What a dream!
He mopped uncertainly at the cold film of terror-sweat on his forehead. A nagging ache throbbed in his right canine tooth—that was the fang, he recalled uncomfortably, that he had struck against the silver studs of Turk's collar. If a rum hangover did such things to him, he had better stick to whisky—and maybe less of that.
His throat felt raw and dry. He limped into the bathroom for a drink of water and found himself reaching awkwardly for the glass with his left hand. He opened his tight-closed right with a nervous start, and found himself still clutching Aunt Agatha's white jade pin.
Jaw sagging, he stood peering incredulously at his numbed hand and that odd trinket. Across the back of his lean fist was a long red scratch—precisely where Jiminy Cricket's sharp little tooth had grazed the gray wolf's forepaw in his dream. He tried to shake off an uncomfortable prickling sensation.
Nothing really strange about it, he tried to tell himself. He recalled some of old Mondrick's classroom discussions on the psychology of dreams; such phenomena of the unconscious, he recalled Mondrick saying, were always less extraordinary and instantaneous than they appeared to the dreamer.
His own troubled doubts about April Bell and her curious confession had caused him to get up in his sleep, the sane solution came to him, to fumble in that cigar box on the chiffonier for that odd pin. He must have scratched his hand on one of the used razor blades there, or perhaps on the pin itself. And all the rest could be nothing else than his own unconscious effort to explain that trifling accident with the material of his own buried desires and fears.
That must be! With a wan little grin of relief, he rinsed his dry mouth, and then reached eagerly for the whisky bottle to help himself to a hair of the dog—He grimaced at the phrase, remembering the disgusting taste of dog hair in the dream, and firmly set the bottle back.
CHAPTER NINE
Nightmare's Aftermath
Barbee wanted to forget that dream. He went shivering back to bed, and tried to sleep again. He couldn't sleep. Every detail of that long nightmare lingered to haunt him, horribly vivid and real. He couldn't rid his mind of the wolf bitch's crimson grin, or the flimsy feel of Jiminy Cricket's vertebrae snapping in his own powerful jaws, or the sight of Mondrick's widow stumbling in her frantic pursuit, pitiable in her blindness and yet terrible with that silver blade.
He got up again, and limped unthinkingly to pull the blinds against the cruel light of day. He poured antiseptic on that enigmatic scratch, and shaved carefully, and took an aspirin to dull that ache in his jaw.
Dreams were logical results of normal causes, he kept insisting to himself, and he didn't need Dr. Glenn to help him unraval this one. The obvious dislike of Nora Quain and Mrs. Mondrick for April Bell might very plausibly have planted the suggestion in his own unconscious that the charming redhead was a bitch, and his own indignant revolt against the suggestion seemed motive enough for the gray wolf's part. With all the bizarre details of the Mondrick tragedy for background, and his own nervous fatigue, the nightmare seemed natural enough.
Yet he wasn't quite satisfied with such efforts at rational self-analysis. He decided to call Rowena Mondrick. He wanted to assure himself that she was really safe in the old house on University Avenue, and her dog Turk with her.
He dialed her number with a numb forefinger. For a long time there was no answer—perhaps, he hoped, everybody was safely asleep. At last he heard the high-pitched voice of Mrs. Rye, the housekeeper, asking sharply what he wanted.
"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Mondrick, if she's up."
"She ain't here."
"Huh!" He gulped, trying to swallow his instant panic. "Then give me Miss Ulford, please." "She ain't, either."
"What—?" he croaked feebly. "Where—?" "Miss Ulford went in the ambulance, to see after poor Mrs. Mondrick."
He nearly dropped the receiver. "How's that?"
"Mrs. Mondrick—the poor old dear—she must have gone out of her head last night. The shock of her husband called so sudden, you know. And she has always had them funny spells, you know, ever since that varmit clawed out her eyes across the water."
Barbee swallowed hard.
"What happened?" he gasped impatiently.
"She got up in the night, and slipped out of the house with that ugly dog she insists on keeping. I guess she thought she was hunting something—that same varmit, might be, as got her eyes. Anyhow, she carried one of her good sterling table knives, that she had gone and sharpened like a dagger. Lucky thing the dog started barking. That woke Miss Ulford, and she got up and followed."
