and took control of Psychomech with his mind, turning certain of the Machine’s energies to his own advantage. The battle was joined, unendurable mental horror against almost limitless psychic strength! Something had to give, and because Psychomech was a machine that something must be the flesh-and-blood Garrison himself.
Unless—
The pact! That pact he had made with Thomas Schroeder, dead these eight years. Schroeder was there now in Garrison’s bloated nightmares just as he had been in that much earlier dream in strife-torn Belfast, and his plea now was that same plea he had made then: that Garrison let him in! Even Psychomech could not destroy both of them.
Garrison capitulated, freely admitted Schroeder into his mind, subsumed the long-dead German’s disembodied psyche within his own id, his own being.
After that.…
Hitler’s advisers had envisaged a machine to turn ordinary men into supermen. But what would happen if the subject was a man whose powers of ESP were already honed to an extraordinary edge? What if, instead of one mind returning from such a voyage, a multimind should emerge—a psychic sentience expanded to almost cosmic proportions? Superman—?
Or God?
Not God, no—not even a god—but a man with near-godlike powers. This was the Garrison/Schroeder which Psychomech had created. And this was the Garrison/Schroeder who freed himself from the Machine to find the lovers desperately, fearfully coupling in their bed—find them out in all their treachery.
Then…miracles and madness!
By the will of Garrison/Schroeder, Vicki Maler was brought from Schloss Zonigen to England and returned to life. But it was Schroeder’s will alone which transferred the living cancer that killed her into Gareth Wyatt and Terri Garrison! And it was Garrison, humane as he had always been, who ended it by destroying both of them in an instant.
* * *
Outside Wyatt’s house when all was done, Garrison/Schroeder and Vicki found Koenig waiting. Suzy was there, too, but she was dead; Wyatt had blown her part with a shotgun. No longer blind—golden-eyed and awesome—Garrison/Schroeder had looked at Suzy, commanding her that she be whole again and live. And Suzy lived.
And Koenig, too—the ever-faithful Koenig—he also was rewarded. He and Garrison/Schroeder embraced, and when it was done Koenig’s clothes fell empty to the earth.
Then, as the house of Wyatt and all it contained melted down behind them and became slag, Garrison/Schroeder/Koenig, Vicki and Suzy moved on toward their futures.…
 
Copyright © 1985 by Brian Lumley