"Good work, Barbee," the girl purred. "Just keep up, till he starts down the curve."
He bounded on obediently. Gears snarled ahead as the little car labored up the grade, and the air behind it was foul with hot rubber and half-burned gasoline. Rex Chittum turned once at the wheel to peer back apprehensively. His dark head was carelessly bare— Barbee's eyes could see every curly hair, ruffled by the cold wind. For all the gray fatigue on his face and the black stubble on his chin and the shadow of dread in his narrowed eyes, he still looked handsome as another Lil Abner.
Barbee growled at the girl astride him.
"Must we kill Rex?" he protested. "He always was such a good kid, really. We went to school together, you know. We neither had much money—Rex was always trying to lend me his last dollar, when he needed it more than I."
"Run, Barbee," the girl murmured. "Keep up."
He turned to snarl with deadly sabers.
"Think of poor old Ben Chittum at the newsstand," he growled softly. "Rex is all old Ben has left. He worked at all sorts of odd jobs and went dressed like a tramp when they first came to Clarendon to keep Rex in school. This will break his heart."
"Keep running, Barbee." The white girl's voice was clear and sweet and limpidly pitiless. "We must do what we must, because we are what we are." Her cool fingers scratched his mighty shoulders. "To save our own kind, and defend the Child of Night."
She flattened against his fur.
"Run, Barbee!" she screamed. "Keep in reach— we'll have to stand the motor fumes. Wait now—stay just behind. Wait till he's on the hairpin—till he's going a little faster. Wait till the linkage of probability is strong enough to grasp—can't you feel it growing? Wait! Wait—"
Her long body stiffened against him. Her cool fingers tightened in his shaggy fur, and her bare, clinging heels dug deep into his heaving flanks. She was sweet against him, and the clear logic of this new life conquered the dreary conventions of that old, dim existence where he had walked in bitter death.
"Now," she screamed. "Spring!"
Barbee sprang, but the little car drew away from him, speeding on the down grade. His reaching claws caught only asphalt and gravel, and the hot fumes choked him.
"Catch him!" shrieked the girl. "While the link is strong enough!"
The fever of the chase burned away his lingering compunctions. He spurned the road and sprang again. His extended claws scratched and slipped on enameled metal, but he managed to catch the leather upholstery. His rear feet found the bumper. He clung to the lurching car, crouching.
"Kill him!" screamed April Bell. "Before the linkage snaps!"
Rex Chittum turned again, below him at the wheel, peering back with dark, anxious eyes. He shuddered in his bulky coat, to the bitter wind or something else. He didn't seem to see the snarling saber-tooth. A brief, stiff smile lighted his haggard, stubbled face.
"Made it," Barbee heard his thankful murmur. "Sam said the danger was—"
"Now!" the girl whispered. "While his eyes are off the road—"
Swiftly, mercifully, the long sabers flashed. Rex Chittum had been a loyal friend to him in that dead, dim world behind, and Barbee didn't want to cause him pain. The linkage of probability was still a dry technical phrase to Barbee, but he could feel the warm yielding tissues of the human throat his sabers slashed.
He forgot the words, tasting the hot salty sweet of spurting blood and giddy with its odor.
The man's lifeless hands let go the wheel. The little car had been going too fast—somehow, Barbee sensed, that fact had intensified the link that let his long fangs strike home. Tires smoked on the pavement and danced on the gravel, and the car left the road where the hairpin bent.
Barbee flung himself away from the plunging machine. He twisted in the air, and dropped cat-like on all four pads, clinging to the slope with his claws. The girl had lost her seat as the car lurched over beneath them. She came down on the loose rocks beside him, clinging to his fur with both frantic hands. He heard her gasp of pain, and then her awed whisper: "Watch, Barbee!"
The hurtling car, the motor still drumming and wheels spinning against the empty air, seemed to fly almost above them. It turned three times in empty space, and first struck the long rockslide a hundred feet below them. It flattened and crumpled and rolled until finally a boulder stopped it. The red, torn thing half under it made no movement.
"I thought the linkage would be strong enough," the tall girl purred. "And you needn't worry over your own part, Barbee—the police will never know that the broken windshield didn't slash his throat. Because, you see, the probability that it would was all that forged the linkage to enable your fangs to do it."
She tossed the long red hair impatiently back of her bare shoulders, and bent to feel her ankle. Her white face set with pain, and her long greenish eyes turned uneasily toward the pale silver point of the zodiacal light, rising in the dark hollow of the pass behind them.
"I'm hurt," she whispered, "and the night is nearly gone. Darling, you must take me home."
Barbee crouched beside a boulder to help her mount again, and he carried her back over the pass and down the long dark road toward Clarendon. Light as his own footfalls when they set out, she now felt heavy as a leaden statue. He lurched and swayed to her weight, shivering to a sickening chill.
That hot sweet taste of Rex Chittum's blood was a lingering bitterness in his mouth. All his mad elation had fled. He felt cold and ill and strangely tired, and he was afraid of the glowing east. He hated that narrow, ugly prison sleeping on his bed, but he had to go back.
He shook himself as he limped wearily on toward the greenish glow of day, until April Bell protested sharply. He couldn't quite dislodge his memory of that dull shadow of horror in Rex Chittum's eyes, looking back through him before he struck, or forget the grief that old Ben would feel.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hair of the Tiger
Barbee woke late. The white glare of sunlight in the bedroom hurt his aching eyes, and he rolled shuddering away from it before he remembered that its deadly power was only a dream. He felt stiff and vaguely ill. A dull, leaden weariness ached in all his body, and a clamor of agony started in his head when he sat up.
