Beetle Juice (10 page)

Then Wizard walked forward, coming to join them. He too had been overwhelmed.

They were lost. Unless they could find some way to balk the monster before they reached it.

Wetzel got an idea. It was far-fetched, but it was all his struggling mind could produce at the moment.

He transformed back to manform. He found he could do that, because it wasn't resisting the deadly pull on his mind. The predator evidently didn't care what form its victims had, so long as they yielded to its imperative summons. Now he could talk.

“Veee!” he said.

She was right beside him. “Yes.” She too could respond as long as she did not resist the monster.

“Hide from it,” he said urgently. “Go to your storm shelter. It can't reach you there.”

She nodded. Then she stopped walking. She had retreated into her secret place, and was no longer subject to the control of the monster.

But in a moment she resumed walking. “It worked,” she said. “But I can't desert the rest of you.”

“I can retreat similarly,” Wetzel said.

“But that won't save the others.”

And that was the problem. Saving just the two of them was not enough.

“Maybe Tod can help,” she said. “Tod!”

Tod turned his head toward her without halting his marching. “Yes.” He too could respond when specifically addressed.

“Wetzel and I can retreat inside ourselves and avoid the mind signal. But that won't help the rest of you. What can we do?”

“Like dogs. One distracts while the other attacks. Take turns distracting it while the other acts.”

It was more complicated than that, but Wetzel got the picture from Tod's mind. “Do it!” he told her. “Make faces at the monster, or something. Tease it. Then retreat so it can't find you. Maybe then it won't be watching me.”

She caught on immediately. “Hey, monster!” she exclaimed. “Sourpuss! Look at me! I'm escaping you!” And she stopped walking.

The grip on Wetzel's mind eased as the monster oriented on Veee. Wetzel strode to where Tod walked, put his arms around the man, and picked him up. He turned and strode back up the hill, carrying Tod. “That's the way,” Tod said. “I wish I could help.”

“You already helped, giving us the strategy.”

Then the monster reoriented, and Wetzel lost control. He started turning around.

Now it was his turn. “Go jump in a lake of manure!” he said. “You can't hold me!” And he retreated into his own storm shelter.

He waited, uncertain whether Veee had emerged from her shelter yet, or how she was coping. He couldn't wait too long, lest the others be hauled on down.

He emerged and looked around. Veee was carrying Vanja up the slope. She had done it!

Then she stopped and began to turn back. “Nyaa Nyaa! You can't catch mee!” And went still.

The monster was distracted again. This was working! Wetzel still had Tod over his shoulder. He marched a few steps back, until the power grabbed his mind again. But he could still talk. “Vanja! Change to bat form so it's easier to carry you out.”

He saw her change. Then he teased the monster again as he retreated.

When he came out of it, he found that Veee, freed of the weight of Vanja's body, had gone after Wizard and hauled him back a few steps. They were making progress.

But the monster was catching on. Next time Wetzel came out of hiding, the monster clamped down on his mind immediately, and he started carrying Tod back down the slope. Veee similarly paused, then marched down. The surprise was gone and the monster had resumed command.

“Act together,” Tod said.

Wetzel tuned into Veee's mind, and when she retreated into her shelter, so did he. Then they emerged together, and started back up the slope before the monster could get both under control simultaneously.

Wetzel carried Tod several steps, and Veee carried Wizard, while the bat perched on Veee. They were making progress.

Until the monster adjusted to this new ploy and clamped down on them both. They turned about again and started tramping downhill. They were out of ploys, and losing.

Veee glanced at him. It seemed she could not speak except in response, and had something on her mind. Wetzel read her mind, and there it was.
The rape repellant
.

He realized that this would indeed be a better defense than mere hiding. The mind monster's attack was similar to a rape, and should be similarly balked. “Do it!” he said.

Veee focused. The awful repulsion surged. She had improved on it since he taught her. Copulation was disgusting, humiliating, and dirty. She was totally without sexual appeal.

But still walking toward the monster.

