Darker Than You Think

by Jack Williamson

  "I need you now, Barbee," her clear voice replied. "Because we've a job to do together—something that can't wait. You must come out to me right away. I'll show you how to change."

  "Change?" he muttered heavily. "I don't want to change."

  "You will," she said. "I believe you have my lost heirloom—that white jade pin?"

  "I have it," he whispered. "I found it with that murdered kitten."

  "Then take it in your hand."

  In a numbed, groping, sleep-drugged way, Barbee thought he got up and went to the chiffonier and fumbled in that box of odds and ends for the tiny jade pin. Dimly, he wondered how she knew he had it. He carried it back, and sprawled heavily on the bed again.

  "Now, Will!" Her vibrant voice called across the shadowy void between them. "Listen, and I'll tell you what to do. You must change, as I have changed. It should be easy for you, Will. You can run as the wolf runs, trail as the wolf trails, kill as the wolf kills!"

  She seemed nearer in the misty dark.

  "Just let go," she urged. "I'll help you, Will. You are a wolf, and your pattern is the jade pin in your hand. Just turn loose, and let your body flow—"

  He wondered dimly how the mental control of probability could mold a man into the four-footed kind of wolf she clearly meant, but his brain seemed too numb and slow for thought. He clutched the pin and made a groping effort to obey. There was a curious, painful flux of his body—as if he had twisted into positions never assumed, had called on muscles never used. Sudden pain smothered him in darkness.

  "Keep trying, Will." Her urgent voice stabbed through that choking blackness. "If you give up now, halfway changed, it may kill you. But you can do it. Just let me help, till you break free. Just let go, and follow the pattern, and let your body change. That's it—you're flowing—"

  And suddenly he was free.

  Those painful bonds, that he had worn a whole lifetime, were abruptly snapped. He sprang lightly off the bed, and stood a moment sniffing the odors that clotted the air in the little apartment—the burning reek of whisky from that empty glass on the chiffonier, the soapy dampness of the bathroom, and the stale, sweaty pungence of his soiled laundry in the hamper. The place was too close; he wanted fresh air.

  He trotted quickly to the open window and scratched impatiently at the catch on the screen. It yielded after a moment, and he dropped to the damp, hard earth of Mrs. Sadowski's abandoned flower bed. He shook himself, gratefully sniffing the clean smell of that tiny bit of soil, and crossed the sidewalk into the heavy reek of burned oil and hot rubber that rose up from the pavement. He listened again for the white she-wolf's call, and ran fleetly down the street.

  Free—

  No longer was he imprisoned, as he had always been, in that slow, clumsy, insensitive bipedal body. His old human form seemed utterly foreign to him now, and somehow monstrous. Surely four nimble feet were better than two, and a smothering cloak had been lifted from his senses.

  Free, and swift, and strong!

  "Here I am, Barbee!" the white bitch was calling across the sleeping town. "Here by the campus—and please hurry!"

  He heard her, and he had already started toward the campus, when a sudden impulse of perversity made him turn back south, on Commercial Street, toward the railroad yards and the open country beyond. He had to escape the chemical fumes from the mills that lay in a burning pall over the city, suffocating and intolerable. And he wanted to explore this new existence, to find his powers and their bounds, before he came face to face with that sleek she-wolf.

  Loping easily along the pavement in the silent warehouse district, he paused to sniff the rich perfumes of coffee and spices that floated from a wholesale grocery, and checked himself abruptly as a sleepy policeman met him at the corner. Caught full in the street light, he turned to run for the nearest alley—the bored cop would doubtless welcome a bit of diversion and a chance to try his gun, and an unmuzzled gray wolf would certainly be fair game.

  The officer merely yawned, however, staring straight at him, and flung a foul-smelling cigarette butt before him on the street, and shuffled wearily on his beat, pausing to try the warehouse door. Barbee trotted back ahead of him, just to be sure. Still the cop didn't see him. He ran on out the odorous street, too elated to wonder why.

  He crossed the railroad yards ahead of a smelly, pounding locomotive, and loped west along the highway beyond, to escape the reek of wet steam and cinders and hot metal. He dropped into the ditch beside the acrid asphalt, and the earth felt cool and damp beneath his springy pads.

