Koontz, Dean - The Psychedelic Children Read online

  the helicopter whining somewhere above them.

  Then the sun came on. The copter settled into Ihe clearing, its headlamps like the eyes of some tremendous moth, its rotors like

  wings.

  "Frank!"

  He grabbed her, pulled her back into the car, scrambled behind the wheel.

  PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE. It was the Voice of T.

  He would have to reverse out of there, which would be a disastrous undertaking in this rugged terrain. Or he would have to push

  through them. Jameson, T, and another android labeled JJK were crossing the hoary field, legs frosted with snow, weapons drawn. He

  rolled down the window. "What do you want?"

  "If you bought groceries that morning, Mr. Cauvell," Jameson said between breaths, "why did no grocer within fifty miles have a

  record of your personal purchase?"

  T was twenty feet away, directly in front of the car.

  He slammed down on the accelerator, flipped the melting bars to full power, felt the jolt when T went under the wheels, as the

  second android was struck a glancing blow that tore its arm off. The engine was whining. He could not make a swift escape through

  the drifts, for the melting bars would not be able to work fast enough. He wrenched the wheel to the left, spun the Champion

  around, and shot back along the trail he had burned into the clearing in the first place. He passed Jameson who leaped out of his

  way. The two androids were lifeless.

  "We're free!" he shouted excitedly.

  The vibra-beam sliced a neat hole through the rear window and struck Laurie on the temple. She slumped across him, dribbling blood

  from one ear . . .

  He could personify tbe moon: the moon peered down patronizingly. He could make a girl into a rose: she was a rose, soft and gentle.

  He could forge metaphors, hammer out similes; he could allocate so much alliteration to just so many lines. But he could not stop

  the bleeding from her ear.

  He could rise up in the morning like a dragon from the sea.

  With the sun over his shoulder, he could warp words to say his thoughts.

  He could lie down at night, satisfied as a god must be.

  But stopping the blood was beyond his powers.

  She was stretched across the back seat, face up, pale and ghostly in what little moonlight filtered through the tinted windows.

  Cauvell lashed himself into the bucket seat, gripped the wheel viciously. Where to? How long would he have until all roads were

  blocked? The forest clearing was fifteen miles behind, but the world had shrunk to the size of an orange in recent years, and

  fifteen miles was hardly the length of one seed. The thing, perhaps, was to find a small town and-with the gun-force a doctor to

  care for her. Hide the Champion in the doctor's garage. He turned the engine over, wheeled into the twisting lane, and spun his

  wheels over the snow.

  Thin rust trickled from her ear-liquid.

  Caldwell twenty-six miles . . .

  Caldwell nineteen miles . . .

  He was ten miles from Caldwell when the helicopter fluttered over the tree tops that sheltered much of the road. The car was

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  bathed in sickly yellow light. He swerved left, right, darting out of the beam. But they broadened the shaft and covered both

  lanes with it. Bullets cut up the pavement in front of him. One pinged off the hood. A few vihra-bearns sent little sections of

  the pavement boiling. Then, abruptly, there was darkness and no helicopter.

  Slowing, he rolled down the window, listened. No whitpa-whupa of fiercely beating blades. It was gone. It vanished; it did not

  simply drift away. Perhaps it had crashed. Yet there was no explosion, no crashing sound. He rolled the window up and drove on.

  They had spotted him near Caldwell, and he must bypass that town now. Forty miles away lay Steepleton.

  He looked over the sent, felt his stomach flop at the sight of her, comatose and pale-dark. He pressed down on the accelerator.

  Steepleton thirty-two miles . . .

  Steepleton twenty-four miles . . .

  At the boundaries of Steepleton there was a roadblock. Seven men, seven androids. And they knew damn well whose car was coming;

  they had their weapons raised ...

  Death is not something that creeps about in black robes, slavering. Death cannot be seen . . .

  It can't!

  And yet his world teas a graveyard. The moon rode high above clouds like pieces of torn shrouds flapping madly to the time of the

  winds in the dead trees. He struggled up the hiU in the cold air, the wind-born explosions of snow forcing him to squint.

  "Good evening," said the mortician.

  Re said good evening . . .

  "Dust to dust" the embalmer said from his perch atop a monument steeple.

  "Ashes to ashes," said the sexton.

  He ignored all of them. He pushed onward, toward the summit of the hill where the sepulcher bit at the sky, a broken tooth.

  Somewhere a muffled drum. Somewhere a passing hell . , .

  He pushed his shoulder against the stone door, felt the rusted hinges move a bit, heard them squeak, heard the rats run inside.

