Dagger of the Mind

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

'The entire head had been stripped of skin, creating a nightmarish sculpture in gelled blood...' The hideous apparition that confronted John Redpath almost defied description. It was the beginning of a horrific ordeal that would cause him to question his own sanity... A member of a telepathic research project, Redpath believes the cause to be side-effects from the experimental drugs he is taking - but then stranger things begin to happen. He wakes up to find himself in America...he is drawn to a local house occupied by a bizarre group of people leading an artificial and peculiar life...which events are really happening? Slowly an explanation emerges, more terrifying than anything he could have imagined...

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 169

Sample

It was while he was pouring his breakfast coffee that Redpath became aware that something was wrong.

He paused for a moment and looked around the small apartment, straining his ears for an extra sound or a missing sound in the murmurous background noise of the building. The apartment block was coming to life in exactly the same hesitant but inevitable manner which was familiar to him from a thousand other mornings, with nothing out of kilter anywhere. He could feel the young couple directly above moving about in an ambience of hurried sex, drip-dry garments hanging like ghosts in the gallows of the doorways, moraines of toast crumbs and marmalade on the butter, and on the sideboard the holy trinity assembled into a neat pile – cigarettes, money and car keys. He could feel old Mr Coates next door slowly regaining consciousness, simultaneously relieved and disappointed over not having died in the quiet hours of the night. On the other side, Harv Middleton, sales representative handling plug-in plastic lettering for menus in café windows, but who liked to tell people he was in advertising’, had already departed for the day in a cloud of conflicting perfumes. Everything was normal in the rest of the building, so the trouble had to be nearer at hand, within the four walls of Redpath’s own apartment.

He took stock of the kitchen, noting the presence and position of every object, remembering stories of how people who have been burgled sometimes fail to miss a familiar item until months afterwards. Again, there was no identifiable cause for his unease, which suggested that it did not have an external source – that the subtle wrongness was developing behind his eyes, between his ears, inside his skull. He tried testing himself. Those rays of sunlight slanting down on to the parquet-patterned floor covering – were they too yellow, too bright, too cheerful? That stencilled blue-and-bronze design on his coffee mug – had it acquired new merits, was it evoking too much aesthetic pleasure? Were there exotic fragrances, such as those of Chamberyzette or champak blossoms, mingling with the ordinary homely smells of his food and drink? In short – was he experiencing an aura?

No, please, no, Redpath thought. Not today.

He went to the long chromium-rimmed mirror in the bedroom and stood close to it. The image which looked back at him in spurious intimacy was that of a tall, slim-built man in his early thirties, with closely waved auburn hair and fair, dry, freckled skin of the type which seems never to perspire. There was an irresolute, mobile quality about the mouth which could make its owner look humorous, reckless or sullen on the instant, and the brown eyes were direct and inquisitive. The overall picture was one of unobtrusive good health, something for which Redpath usually felt grateful in view of the fact that he suffered from an incurable disease. There were other times, however, when – even if only for the assistance it would afford him in the management of his condition – he felt it would be more appropriate and in some way satisfying if he could appear ill.

In the present instance, as a case in point, he had no way of knowing if he was experiencing the aura which preceded a grand mal, actually undergoing a mild psychomotor epilepsy with its characteristic disturbance of thought, or simply passing through a period of heightened awareness which had no connection with neural abnormality. He decided to take precautionary measures.

Setting his coffee aside, he went into the living-room, picked up a cigar-box full of darts and positioned himself before the dartboard hanging near the window. With his toes at the edge of a carpet tile he knew to be exactly nine feet from the board, Redpath began throwing the darts, concentrating to the utmost as he tried to place one in each division from one to twenty. There were twenty-one darts in the box, which allowed him to make only one mistake in the private contest. He had to make two attempts at the four, a shot he usually found difficult, but that had the effect of steadying his hand and eye, and he successfully picked off all the other numbers. In a second game he needed two darts for both the four and the sixteen, but in the third set he went right round the board without a single miss, leaving himself with a dart in hand. He resisted an impulse to throw the remaining dart at the bull’s eye – aware that hitting it could cause a dangerous surge of elation – and again took inventory of all those intangibles which made up his consciousness.

He felt cool, relaxed, fully locked-on to his surroundings.

Dr Hyall had recommended occupational therapy as a preventative for attacks (it’s a long-established fact that a workman rarely has a seizure while he’s at the bench) and for a time Redpath had tried making jewellery and repairing watches, but all crafts had a disadvantage in that it took too long to become engrossed, to pick up yesterday’s threads. The darts, by comparison, provided him with immediate and complete involvement for hand, eye and mind. In spite of some scepticism from Dr Hyall and others, Redpath was satisfied that they shunted excesses of neural energy into harmless channels.