  "Barbee! Why don't you come on?"

  He heard the she-wolf's call behind him, but he wasn't ready to heed her yet. The night refreshed him with the clean chill of autumn. A breath of wind swept away all the sharp traffic odors of the road and brought him a delicious symphony of farmyard and woodland scents.

  He rejoiced in the aroma of wet weeds and the redolence of decaying leaves. He liked even the cold dew that splashed his shaggy gray fur. Far from the too-loud clank and wheeze of the locomotive, he paused to listen to the tiny rustlings of field mice, and he caught a cricket with a flash of his lean forepaw.

  April called, but he still ignored her.

  Elation lifted him: a clean, vibrant joy that he had never known. He raised his muzzle toward the setting half moon and uttered a quavering, long-drawn howl of pure delight. Somewhere beyond a dark row of trees a dog began to bark in a frightened and breathless way. He sniffed the cold air and caught the noisome scent of that ancient enemy, faint and yet sickeningly unpleasant. His hackles lifted. Dogs would learn not to bark at him.

  But the white wolf's call came again, suddenly more urgent: "Don't waste time on a stray dog, Barbee—we've more deadly enemies to deal with tonight. I'm waiting on the campus, and I need you, now."

  Reluctantly, he turned back north. The dark world flowed, and the furious barking of that angered dog was lost behind him. In a moment, he was passing Trojan Hills—as Preston Troy had named his baronial country place southwest of Clarendon, on the rolling uplands above the river valley that held the town and Troy's mills. The lights were out in the big house beyond the trees; but a lantern was bobbing about the stables, where perhaps the grooms were tending a sick horse. He heard a soft, uneasy whicker and paused a moment to sniff the strong, pleasant pungence of the horses.

  "Hurry, Barbee!" begged April Bell.

  He loped on, unwillingly, toward the uneasy murmuring and the clashing, violent odors of the city. Presently, however, he caught the she-wolf's scent, clean and fragrant as pine. His reluctance faded, and he ran eagerly along the deserted streets toward the campus, searching for her.

  Somewhere among the dark, crowded houses, a dog made one thin yelp of alarm, but he ignored it. Her scent guided him, and she came trotting out of the fragrant evergreens on the campus to meet him on the wet grass. Her long greenish eyes were bright with welcome. He sniffed the clean, sweet redolence of her, and she touched his muzzle with a tingling cold kiss.

  "You're late, Barbee!" She sprang away from him.

  "You've wasted too much of the night already, and we've enemies to meet. Let's go!"

  "Enemies?" He stared at her lean white sleekness, puzzled. Somewhere to the south, the way he had come, a dog was barking nervously. He snarled toward the south. "That, you mean?" he whispered. "Dogs?"

  Her greenish eyes glittered wickedly.

  "Who's afraid of those curs?" Her white fangs flashed in scorn. "Our enemies are men."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Trap in the Study

  The white bitch ran, and Barbee followed. He hadn't realized how late it was, but much of the night had fled. The streets were empty, save for a few late motorists who seemed to drive with an apprehensive speed. Most of the traffic signals were out; only the one at the corner of the campus, where Center Street crossed the highway, was blinking a warning yellow. Loping after the fleet white wolf, Barbee called uneasily: "Hold on, here—I want to know where we're going."


  She leapt gracefully out of the path of a drumming car—the driver didn't seem to see them. Running on with an easy feral lightness, she looked back at Barbee. Her long red tongue was hanging out of her mouth, and her clean fangs shone.

  "We're going to call on some old friends of yours." He thought she grinned maliciously. "Sam and Nora Quain."

  "We can't harm them," he protested sharply. "Why should they be—enemies?"

  "They are enemies because they are human," the white bitch told him. "Deadly enemies, because of what is in that wooden box that Quain and old Mondrick brought back from Asia."

  "They're my friends," Barbee insisted, and whispered uneasily: "What's in that box?"

  Her long eyes narrowed warily as she ran.

  "Something deadly to our kind—that's all we have been able to discover," she said. "But the box is still at Sam Quain's house, though he's ready to move it to the Foundation tomorrow—he had been clearing out the top-floor rooms for it, and hiring guards, and arranging his defenses against us there. That's why we must strike right now. We must have a look inside tonight—and destroy whatever weapons they brought back from those prehuman mounds to turn against us."