“Change it,” he said. “The monster doesn't want sex, it wants flesh to eat. Make yourself repulsive as food.”

She nodded. Her mental imagery shifted from an ugly genital region to a diseased body. She became a virtual zombie, walking decaying flesh, complete with maggots wriggling in holes in her skin. It was sickening. Wetzel almost smelled the stench.

Something changed.

“I'm free!” she exclaimed.

“Carry Wizard away,” Wetzel told her. “When he is beyond range, return to carry another.”

She hesitated. “I don't want to leave the rest of you in danger.”

“Do it!” Tod snapped.

Veee hastily obeyed. She might be her own woman, but she was highly responsive to Tod.

Wetzel addressed the bat. “You were there when she learned rape repulsion. You know how it works. Do it.”

The bat became the woman. “Do it yourself,” she said, and started concentrating. The image of vomit suffused her mind.

She was right. Wetzel had been so busy addressing others he had neglected to see to himself. He had never been concerned about getting raped, knowing that even if someone wanted to do it to him, he could become the unicorn and destroy the rapist. Now he marshaled his feelings in earnest. He borrowed from Veee's imagery, making himself another zombie, and added open sores that leaked corrosive ichor.

And he was free. Just like that, they had found the way to stop the predator. It was repelled by bad meat. It seemed to be an automatic response.

“You can do it too,” he told Tod. “Picture yourself as dirty, ugly, diseased, and foul-tasting. Maybe even poisonous. Something no self-respecting predator would eat.”

Tod worked on it. It seemed he had once discovered a rotting carcass, and the odor had been appalling. He pictured himself as that noisome mass, complete with protruding bones.

It worked for him too. The three of them strode back up the slope, away from the predator.

They rejoined Veee and Wizard some distance back on the trail. “It seems we have had our first test as a reconstituted team,” Wizard said. “One thing bothers me: why was I so incompetent? I should have devised magic to repel, confuse, or destroy the monster. Instead I was helpless.”

“I can tell you why,” Veee said. “The Amoeba is breaking in our new member. It put us on a route that passes a mental threat, rather than a magical one, so you could not handle it but Wetzel could, once he figured out how.”

“You were the one who figured it out,” Wetzel said. “You remembered the rape repellant. That was the key.”

“Which you taught me,” Veee said. “Then you figured out how to adapt it for this purpose.”

Wetzel smiled. “You seem determined to give me credit I don't deserve.”

“She does that,” Wizard said. “She derives the rules of the game, then encourages others to play it. She doesn't seek credit herself. It is one of her endearing qualities. But she is right: it was your insight and technique that foiled the monster. Had we encountered it without you, we could have been lost.”

“Had we been with someone else, the Amoeba would have led us past a different trap,” Tod said.

“Next question,” Vanja said. “What do we do about that monster? We can't let it go on eating innocent travelers.”

“Now that we have nullified its power,” Tod said, “we can attack it and destroy it. Wizard can fashion a magic bomb to blow it apart.”

“I like that,” Vanja said. “Maybe I can fly into its lair as a bat and spike it with a quick bite to the ugly snout, then change to human form and drain it dry.”

“Two problems,” Tod said. “It is probably too big to drain that way; you'd swell up and burst and be no further good to us. And its blood probably tastes like rotten swill.”

“I could open a vein and let it bleed out on the ground.”

“No,” Veee said.

Vanja looked at her. “It was going to eat you! You can't forgive that.”

“There's nothing to forgive,” Veee said. “It's not a matter of right and wrong. It's a predator like any other. We just need to protect ourselves from it and its kind.”

“Its kind,” Vanja repeated thoughtfully.

“She's right again,” Wizard said. “Predators don't grow in isolation any more than prey creatures do. There are ratios, overall balance, natural selection. There will be others like it, some with variants we have not yet thought of. It is the unknown ones ahead of us we need to anticipate and foil, not the one we have escaped. That is our lesson of the occasion.”

“But it tried to consume all of us,” Vanja protested. “I hate to let it go.”