He retrieved his coffee and carried it back into the kitchen, now feeling a slight sense of anti-climax. You can’t win, he thought. And it’s all Leila’s fault – she should have been here this morning.

Redpath finished his coffee, placed the mug in the sink beside his empty cereal dish and ran some hot water on both. That done, and with fifteen minutes in hand before he had to leave for the institute, he felt sufficiently bolstered to face the morning paper and mail which had been lying on the hall floor since he got up. He went into the hall and knelt to retrieve the various items spilled across the doormat. On top was a buff envelope bearing the return address of Harrup & Phizackeley, Estate Agents, and he knew it was yet another reminder about the rent of the apartment, now three months in arrears. He fingered the envelope, noted that it seemed to contain more than one sheet of paper, and wondered if things had gone beyond the reminder stage. That, he decided, was a mystery whose unveiling could wait until the evening. He flicked the unopened envelope on to the hall stand and glanced at the three other letters, identifying them as two promotional circulars and an electricity bill. What was the small ad he used to see in American pulp magazines? ‘DO YOU GET INTERESTING MAIL?’

He sighed and, still kneeling on the floor, turned his attention to the newspaper which was the Haverside Herald, a daily serving the four towns and scattering of hamlets which made up the South Haverside district. He took it in preference to any of the nationals because, although the Herald did its best to be as despondent as any major paper, the tragedies served up in its pages were usually on a manageable scale and allowed Redpath to go on believing that something could be done. One of the front page stories in that day’s edition was a case in point – it concerned a local pigeon fancier who had just lost a third batch of prize racing birds.

‘It is definitely sabotage of some kind,’ said 54-year-old Mr Giddings at his home last night. ‘My birds made good time the whole way from France, and they were definitely seen passing over the Tiverly Edge checkpoint at ten o’clock on Sunday morning, which means they should have been—’

Redpath stopped reading as he became aware of something peculiar. At this time of the day the corridor outside his apartment received a lot of natural light, creating a thin line of silver radiance along the bottom of Redpath’s door. The strip of brightness was there now, but it was interrupted at the centre – which meant that an object had been placed against the outside of the door, or that somebody was standing there. The former explanation was the most likely – the postman sometimes simply abandoned packages that were too big for the letterbox – but it seemed to Redpath that the ends of the dark segment were wavering slightly, as became the shadow of a living thing. On the other hand, there was no sound, no evidence that a caller was getting ready to ring the doorbell, and it was hard to believe that anybody would be eccentric enough to stand vigil on his threshold. It had to be a package. The slight shimmering had to be a trick of the light, a result of foliage stirring in the tall trees behind the building or of clouds slipping across the disc of the sun.

Redpath stood up and reached for the lock, then something happened inside his head. There was a shifting, a disturbance, a psychological event. He found himself looking at the plastic-rimmed lens of the peephole set in the middle of the door, the absurd device he had never used because it was designed for nervous and neurotic old ladies. He brought his eye close to the lens.

The face on the other side was not immediately recognizable as a face. At first there was an impression of mushy redness, as though he was looking at a giant tomato or some crimson-fleshed fruit from which the skin had been removed, leaving a surface of moistly oozing pulp. There was a moment during which human features began to emerge from the glistening mass, followed by a brief period of rejection in which Redpath’s mind refused to deal with the messages it was receiving. Then came the instant of terrible, gut-churning, soul-blighting acceptance.

The face, the entire head, had been stripped of skin, creating what appeared to be a nightmarish sculpture in gelled blood. The eyes and eyelids, which were complete in every detail except for lashes, were complex spheres of blood; the naked flesh of the lips was parted to reveal blood-enamelled teeth; the nose, made pendulous by the distortions of the peephole lens, glittered as a mass of bloody droplets, and dark-red bubbles welled and swelled beneath the nostrils, showing that the monster was alive …

Redpath moaned aloud as he stepped back from the door, then a survival mechanism came into play, forcing him against his will to do what had to be done. He lurched forward, twisted the handle of the Yale lock and pulled the door wide open.

The corridor was empty.

He advanced into it on rubbery legs and looked about him. To his left the corridor came to a dead end a short distance on the far side of the door of Mr Coates’ apartment. On the right was Harv Middleton’s door, beyond it the head of the stairs which led down to street level, and in the opposite wing of the building three more doors, all locked. Through the windows which ran the length of the corridor he could see mature plane trees, part of a cindery car park, a builder’s yard stacked with concrete lamp standards, and the rear elevations of a row of semi-detached houses and assorted garages. Morning sunlight glowed on everything with quiet intensity. The world looked cheerful, humdrum, commonplace.