Barbee listened, mute and shivering.
"The dog must have run off and left her. Mrs. Mondrick was stumbling after it through the streets—poor blind thing—as hard as she could run. The nurse said she had to chase her nearly twenty blocks—I don't see how she ever got so far."
Mrs. Rye seemed to find a morbid satisfaction in her own narrative.
"Miss Ulford was all worn out herself, but she finally brought Mrs. Mondrick home in a cab. Dear blind thing—she was all skinned and bleeding from falling in the streets, and quite out of her head. She wouldn't let go that sharpened knife till we twisted it away, and she kept screaming something about the things Turk was after.
"Miss Ulford called the ambulance from Glennhaven, and woke me to pack a few of Mrs. Mondrick's things. They took her away, not an hour ago—she struggled with the keepers, poor old dear, till I was afraid she'd kill herself."
"I—I think Glenn has treated her before." Barbee tried desperately to make his voice sound calm. "Why didn't she want to go?"
"She kept begging us to take her to Mr. Sam Quain's house. She was so frantic about it, that I finally tried to telephone Mr. Quain for her—but the operator told me he had left his receiver off the hook. The men in the ambulance kept telling her they'd take care of everything, and they took her on to Glennhaven.
"So she ain't here," Mrs. Rye concluded. "Anything I can do?"
Barbee stood woodenly, too dazed to reply.
"Hello?" said Mrs. Rye. "Hello?"
He couldn't find his voice, and she hung up impatiently. He stumbled to the bathroom and poured himself half a tumbler of whisky—and dashed it untasted, on a terrified impulse, into the lavatory. If whisky had anything to do with such disturbing occurrences as this, it was high time to quit.
Little Miss Ulford was a smart nurse, he told himself stubbornly, to take her patient to Dr. Glenn. That queer tragedy at the airport had clearly been too much for Mrs. Mondrick, and his own fears for her sanity must have played a part in shaping that grotesque dream. Grimly, he resolved not to ponder the too-many coincidences between fact and dream—that road to madness Mrs. Mondrick herself must have travelled.
On abrupt impulse, he called the Trojan Arms.
He couldn't quite dare ask April Bell if she had got home safe from the railroad bridge. He knew very well that people didn't get hurt in other people's dreams. But he wanted to hear her voice, and know where she was. He could make his excuses for not calling yesterday and ask her for another date. His voice turned eager as he asked for Miss Bell.
"Sorry, sir," the clerk told him. "We can't disturb Miss Bell."
"I'm a friend," Barbee insisted. "I don't think she'd mind."
The clerk was firm, and Barbee asked for the manager. Publicity is important to hotels, and Gilkins was commonly cooperative with the working press. April Bell, however, appeared to be the uncommon case.
"Sorry, Mr. Barbee," he murmured politely, "but we really can't disturb her. Sorry, old man—but Miss Bell always sleeps till noon, and she has left strict orders not to be bothered for anything less than fire or bloody murder."
Barbee tried not to shiver at that last phrase. The tall redhead kept pretty luxurious hours, it seemed to him— for a cub reporter on an afternoon paper. Barbee left a message that he had called, and determined not to brood about his nightmare.
He dressed hastily, stopped for a cup of coffee at the Daint
y Diner on the corner, and drove on downtown. He wanted people around him. Human people. He wanted familiar voices and the clatter of typewriters and the steady thump of teletypes and the jingle of mats in the composing machines and the deep rumble of the presses. He stopped across the street from the Star at old Ben Chittum's newsstand, and asked about Rex.
"He's all torn up." The lean old man seemed moodily depressed. "It must have hit him pretty hard, the way Dr. Mondrick went. He stopped to see me yesterday after the funeral, but he didn't have much to say. Had to get back to the Foundation."
He paused to straighten a rack of papers, and then peered sharply at Barbee.
"Why didn't the papers print more about it?" he wanted to know. "I know you were out there, and this girl from the Call. It seems important to me—when a man like Dr. Mondrick dies that way. But there's hardly anything."
