The Terror Version (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #24)

By John Lymington

Professor Odds had a theory that if we travel in a flash while we dream, we could do the same when awake. He discovered a way of lifting the mind out of its usual rut, and landed himself on another planet. A friend, Richard Trenton, followed, but he was younger and anxious to get back to the woman he’d left behind. He began to worry still more when an alien woman of great power in her land, chose him for a lover.
There was no way she was ever going to let him go. And even if a whole galaxy should separate them, she would still find a way to keep him right where she wanted him ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215778753

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.

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Professor Odds had a theory that if we travel in a flash while we dream, we could do the same when awake. He discovered a way of lifting the mind out of its usual rut, and landed himself on another planet. A friend, Richard Trenton, followed, but he was younger and anxious to get back to the woman he’d left behind. He began to worry still more when an alien woman of great power in her land, chose him for a lover.

There was no way she was ever going to let him go. And even if a whole galaxy should separate them, she would still find a way to keep him right where she wanted him …

THE TERROR VERSION

By John Lymington

First published by Robert Hale Limited in 1982

©1982, 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.

Chapter One

1

PROFESSOR ODDS WAS well known to the staff of wardens at Stonehenge. He had come often in all weathers; in good, wearing a tee-shirt and corduroys, and in bad, wearing an Inverness cape and an old soft fishing hat from under which brim he peered out luminously. He had all the makings of an eccentric, which is a term applied to those who aren’t affected by what others think.

The staff speculated as to why he was famous, because nobody seemed to know. Miss Strange, a lady student of prehistoric peoples, shared her scrappy knowledge of the Professor with the staff. They learnt he had founded a chair at Cambridge on the matter of Trivialia, a thought system whereby the Absolute may be reached by a convolution of streamed trivia relative to a variable base of race origin throughput, and so on. Lord Harman, the physicist, described Odds’ theory as a system of creating a vacuum within a variable flask, and then, by convolution of irreducible minima, extracting the vacuum from the flask, thereby achieving, in a name, Sweet Fanny Adams. But Miss Adams has more followers than the Great Whore of Beldame and Odds was on sure ground in ensuring a host of admirers.

But that was only a part, it seemed. Odds had studied psychology and psychiatry, optics, sceptics, astronomy and drainage systems, and had privately admitted that he had invented Trivialia in order to rival ‘that hideous balloon, Sociology’.

That was about as much as the staff had learnt from Miss Strange. Otherwise, Professor Odds made them laugh, and therefore he was popular.

On May 13th, though the weather was then fine, Odds arrived in his Inverness cape and fishing hat, with a sextant, an old gasmask case of canvas, stuffed pretty full, and an authority to maintain a vigil for seventy-two hours without interruption; that is, he was to stay all night and all day for three days from the afternoon of the 13th.

It was an odd date to choose, so long before the Solstice, but that was his wish and that was what he got.

That day and the next he stayed around, almost always within the blue stone circle, taking angles with the sextant, testing his eyesight, sight lines and angles by the use of many pairs of spectacles with different-coloured lenses, and sometimes sitting solemnly, eating a few water-biscuits and sipping from a very large flask which passers-by noticed smelt of Scotch whisky. By night he sat on a stone, huddled in his Inverness, sharing his thoughts with the placid moon.

On the afternoon of the 15th, Odds left his belongings on a stone where he had sat and began to thread his way in and out of the arches, across the centre, back by another path and so on until suddenly, passing the Hele Stone, he met the Boojum and vanished.

A party of schoolchildren saw him go, and for a moment there was an awed silence; and then a hubbub as if a fat lady had sat on the right end of an organ keyboard. The teacher scurried and soothed and snapped and threatened and tried to calm and stop the shouts, sobs, screams and yells of delight. She failed. She suspected a trick, a new game, another way to drive her potty, because, unfortunately, she hadn’t seen the miracle.

The party was got rid of, with teacher explaining her charges were all very tired and a little hysterical.

But all the same, when the public had gone, the place of the great stones was empty.

We can only assume, said Steve Ornick, warden, that he’s putting one over on us for a laugh.

Which was a reasonable assumption.

They took his cape, sextant and gasmask case into safekeeping and waited.

And waited.

On the 16th, it was noticed that his authority to stay the time was about to cease, and telephone calls were made to Departments in London which had authority to do anything, such as pass to another Department, and from That to Them, from Them to They, from They to Those and so to Lord God Almighty, who said, Who? and mentioned it to the Prime Minister, who said, Inform the Police, and so the matter came all the way down the Departments and back to Stonehenge, where the local police were spurred to action. That was on the 27th of May, when at noon precisely the Professor was suddenly observed passing the Hele Stone and about to try to find his gasmask satchel, cape and sextant.

