Voyage of the Eighth Mind (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #22)

By John Lymington

What happens when you suddenly become aware of a stranger walking around inside your head, asking questions to which you’ve known the answers all your life?
What happens when you realise, slowly but surely, that the telepathic visitor is an alien, and that the purpose of his visit is invasion from another world ... and a very unpleasant invasion, at that: one that requires the elimination of half the human race by robots.
It’s one thing to know what will happen, but another thing entirely to convince everybody else of the truth.
The only people who believed John English were his own family, who were themselves being prepared as hosts for the invasion commanders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215907696

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

Book preview

The Home of Great

Science Fiction!

What happens when you suddenly become aware of a stranger walking around inside your head, asking questions to which you’ve known the answers all your life?

What happens when you realise, slowly but surely, that the telepathic visitor is an alien, and that the purpose of his visit is invasion from another world … and a very unpleasant invasion, at that: one that requires the elimination of half the human race by robots.

It’s one thing to know what will happen, but another thing entirely to convince everybody else of the truth.

The only people who believed John English were his own family, who were themselves being prepared as hosts for the invasion commanders.

VOYAGE OF THE EIGHTH MIND

By John Lymington

First published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1980

©1980, 2024 by John Newton Chance

First Electronic Edition: February 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate

Series Editor: David Whitehead

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Visit www.piccadillypublishing.org to read more about our books.

Chaos

For is It here? Or is It there?

Or is It anywhere at all?

How can It be, while we so strive

Upon the furry tennis ball,

When suddenly oh bang oh bang and splits the ball

and murders all

and in the Universal Hall

no one awares?

But has All gone? To where? By how?

And where’s the Was that Isn’t now?

Tristram English

(Half-thoughts in the Ewigkeit)

Chapter One

THE VISITATION BEGAN on the night before full moon, September 15th. John English was alone in the Mill. The light in the mill room came from moonbeams slanting down through the windows making the great wooden gears and wheels of the machinery show like weird trees in a moon forest. He loved moonlight, the quiet, the magic of it. But that night he was uneasy. Something was odd in the atmosphere. He had had the feeling something was wrong all the evening, but all he could count were small incidents which had just not gone right.

There was something mechanically wrong, which worried his perfectionist mind. The flood gate to the leat was jammed and instead of a trickle running down through it, there was a fast, frothing stream against which the great chained wheel strained and grunted under its ties. The struggle sounded in the mill room, setting the heavy old timbers creaking to an odd sort of rhythm.

He turned and walked back through the mill room to the broad cave of Jonathan’s study, a place of heavy leather chairs, a big mahogany desk; a long line of small ink drawings showing in luminous squares against the dark wooden wall.

He stopped at the wide entrance. It was like a stage set facing the mill room and a faintly squeaking audience of wooden machines.

It might be Jonathan. That was always a possibility. The room was so strong with his presence that, ten years after, his death seemed to have made little difference to that atmosphere. Sometimes, when the magic of the night was strong, it was easy to believe he might be there, returning on a short, gleeful visit. Because if ever a ghost would be a wicked, laughing one, it would be Jonathan.

The magic was strong that night, as if the living spirits of every person who had lived in that place in two hundred and seventy years were alive in the shadows of the Mill which had formed their lives. But Jonathan was not one of them. The Mill had not formed Jonathan. Jonathan’s son, Tristram, once said Pan had personally brought up Jonathan.

John crossed the moonlit room, but the usual peace of the moon and that place, which eased him after a day’s hard going, just wasn’t there. Instead he felt a restlessness, an awareness of something, if not wrong, then sharply awry.

He had a slight guilt over Leila. When he had made the excuse of work to be cleared up and let his wife go alone to the dinner with her father and Leila, the excuse had not done too well. He could see Maxine’s profile as she looked into the mirror just before she went, and it had been not so much angry as indifferent.

You’ll have to get Leila off your mind someday. Going around dodging her with excuses is getting to be a joke. Let her seduce you and get it over with.

I have this stuff to clear up, Maxie.

Okay, clear it up. Then she said. Sorry, and kissed him. I’ll tell them you’re very busy calculating the density of onyx bath tubs.

He got a Scotch and turned back, listening to the thousand whispering sounds of the wheel’s struggle creaking in the mill room.

Well, yes, it had been stupid to make an excuse like that. He was even puzzled as to why he had made it, but having made it, it had to stay. He hadn’t wanted to go out that night, but didn’t know why. He certainly hadn’t been tired. A restlessness had made him uneasy all that day, and when he had mentioned wanting to put off the dinner date to his father, Tristram had said: Well, you do as you like, dear boy. Why are you worried about it?

Why had he been worried about it? He didn’t know. He just didn’t want to leave the Mill that night.

As if he had expected someone to come.

He sat down in one of the big chairs and watched the moonlight dappling the ceiling, rippling across the beams towards the mill room. It was almost mesmeric, the continuous light movement of the river ghost running into the mill room.

He drank whisky and looked aside to the little drawings set straight along the wall like windows of a train. A set of pen-and-ink drawings of a beautiful girl in naughty situations drawn in 1925. He had known them all his life. The girl had been a secret love of his childhood, a girl so beautiful that in all his dreams of gallantry and rescue of fair maidens, it had always been this girl he had fought and bled (but not too much) for. Until the bombshell.

Somehow memory ceased to be working and he was back there in the mill room again on the day of the funeral, September 15th, ten years before. The Mill was his favourite room where the great wooden cogs and turning wheels, the wooden axles and shafts all seemed one great friendly machine, the magic room of childhood.

But that day he was awkward, shy, unwilling to participate in Jonathan’s funeral. He did not want to think of Jonathan dead, nor go with the people who made his death certain, transforming the live old man into a tombstone; a grey, craggy tombstone with a grin on it.