"Huh?" Barbee was vaguely puzzled. "I thought it was a page-one story, and I turned in six hundred words. I guess I was too upset myself to notice what they used."
"See." The old man showed him a copy of yesterday's Star. Not a word of his story had been printed. On an inside page, he found the bare announcement of Mondrick's funeral at two in the afternoon.
"I don't get it," he said, and shrugged off his brief perplexity. He had more disquieting riddles than that to solve. He crossed the street, glad to get back to the ordered confusion of the newsroom.
On his desk was a familiar blue-paper memo requesting him to report to Preston Troy. The Star was not the greatest among Troy's enterprises—which included the mills and the Trojan Trust and the radio station and the baseball club. The newspaper was his favorite child, however, and he handled most of his affairs from his spacious corner office on the floor above the city room.
Barbee found the publisher dictating to a svelte titian-haired secretary—Troy was famous for the sophisticated good looks of his secretaries. He was a squat, florid man, with a thin fringe of reddish hair around the pink dome of his head. He looked up at Barbee with shrewd blue eyes, and rolled his thick cigar across his wide, aggressive mouth.
"Find me the Walraven file," he told the girl, and his cold eyes came to Barbee. "Grady says you're a good legman, Barbee. I want to give you a chance at some feature stuff—under your own by-line—to build up Colonel Walraven for the senate."
"Thanks, Chief," Barbee said without enthusiasm for Colonel Walraven. "I see Grady didn't run my story yesterday on Mondrick's death."
"I told him to kill it."
"Will you tell me why?" Barbee watched Troy's pink-jowled face. "I thought it was page-one stuff. Strong human interest, with a swell mystery angle. Old Mondrick died, you see, right in the middle of telling what they had brought back from Asia in that green box.
"And it's still a good story, Chief." Barbee curbed his eagerness, trying to sound sanely calm. "The coroner's verdict was death from natural causes, but the old man's associates act as if they don't believe a word of that. They're hiding whatever is inside that green box, and they're still afraid to talk."
Barbee gulped and tried to slow his voice.
"I want to follow up the story, Chief. Give me a photographer, and I'll file some features that will put Clarendon on the map. I want to find why Mondrick went to the Ala-shan. And what those men are afraid of. And what they're hiding in that box."
Troy's eyes were hard and blank.
"Too sensational for the Star." His rasping voice was abruptly dictatorial. "Forget it, Barbee. Get to work on the colonel."
"Too sensational, Chief?" Barbee echoed. "You always said murder was the cornerstone of the Star."
"I set our editorial policy," Troy snapped. "We're printing nothing about the Mondrick case. Neither, you will find, is any other large newspaper."
Barbee tried to swallow his puzzled unease.
"But I can't forget it, Chief," he protested. "I've got to find out what Sam Quain is hiding in that box. It haunts me. I dream about it"
"You'll have to work at that on your own time— and at your own risk." Troy's voice was flat and cold. "And not for publication." He studied Barbee with penetrating eyes, rolling the thick perfecto back across his mouth. "Another thing—just keep in mind you aren't a fish. Better lay off the booze."
He opened the desk humidor, and his hard face thawed.
"Have a cigar, Barbee." His voice turned easily genial. "Here's the Walraven file. I want a biographical series. His early hardships, his military heroism, his secret philanthropies, his happy domestic life, his public-spirited service in Washington. Play down anything the voters wouldn't like."
That would be plenty, Barbee thought.
"Okay, Chief."
He went back to his desk in the noisy city room, and began to finger through the pile of clippings. But he knew too much the clippings didn't say, about the sewer bonds and the highway department scandal and the reason the Colonel's first wife had left him. It was hard to keep his mind on the unsavory task of whitewashing such a man for the Senate, and he found himself staring over his typewriter at the picture of a lean wolf howling at the moon on a calendar, thinking wistfully of the splendid freedom and power he had enjoyed in that dream.
To hell with Walraven!
Barbee knew suddenly that he had to get the facts behind the bizarre riddles of Mondrick's death and Rowena's madness and April Bell's queer confession. If he were only building haunted castles out of whisky and coincidence, he wanted to be certain of it. If not— well, even insanity would break the monotonous grind of a legman on the Star.