  Stepping in, the moonlight flooding in he-hind him, he advanced to the sarcophagus. They had Jntried her in a limestone coffin,

  for that facilitated the rotting of the corpse. Somehow, that filled him with rage. He thrust the immensely heavy lid free, looked

  down at her pale face. Gently-ohf so gently-he lifted her out, placed her upon the marble slab where no coffin yet lay.

  Somewhere a tolling-in rereverse; somewhere a dirge is sung backwards.

  And he would sing the oration; he would make with panegyrics . . .

  "For the Moon never beams without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never ri.te hut I see the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of mij darling, mi/ darling, my life and my bride,

  In her sepulcher there by the sea-

  In her tomb by . . ."

  He was three miles past Steepleton. And there were no guards . . .

  He pulled the car off the road and sat thinking for a time.

  Was his mind leaving him? There had been guards and a roadblock back there, had there not? Which was real, the police or the

  graveyard world? The police, certainly. He was no E.A. foe who slept with his dead mistress. Besides, his mistress was not dead.

  He turned to look at her. Her face had become wrinkled as if she were in pain. He called her name. For a brief second, he thought

  she answered. But her lips had not moved. He turned back and faced front. It was ten miles to Kingsmir. What would happen there?

  Would the graveyard delusion come back? Would there be further oddities? He suddenly remembered the disappearance of the

  helicopter and shuddered. Pulling back onto the road . . .

  . . . He woke and kissed her on the neck.

  liar black-black hair spilled doion her bare shoulders, over her bare breasts, curled tinder her pink ears .. .

  She kissed him hack . ..

  And then she was lying in a limestone casket . . . Then warm and alive , , , then cold and rotting ... A helicopter flattered

  again . . . A helicopter blinked out of existence in a world where men had suddenly never learned to fit/ . . , Then if was back

  again, chasing after quarry that had gone Ions ago when the world had been different for a few moments . . .

  Tombstones . . .

  Blink!

  A warm bed, warm bodies . ..

  Blink!

  Blink! Blink!

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  He woke up two miles closer to Kingsmir. And he knew! He pulled the Champion onto the berm and crawled be-tween the b
ucket seats

  to where she lay. He ran his fingers over her face, trailed them under her chin, felt the blood pulsing in her neck. Laurie was

  changing reality! Somehow, comatose as she was, the psychic powers were siphoning themselves off instead of exploding violently.

  They were under control! And they were not merely powers of teleportation and mind reading; they were powers that could change the

  basic fiber of the universe. He had thought he imagined her answering him a while back; now he knew she had answered. There had

  been no need of lips.

  "Laurie, can you hear me?"

  There was the distant answer that he had to strain to hear.

  "Laurie, you heard the helicopter, sensed the guards and the roadblock. And you changed reality for a while until the car-moving

  independent of both worlds-had passed the trouble spot. Isn't that what you did, Laurie?"

  A distant yes.

  "Listen, Laurie. The graveyard is all wrong. Poetic as hell, but wrong. The other one. The one where we are in bed. Laurie," He

  stroked her chin. He kissed her lips and urged her to concentrate. He heard the sirens on the road and talked faster . . .

  He talked of a world where there had never been hallucino-children- He spoke of a world where ali were normal . . .

  He woke before she did and lay listening to the rasping of her breath: seafoam whispering over jagged rocks. It would get worse

  before she woke.

  The view froni the window was pleasant. It had been snowing since suppertime. Beyond the hoary willow tree lay the highway, a

  black slash in the calcimined wonderland. They were plowing the road, for the heating coils had broken down again. Somehow, he

  felt that he had seen it all before. Everything was like an echo being relived.

  "Glittering dreams fluttering flaked float softly downward while snow -priests prepare for fairy cotillions . . ."

  He was not sure whether that was senseless or not. And even the poem seemed Haggling familiar. He repeated it softly.

  "Frank?" she said.

  "I know."

  "Soon."

  Til pull the car out of the garage."

  The snow-"

  "They seem to have it under control," he said, feeling as if he had said the same thing once before.

  "I love you," she said as he went through the doorway into the shadow-filled living room. That always sent shivers through

  him-that face, that voice, those words. The shiver continued, however, rippling over his spine, quaking across his forehead,

  spreading to ne3rly every nerve in his body. What was he frightened of? And what was this feeling of familiarity all aboul? He was

  more than normally afraid for Laurie. After all, she was only pregnant. Suddenly, he hoped to hell it would be a girl. And then

  the shivers were gone as he rushed for the car. He was warm, the world was wonderful, and there was no longer a sense of

  familiarity. Suddenly things were very much different and very new indeed.

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