Everything’s normal except me, Redpath thought. I’m turning into a frigging maniac.

He went back into his living-room and stood drumming with his fingertips on the arm of a chair while he came to an important decision about the course of his life. His work – his so-called work – at the institute represented his sole source of income, but he was not going to carry on with it if this was the sort of thing he could expect. The pay was pretty poor anyway – not enough to live on, but just sufficient to convince the social security people, who put commercials on TV begging the public to come and accept money from them, that he was a malingering spendthrift. If he had no work at all he would qualify for National Assistance, would get his rent arrears taken care of, and – above all – would be able to resume a life that was as normal as anybody with his particular affliction could hope to achieve.

Find a cheaper place, came a stray thought. A safer place.

What could be safer than this place?

Safe from what?

‘I told you,’ Redpath said indignantly to the peacefully inert furniture. ‘I’m turning into a lollipop farmer.’ He lifted his brown suede zipper-up, pulled it on and strode out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him. The corridor was still empty. When he got down to street level flat swirls of dust and candy wrappers blew in from the footpath to greet him, gambolling around his ankles like pets. Redpath stared down at them in distaste, suddenly realizing how much he had come to detest the place where he lived.

Bingham Terrace was named after a prominent councillor in Calbridge, largest of Haverside’s four towns. The novelty of the location had appealed to Redpath at first. It had seemed like a fun idea to live on a high street, right in the heart of things, watching the world go by from the vantage point of his cosy apartment perched above a row of six shops. For quite a long time he had appreciated the nearness and convenience of the shops, and had gone to considerable lengths to get on friendly terms with their owners and staffs. Their assorted specialties – home bakery, newsagent, boutique, coffee shop, grocer, butcher – might, for the most part, have been chosen to suit his personal needs. Even the one exception, the women’s clothiers, had managed to make a contribution because its sign proclaimed it to be the Boutique Shop. After Redpath had pointed out the tautology to the girls who worked there, he had established himself as a comic by putting his head round the door once a week and saying he wanted to buy a shop.

Now, quite abruptly, he was tired of the raw modernity of the place, the noise of the passing traffic and the eternal slamming of car doors, the racket kicked up by the youngsters who hung around the coffee shop in the evenings. None of the people in the other eleven apartments had fully responded to his overtures of friendship – possibly because the word had gone round that he was epileptic and they were slightly afraid of him, more possibly because they were dull and circumscribed beings leading dull and circumscribed lives. In all probability he had never managed to get through to them, not even once.

Standing in the narrow passageway which constituted the entrance to the upstairs apartments, Redpath frowned into the boutique on his right, intensifying his gloomy mood. Two of the girls had already arrived, but were standing with their backs to him, arranging displays on a counter, thus making it impossible for an exchange of friendly signals.

They probably never got the joke anyway, he thought. Communication problems. They probably laugh out of politeness. Or nervousness. I should have spelled it out that first time. Look, boutique is French for shop, so your sign says that this is a shop shop. Get it? See the funny joke?

Redpath found himself wishing, more fervently than before, that Leila Mostyn had spent the night with him. He was convinced that everything would have been all right had she been there beside him when he had wakened an hour previously. And no less an authority than Doctor Hyall agreed that he would benefit from the comfort and support of a stable relationship. He squared his shoulders and walked through the tunnel-like passageway to the car park at the rear of the building. Barred by law from obtaining a driving licence, he had the distinction of being the only person in Bingham Terrace – old Mr Coates included – who did not have a car, and his pedal cycle was the sole occupant of a lean-to in one corner of the cindered rectangle. Still brooding about Leila, he unchained the bicycle and wheeled it out to the street. The girls in the boutique saw him this time and waved a greeting. Redpath halted and pointed up at the sign above the shop, and the girls shook with extravagant laughter.

‘Who’s kidding who around here?’ Redpath muttered, getting on to the bicycle. He rode with the townward traffic for a couple of hundred yards before turning left into a quieter and mainly residential thoroughfare which would take him most of the way to the Jeavons Institute. The purr of his tyres on the tarmac and the steady rhythm of his legs usually served as aids to thought. He tried to rehearse the resignation speech he was going to make to Henry Nevison, but his mind kept turning towards that other source of the complications which had begun to plague his life.

Leila Mostyn was a mathematician who for six months had been doing post-graduate work on statistics in the research department where Redpath passed most of the working day. On meeting Redpath, and learning what he did for a living, she had spent some weeks treating him with impersonal kindliness, like a cancer researcher being very correct in her handling. . .