The Big Reap by Chris F. Holm Page A

by the many-eyed wooly beast that guards the keep – our basest survival instinct, our truest and most horrible self. Each mind’s a pattern, a thousand strands of silk joined in one purpose. Some read as easy as the funny pages. Others read like Joyce – constellations within constellations, thoughts within thoughts within thoughts. And others still are like trying to read a Braille transcript of a bad translation of a foreign lunatic’s street-corner rants with your stockinged feet.
    Lucky for me, this guy was of the funny-page persuasion, the thread of his life easily unwound. Unfortunately for the both of us, that’s where his relationship with funny ended.
    I caught a fleeting glimpse of a shoddy housing estate in Cardiff; a single mother – pretty once – wasting away to nothing, as her omnipresent cigarettes were replaced in Gareth’s memories by a chipped, green-painted oxygen tank, the narrow tubes too small and delicate in his mind to entrust with so vital a task as conveying her life’s breath; a sparsely attended funeral, his heart cold and gray beneath a sky of brilliant blue; a youth spent in and out of juvenile detention centers, his anger both uncontrollable and preferable to his crushing sadness; a boxing gym heavy with the scent of liniment and sweat socks, a heart once more full of hope; the doctor’s hand atop his shoulder as he explained how the random squiggles on the CT meant he’d never fight again; and a kindly old man behind the wheel of a stunning ’65 Bentley, asking the weeping giant sitting on the chill stone curb if he might be interested in an exciting employment opportunity. And then horrors, half-glimpsed by me before Gareth pushed them aside. Never did he think the old man’s offer would come to this, to a young woman, so beautiful and so vibrant – her verbena-scented auburn curls so much like his mother’s own – lying dead and mangled on a slab beside him, just another workday mess to be carried to the curb.
    The meat-suit I wished to leave was losing consciousness. Copper on my tongue, spots in my eyes, a tinny sound like a corded phone left off its hook in an adjacent room echoing in my ears. Magnusson’s needle plunged into my neck. I heaved with all I had toward Gareth.
    Magnusson sensed what I was doing – sensed, or guessed. He stretched his mind toward the Welshman’s shattered one as well. He was faster than I, and managed Gareth’s meager psychic locks with the ease of one maneuvering one’s own living room with the lights off. All while I fumbled and struggled to gain hold. But I felt first one arm twitch, and then another, and felt the bile rise in Gareth’s throat as his body tried to cast me out. It happens every time my kind possesses a new vessel – more or less the only thing The Exorcist managed to get right. The body’s way of trying to expel that which does not belong, not that it ever does a lick of good. I thought that meant that I stood a chance, that I might yet best Magnusson as we struggled for control.
    I was wrong. I never stood a chance.
    Because Magnusson didn’t need complete control. Couldn’t even use it if he did manage to get it. As he himself had told me, “We can scarcely stretch our consciousness enough to control those most dimwitted of humans who happen through our sphere of influence – and even then, only temporarily.”
    But what he could do, I discovered, was plant a seed.
    A kernel.
    A single, irresistible suggestion.
    I felt it bubble up from the depths of the Welshman’s psyche as if the thought were his own. But the malice behind the thought was unmistakable.
    Through Gareth’s mind’s eye, I saw a gun – his gun. Not as a threat, or a defensive weapon, but as a choice, a cure, a salve to soothe his aching soul.
    I saw it through his mind’s eye as salvation.
    And from the sudden giddy hope that surged in