He stuffed the Walraven papers into his desk, got his coupe out of the parking lot, and drove out Center Street toward the university. He still couldn't understand why the Mondrick case didn't fit the editorial policy of the Star—nothing had ever been too sensational for Preston Troy before. Anyhow, for print or not, he had to know what was in that box.
Sam Quain must have moved it already, he supposed, from his study to the place he was arranging on the top floor of the Foundation building. He wondered what those carpenters and welders had been doing there—and realized that once more he was accepting the dream as fact.
He turned right at the traffic light, and left on Pine Street, and parked in front of Sam Quain's little white bungalow. It looked exactly as it had in the nightmare —even to the same rusted tin bucket and toy spade on Pat's sand pile in the back yard. He knocked, trying to ignore an uneasy tingling sensation, and Nora came from the kitchen to open the door.
"Why, Will—come in!"
A mild astonishment widened her blue eyes—they looked dull, he thought, and the lids a little swollen, as if she hadn't slept well.
"Is Sam at home?" A sudden pang of icy dread halted him inside the door, as if this quiet and friendly seeming dwelling had concealed some deadly trap. He couldn't help sniffing, as that panic caught his breath, for the seeping, lethal malodor of the thing in Sam Quain's box. His nostrils found nothing more noxious, however, than the pleasant aroma of a roast in the oven; and he saw Nora's faintly puzzled expression.
"I'm looking for Sam, for another interview," he told her. "I want to ask more about the Foundation expeditions, and what they found at those sites in the Ala-shan."
Her tired face frowned.
"Better forget it, Will." Her hurried voice seemed dry and uneasy. "Sam won't talk about it, not even to me. I don't know what they brought back in that mysterious box, and there isn't a chance Sam would let you see it. He kept it here in his study the last two nights—and woke up this morning dreaming about it."
"Huh?" Barbee gulped. "He did?"
"He thought somebody was trying to take it." Nora shivered a little, and her blue eyes looked dark-shadowed with worry. "I guess the thing is getting on my nerves as well as Sam's because we both had a bad night. It seems I almost remember—"
She checked herself, looking sharply at Barbee.
"A funny thing," she added, without saying what she almost remembered. "The telephone receiver in Sam's study was off the hoo
k this morning. I'm pretty sure it wasn't last night, and Sam had the door locked. I can't imagine how that happened."
Barbee offered no solution for that puzzle. He looked away from her troubled face, trying to swallow the sudden tightness in his throat, and asked abruptly: "Where is Sam now?"
"Down at the Foundation," she said. "He has had a crew of men working day and night there since he got back—installing the fixtures in a new lab, he told me. He telephoned them when he woke up this morning, and Nick and Rex came in a station wagon for him and the box. He didn't even have time for his breakfast."
Her tired eyes looked appealingly at Barbee.
"Sam told me not to worry," she said, "but I just can't help it. He telephoned just a few minutes ago that he won't be home tonight. I suppose it is a really big discovery, that will make them all famous when it's announced, but I don't quite understand the way they act. They all seem so—frightened!"
She shuddered a little, and added hopefully: "Maybe Rex will tell—"
She caught herself.
"Tell what?" Barbee demanded.
Her soap-reddened hands twisted uncertainly at the corner of her kitchen apron.
"Sam warned me not to say anything about it." Freckles stood out from the worried pallor of her round face. "I know I can trust you, Will—but I didn't mean to mention it. Please don't let your paper get hold of it." Her eyes were afraid. "Oh, Will—I'm so upset—I don't know what to do."
Barbee patted her plump shoulder.
"I won't print anything you tell me," he promised.
"It's nothing much, really." Her sleepy, uncertain voice seemed grateful. "Just that Sam sent Rex back, after they left this morning, to get our car. I was going to take it to have the brakes tightened this morning. But they were in such a hurry. Rex is going to take it, Sam told me on the phone, to drive to State College tonight to make a radio broadcast."
"What about?"
"I don't know—Sam just told me the Foundation is buying time for a special program tomorrow. He asked me to listen. But not to speak about it. I hope they explain some of this horrid mystery." Her voice turned anxious. "You won't say anything, Will?"
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