His father and an old woman were talking in the study. He saw them round the edge of a great drive shaft which went up through the ceiling to the wheel gears in the room above.

She was an elegant woman, tall, very well dressed, and with a little limp so that she carried a black stick with a silver knob.

She was looking at the pictures, moving slowly along the line.

I haven’t seen them for a long time, she said. I was very beautiful, Tristram. It’s such a pity it all has to go.

Change, dear. It doesn’t really go.

She laughed and sat down in one of the big chairs. You know he was a comic artist, she said. It wasn’t till he did those that he hit his target. So I helped somebody on his way.

If I remember, you ran with him.

Well, yes, he was very amusing, she said. "He had this comic paper mind and saw everything in frames. One, two, three or four for a strip, or nine for a full page—how well I remember! When he met people you could see his mind struggling to fit them into frames and make them look funny or ridiculous. But once he started drawing me he made money and then decided to make films and lost it all and died eating lobster and drinking Scotch which always did make him go red and gasp.

"Well, before that I said to Jonathan, ‘I have been very naughty and I think you ought to have a divorce’, and he said, ‘Yes, that would be rather fun. We could marry again sometime.’ But, as you know, I married the stockbroker and art connoisseur.

We kept on meeting, Jonathan and I, right to the very end. I would have lost my husband any time if Jonathan had said it, just that second time, but he never did. He thought there was more fun in secret meetings and so on, and frankly, so did I.

You are crying, Mother. Have my handkerchief.

Yes, of course I’m crying. I loved him for sixty years, in my way, and he loved me in his. It hasn’t gone. It’s just that I’m emotional this morning. Where is my grandson? I haven’t seen him for years thanks to your bag of nails.

Well, she has her points—if you really must have Tinker’s talk. He went to help her up.

"We must go and see the stranger’s coffin bedecked with flowers slide through a door into the gas ovens. It’s empty, you know. Jonathan’s here."

Of course I know, darling. They went out of the door to the corridor.

John waited, leaning on the wooden wall of the grinding pit and thought: Grandmother! The girl of all those years, when he was a boy, really his grandmother! What a mess time can make of one’s brains, thinking of a girl now, because of a picture, when it was an old woman now, but the picture remained. Oedipus, Hamlet, Muddlebreeches and all, but who got things about his grandmother?

But the pictures were not his grandmother; they were really what an artist had seen of a girl with nothing on, years ago. Just an idea, really, of a humorous artist’s making a series of pictures of a girl doing various things so, when you looked at one after the other the girl seemed to be moving a little. But fancy it being—

He took his hot face along to the bathroom and washed and straightened his tie and hung about in Jonathan’s bedroom till his father shouted for him and he went out to the line of black Rolls-Royces and people nodding sadly at him while he looked at the ground, which was the proper place to look at funerals. In the car he sat on a tip-up seat facing his grandmother, who smiled at him. She didn’t seem that old.

But Jonathan was old and he didn’t seem it sometimes. He was ninety-five, and that was getting on for as old as God.

At the crematorium there were a lot of people, groups coming close to others and muttering things. Some were sniffing on handkerchief balls, and there were little black veils and all sorts of Victorian grandeur. Grandmother Virginia seemed rather fixed on the flowers and especially on an artistic bunch of—poppies? Where did one get poppies at this time of year? They must have cost a small fortune. And poppies—at a funeral! But though the poppies attracted attention, it was the card which held Virginia in long fascination.

It said, My Young Lover—Bette.

Young lover! John thought, astonished at the antics of the apparent adults; young? He was ninety-five!

It was embarrassing to leave the sound, logical air of his school where he was the comparative adult, to become a small sinking hulk in waves of fully adult childishness.

WHEN THE ROLLS convoy returned at fast pace, Jonathan’s more immediate wishes were being carried out. A small refreshment marquee was erected, there was a bus for the town band and other buses for the staff of the Old Works, who had the day off. There was to be dancing on the green in front of the Mill, feasting and general merriment, through which, John was certain, the spirit of Jonathan English would be moving around dancing and conducting the band.

Virginia, Tristram, Joyce and her daughter, Judith, went back into the study to wait for other guests. Judith, who was fifteen, hauled John away to watch the party start outside.

Virginia said, ‘My young lover—Bette’. It’s got to be the missing bint, as we used to say.

You mean the poppies? said Joyce. They made me wonder.

When Jonathan was thirteen he had his first affair—in a poppy field, he always said. And the girl was a milkmaid on one of his father’s farms. She was fourteen, then. Jonathan’s father sent her away to her home in Dorset with a small pension to keep the child.

The child? said Joyce, alerted. What? At thirteen! Mother, you never told me that before!

She must be still alive, said Virginia thoughtfully. Closing up to the hundred. Well, well, well! She laughed to herself.

There are cables from the two daughters still alive, Tristram said, tactfully. They’re here if you want.

Oh no, said Virginia. They never approved of me. After their mother died they thought I was much too modern and shiftless for their father, as if I could help their mother falling off a horse! She smiled scornfully.

Judith, having used John as an escort to mix with the newly arriving party guests, accepted the first nice looking boy’s invitation to fetch her ice cream. John went back to the study without recognising her acceptance of the boy, an invitation to him to get on with making a fuss of her.

I think John should have all his diaries, Virginia said. All the volumes and volumes of them. He will probably read them and one day write a best seller about Jonathan. I’m quite sure Tristram wouldn’t look at them. He’s always thinking up obscure poems, and that makes one so intolerant.

Mother, you misjudge me, Tristram said.

It’s customary, dear, said Joyce, smiling.

"How is Mary, Tristram? said Virginia. Still alive?"

"It never fails to amaze me, Mother, that you can recount the adventures of years gone by in minute detail, splendid vigour