“Just as that rabbit you tapped hated to let you go,” Veee said. “It would have smashed you if it could.”

Vanja raised her hands in surrender. “I guess I'm just a bad sport about being considered prey. So let's devise our defense against future mental predators.”

“I think we all need the three things Wetzel taught me,” Veee said. “To recognize a mental touch before it becomes compulsive. To develop a rape or consumption repellant. To hide our most secret thoughts, so we can plan programs without giving them away, even to telepaths.” She glanced at Wizard. “And to find ways to adapt magic to our defense too, in case some mental predator is proof against our other wiles.”

“We had better do it now,” Tod agreed. “We have had our warning. We can even test techniques on the local predator, to be sure they are effective.”

“So the damn thing is useful after all,” Vanja said distastefully.

They camped where they were and got to work. Wetzel drilled them all on recognition of the mind touch. They already knew how to prevent rape or consumption, thanks to their recent experience. It was the storm shelter that required more attention.

“You will not enjoy this,” Wetzel said. “You need to revisit your deepest secret fear or shame, the one you most want to bury. That will be the basis for your construction of your personal retreat, your storm shelter. You could do this yourselves, as I did when I made mine, but it will be faster if I guide you.”

“So you will know our most secret shames,” Vanja said.

“Yes. I understand why you would not want to do that.”

“So we'll start with you,” Vanja said. “What's your secret?”

“As a young child I sneaked into a haunted house with a girl. We were playing Show-Me, and she stripped to her panties. Then the adults caught us, and the girl disappeared. I thought she had been punished for being willing to show herself, and I was frightened and ashamed. She was precociously telepathic; I suspected that this also could be the reason she was sequestered. But at the time I didn't know. Then when I also became precociously telepathic I feared I would be taken away and perhaps killed, so I found a way to hide. My storm shelter is the cellar where we played our naughty game. So my secret was that I had a secret. As an adult I know that it's not much of a crime, but it did enable me to make my shelter.”

“You're right,” Vanja said. “We don't care at all about any such guilt. Every boy wants to look at every girl nude. Every girl secretly wants to show it off.” Her clothing faded momentarily to nudity. “Who's next?”

“I will do it,” Wizard said. “My secret is truly guilty, because it derives from an episode when I was adult and knew better. The giantess who governed our region was a beautiful woman, when she tried to be, and she sought to seduce me and thus bind me to her. I resisted, of course; I was in a long-term happy marriage. But once when I was scrying for her she quietly stripped, stepped into me, kissed me, and seduced me. I fought against it, but her sheer eroticism overwhelmed me.”

“We saw her,” Vanja said. “She was like me: lovely, wild, and unscrupulous.”

“We did see her,” Tod agreed. There was a mental flash of a remarkably sexy nude woman in motion.

“She mesmerized you,” Veee said fondly. “You couldn't stop staring at her bare body.”

“She was standing right over me, fifty feet tall, her legs spread,” Tod said reminiscently. “Then these two jealous females hauled me out of there.”

“You were freaking out, you letch,” Vanja said.

Wetzel saw the enhanced image in Tod's mind. “I would have freaked out too,” he said. “What a view!”

“So we don't blame you for falling under her spell, Wiz,” Vanja said.

“Thereafter I guarded myself with magic,” Wizard said, returning to the subject. “Not the neat repulsion mind-frame we have recently learned, merely a field that made me difficult to approach close enough for sex. I was on guard, and it never happened again. But I knew my wife would not understand, and I hid it from her. Thus my infidelity was compounded by the lie that was my concealment. It remains my deepest shame.”

“That will do,” Tod said. “Fashion a chamber around that memory. Encapsulate it. Then when you have a secret to hide, bring it into that chamber and leave it there. It may take time to perfect the technique, but if you practice you will improve, until there is no evidence of your shelter, even to telepaths.”

“I will,” Wizard said.

“I think it is my turn next,” Tod said.

There was a gust of wind. Veee looked at the sky. “Storm. It may be a bad one.”