  Barbee shivered a little as he ran.

  "What sort of weapons?" he whispered uneasily. "What can hurt us?"

  "Silver can," the white bitch said. "Silver blades and silver bullets—I'll tell you why when we have a little time. But the contents of that box must be something more lethal than silver—and the night's going fast!"

  They passed the yellow-blinking signal, and ran on through solid walls of odor—the sulphurous bite of settling fumes from the industrial district and a piercing reek of garbage smouldering in some incinerator, the crisp fragrance of a bakery, and a thin bitter stench trailing from the packing plant across the river, and the stale unpleasant human fetors seeping out of the silent houses.

  She turned off the highway, crossing a corner of the campus toward the broad grounds of the Research Foundation and Sam Quain's little house beyond. The leaf-strewn grass made a cool, pleasant cushion for Barbee's pads, rustling very faintly, and his sniffing nostrils found a new orchestra of odors so intriguing that he almost forgot the task and the peril before them.

  The grass and the walks still reeked of the students who had thronged them during the day, the human body smells rank and rancid, very different from the clean, friendly fragrance of the racing wolf beside him. An explosive purple malodor of hydrogen sulphide burst from the chemistry lab, and a pleasant pungence of manure drifted from the model dairy barn of the agriculture department beyond the highway.

  The Foundation building was a slender tower of white concrete, aloof beyond its lawns and hedges, nine stories tall. Barbee wondered for a moment at the dogged intensity of old Mondrick's secret purpose— at the tireless drive that had overcome his age and illness to build this stern citadel and then ransack the cradlespots of mankind for the archeological treasures he had hoarded and studied here.

  The white, graceful spire was enveloped in the turpentine-and-linseed-oil smells of new paint, mingled with a faint, jarringly unpleasant scent that Barbee couldn't identify. Light shone from the top-floor windows, and he flinched from a sudden blue flicker, painfully intense, that must come from a welding arc. The snarl of a power saw came down to him, and the muffled thudding of a carpenter's hammer.

  Racing on beside him, the white wolf pricked up her ears.

  "They're at work tonight," she said. "It's too bad we had to strike so openly against old Mondrick, but he gave us no time for the niceties we prefer. Now I'm afraid we've tipped our hand too far—Quain must know about what we expect, because he's having that top floor rebuilt into a fortress against us. We must get at that box, tonight!"

  Down the wind, Professor Schnitzler's collie began to howl.

  "Why is it?" Barbee asked apprehensively. "Men don't seem to see us, but dogs are always frightened."

  April Bell snarled toward the howling.

  "Most men can't see us," she told him. "No true man can, I think. But dogs have a special sense for us—and a special hatred. The savage man who domesticated the first dog must have been an enemy of our people, as cunning and terrible as old Mondrick or Sam Quain."

  They came to the little white bungalow on Pine Street that Sam Quain had built for Nora the year they married—Barbee remembered drinking too much at their house-warming party, perhaps to dull his own unspoken disappointment. The she-wolf led him warily around the silent house and the garage, listening, sniffing uneasily. Barbee heard soft breath sounds from a lifted window, and then he caught the scent of little Pat from the sand pile in the back yard, where she had played.

  He sprang before the white wolf with a growl in his throat.

  "They mustn't be hurt!" he protested sharply. "I don't understand all of this—and it seems like fun. But these people are friends of mine—Sam and Nora and Pat. It's true Sam has acted a little funny, but still they're the best friends I have."

  The bitch grinned redly over her hanging tongue.

  "Both Sam and Nora?" Her greenish eyes mocked him. "But they're the dangerous ones." She crouched a little, fine ears lifted, sniffing the wind. "The thing in that box must be the key to some power more deadly than all our little spells—or they would never have dared defy us as they did."

  Still he blocked her way.

  "But I don't think we'll have to harm them now," she said. "They're both truly human—they won't be aware of us, unless we wish to make them so. The contents of the box are what we must reach and destroy."