When he went to ask for his belongings he was, naturally, asked where he had been. Furtive, he said, Thinking.

He left and was arrested on the London side of Salisbury by a diligent police force who believed his car to have been stolen as he could not have been in it, having disappeared without trace. But when events began assuming the seven dimensions of farce, Odds proved he was himself. The question then was whether to prosecute him for wasting police time, or merely to forget the matter and list him as an entertaining, but unpinned, hinge.

He then disappeared into a crofter’s hut in the Hebrides for some months until the Press forgot him, and then he went back to Cambridge where, thoughtfully, he made small gifts to his three mistresses.

Lucy rang Amanda.

I think Jack’s going to go away, Lucy said. He’s given me the most gorgeous platinum bracelet. It breaks my heart. I mean, what can I do with it? Charles does surface occasionally from his wretched research work and he’s bound to notice—

What about me? said Amanda. He’s given me a mink jacket! How on earth can I wear a mink jacket? I mean, darling, I’m the Master’s wife. One sniff of a mink jacket on me and the hounds would be baying all round.

And Mary’s got a watch. Longines, white gold. You can just imagine Robert’s face if he sees that. There’d be one enormous explosion and he’d come out of the smoke with the watch en route for the pawnshop while she’s sobbing on the floor. I’m sure Jack’s going. These are farewell presents.

Well, all good things come to an end. We must be grateful for happy memories, but why suddenly? What’s happened?

Apparently something very odd happened at Stonehenge. You know Bertie, the Prehistoric Monument? Well, he was down there and got this story about Jack disappearing for several days and then suddenly coming back again, like one of those SF films, you know, when they dissolve in a pillar of gold sequins. Not that Jack did, but he seems to have dissolved somewhere and then solved again a fortnight later.

What? You must be joking!

No. That’s why he hid up in the Hebrides, and then it seems he went to Maryland and bought some kind of house and then came back.

Why on earth does he want a house in Maryland?

Don’t ask me. Perhaps that’s where he’s going off to. I’ve got a sister at Columbia, you remember? He teaches English. I was thinking—No. What did Mary say about him and this mysterious house?

She said there are a lot of Poles in America.

Pole? Well, I suppose he is, but he’s never been to Poland. He was born in Paris and brought up here. I don’t think he knows many Poles, does he?

I don’t remember he ever talked to me about Poles—

Did he ever tell you his real name? If you pronounce it properly in Polish it sounds like something not usually mentioned here, so when they took his father in the RAF they wouldn’t use his name and called him Oddbodski. That’s where it comes from, this Odds. It isn’t his name at all.

Darling, you’re just chattering and chattering and trying to pretend he isn’t going. Yes, I know all that about him, but one thing I didn’t. Did you know he—?

JACK ODDS WENT to Maryland that July. The house stood alone in many acres of ground off a by-road about thirty miles south of Baltimore. It was a Victorian Gothic type of dark-faced building, with very steep-pitched roofs that looked, from some angles, like turrets. It was still furnished in heavy Victorian style, just as it had been left by Josef Kowalski when he had died, five years before, after having made a million out of iron in Pennsylvania. Kowalski had been some kind of cousin, originally from Cracow, which was how Jack found the place.

On August 1st, a small Japanese hired car, blowing steam out of every available crack, pulled up outside the house and a young Englishman, Richard Trenton, got out.

May I use your phone? he said.

You don’t need a phone, you need a car, said Jack.

You’re English! said Trenton, surprised.

You mean I sound like it but don’t look like it. Very well, come in. We shall have tea. I’ve got a fine daily woman who turns up in a bloody great car, but she can make tea, and I make cakes, so you’re safe.

They had tea, and talked. They had dinner, and talked.

A chair? Trenton laughed. And that’s my father’s old college.

You were there?

No. I avoided. My half-brother was there. He has the title, but only holds the estate until he dies, and so on. It’s complicated.

Your father’s first lady died?

The first lady divorced my father and took her son with her right away from father and with a considerable alimony. He then married my mother, who stayed with him without competing with his mistresses.

He had many? said Jack with lively interest.

I’m not sure, but I had a lot of aunts, which to me, as a small boy, was profitable.

Your mother, perhaps, was one of his mistresses by the previous wife? said Jack.

If that wasn’t so funny, I might have to think it insulting, said Trenton, and laughed.

At midnight they had supper and talked. They had a bottle of Bourbon whisky.

Do you know this bloody stuff is distilled from maize, or corn as we call it? said Trenton.

It drinks all right. I try everything, or I should say, perhaps, I have tried nearly everything. I am no gourmet. I am a glutton at best. Jack sat back in his huge wing chair. I’m about to issue a gnome, he said.

"Giving birth to fairies is not