  "All right," Barbee yielded unwillingly. "So long as we don't injure them—"

  Hot dog scent struck his nostrils. Inside the house there was a sudden small, shrill yelping. The she-wolf sprang back fearfully. Barbee shuddered to a deep, ungovernable alarm, and he felt his gray hackles rise.

  "That's Pat's little dog," he said. "She calls it Jiminy Cricket."

  The wolf bitch snarled. "She'll call it dead tomorrow."

  "Not Jiminy!" Barbee cried. "Pat would be heartbroken."

  A screen door banged. A fluff of white fur hurtled out into the back yard, barking furiously. The she-wolf sprang away from it apprehensively. It leaped at Barbee. He tried to cuff it away, and angry little teeth grazed his forepaw. The pain woke a latent savagery in him that drowned his regard for little Pat.

  He crouched and sprang. His powerful jaws caught that bit of fur, and shook it until the thin yelping ceased. He tossed it upon the sand pile and licked the evil-tasting dog hair off his fangs.

  The white wolf was trembling.

  "I didn't know about the dog," she whispered uneasily. "Nora and the child were out when I came this evening to see what Sam was up to, and it must have been with them." Her lean shape quivered. "I don't like dogs. They aided men to conquer us once."

  She slunk toward the back door.

  "We must hurry now—the night is already too far gone."

  Barbee tried to forget that little Pat would cry.

  "The daylight?" he asked apprehensively. "Is it dangerous?"

  The white wolf turned back quickly.

  "I had forgotten to warn you," she whispered urgently. "But you must never try to change by day—or let dawn find you changed. Because any strong light is painful and likely to be injurious when we are changed; and the sun's rays are deadly."

  "Why?" he asked uneasily. "How can light be harmful?"

  "I used to wonder," she told him. "I talked about it once, to one of us who has quite a name in physics. He told me his theory. It sounds good—but we'd better look for that box."

  Her deft, slender forepaw opened the screen, and Barbee led the way through the back door into the hot stuffiness of the little house. The air was heavy with cooking smells and the sharpness of an antiseptic Nora must have used to clean the bathroom and the warm body scents of Sam and Nora and the child, all overladen with the noisome, sickening rankness of the little dog he had killed.

  They paused in the nar
row hall beyond the little kitchen, listening. A clock ticked softly. The refrigerator motor started suddenly behind them, so loud they started. Above its steady drumming, he could hear Sam's strong, even breathing from their room and Nora's breath, slower and more quiet. Pat turned uneasily on her bed in the nursery and whimpered in her sleep: "Come back to me, Jiminy!"

  The she-wolf sprang toward the nursery door, snarling silently, but the child didn't quite wake. Barbee had started after her, alarmed for Pat. She turned back to him, her white fangs smiling.

  "So Quain's asleep!" A taut elation rang in her tone. "Quite exhausted, I imagine. It's lucky you got that nasty little cur outside—he must have counted on it to wake him if we came. Now for the green box—I think it's in his study."

  Barbee trotted to the study door, and rose against it to try the knob with his supple forepaws. It didn't yield. He dropped back to the floor and turned uncertainly toward the white wolf.

  She stood listening, snarling toward the nursery, and he heard little Pat whimpering in her sleep. A sharp pang of concern for the child struck Barbee; a surge of his old loyalty to Sam and Nora impelled him to abandon this queer project and get the wolf bitch out of the house before she could harm them. That brief humane impulse died, however, against the stronger urgencies of this exciting new existence.

  "I'll look for Sam's keys," he offered. "He must have them in his trousers—"

  "Wait, idiot!" He had started toward the bedroom; the she-wolf's fangs caught the scruff of his neck to stop him. "You'll wake him—or trip some trap. His keys are probably protected with a silver ring that it would poison us to touch. The padlock on that box is silver-plated, I saw. And I don't know what other weapons Quain has lying by his hand—deadly relics they dug up of that old war our people lost.

  "But we don't need the keys."

  Barbee blinked at the locked study door, bewildered.

  "Stand still," she whispered. "I see I must tell you a little more of the theory of this change of state—if Quain stays asleep. Ours is a precious and useful power, but it has its limitations and penalties attached. If you fail to regard them, you can very easily destroy yourself—"