The shadowy dread in Rex Chittum's dark, unseeing eyes still haunted him, and he couldn't forget the feel of soft skin and firm tendons and the stiff tissues of the larynx slicing to his long sabers. He blinked apprehensively about the narrow room, glad to see no evidence that any saber-tooth had ever walked there.
He stood up uncertainly and tottered into the bathroom, holding his head. The shower, as hot as he could bear it and then as cold, washed some of the stiff pain out of him. A teaspoon of baking soda, stirred in a glass of cold water, eased the queasy feeling in his stomach.
But the face in his mirror shocked him. It was a bloodless gray, seamed and drawn, the eyes deep-sunken and red-rimmed and glittering. He tried to smile, just to light the dark strangeness of it, and the pale lips twitched at him sardonically. That was a lunatic's face.
He reached a shuddering hand to change the angle of the cheap mirror, hoping to correct some accidental distortion. The result was still unpleasant. The putty-colored face looked too gaunt, the raw-boned skull too long. He had better get more vitamins, he told himself uneasily, and drink a good bit less. Even a ... shave might help, if he could manage not to nick him self too deeply.
The telephone rang as he fumbled with his razor.
"Will? ... This is Nora Quain." Her voice was sick. "Brace yourself, Will. Sam just called me from the Foundation—he worked there all night. He called to tell me about Rex. Rex started to drive to State College last night—in our car, remember. He must have been driving too fast—too nervous, maybe, about that broadcast he meant to make. Anyhow, the car turned over on Sardis Hill. Rex was killed."
The telephone fell out of Barbee's hands. He dropped weakly on his knees, and groped for it with queerly numb fingers, and picked it up again.
"—ghastly," N
ora's low, hoarse voice was rasping. "Anyhow he died instantly, the state police told Sam. His head was cut almost off. The edge of the windshield, the police said. It's a terrible thing, and I—I almost blame myself. You know the brakes weren't very good—and I didn't think to tell him."
Barbee nodded at the receiver mutely. She didn't know how terrible it was. He wanted to scream, but the stiff constriction in his dry throat wouldn't even let him whisper. He shut his aching eyes against the cruel white glare from the window, and saw the handsome haggard face of Rex again, grown bitterly reproachful in his recollection, the brown fearful eyes still peering through him unseeingly.
He felt the receiver vibrate and listened again.
"—all he had," Nora's shaken voice was saying, "I think you're his best friend, Will. He's been waiting for two years in that little newsstand for Rex to come home. He's bound to take it pretty hard. I think you ought to break the news. Don't you think so?"
He had to swallow twice.
"All right," he gasped huskily. "I'll do it."
He hung up the telephone and stumbled back into the bathroom and took three long gulps out of a bottle of whisky. That took hold of him and steadied his quivering hands. He finished shaving and drove downtown.
Old Ben Chittum lived in two small rooms behind the newsstand. He was already open for business when Barbee parked at the curb, arranging magazines in a rack outside the door. He saw Barbee and gave him a cheery, snaggle-toothed grin.
"Hi, Will!" he called brightly. "What's new?"
Barbee shook his head, gulping mutely.
"Busy tonight, Will?" Noticing nothing, the old man ambled across the sidewalk to meet him, digging his pipe out of a bulging shirt pocket. "Reason I ask, I'm cooking dinner tonight for Rex."
Barbee stood swaying, feeling cold and bad inside, watching the spry old man strike a light for the pipe.
"Haven't seen much of Rex since he got back from over the water," old Ben went on. "But I reckon he'll have his work caught up by now, and I know he'll want to come. He always liked my beef mulligan, with hot biscuits and honey, ever since he was a kid, and I remember you used to eat with us now and then. Welcome, Will, if you'd like to come. I'm going to call Rex—"
Barbee cleared his throat harshly.
"I've got bad news for you, Ben."
The man's spry vitality seemed to drain away. He gasped and stared and began to tremble. The pipe dropped out of his gnarled fingers, and the stem broke on the concrete sidewalk.
"Rex?" he whispered.
Barbee gulped, and nodded again.
"Bad?"
"Bad," Barbee said. "He was driving over the mountains on some business for the Foundation late last night. The car went out of control on Sardis Hill. Rex was killed. He—he didn't suffer."
Ben Chittum stared a long time, blankly, out of slowly filling eyes. His eyes were dark like Rex's, and when they went out of focus, staring vaguely past Barbee, they were suddenly Rex's own, as they had been in that dreadful dream, peering with a fear-shadowed vacancy through the crouching saber-tooth.
Barbee looked hastily away, shivering.
"I've been afraid," he heard the old man's broken whisper. "They just don't seem quite right—none of them—since they got back from over the water. I tried to talk to Rex, but he wouldn't tell me anything. But I'm afraid, Will—"
The old man stopped painfully to pick up the pipe and the broken stem; his quivering fingers fitted the pieces awkwardly back together.
"I'm afraid," he muttered again. "Because I think they dug up something in that desert that should have stayed under the ground. You see, Rex told me before they ever left that Dr. Mondrick was looking for the true Garden of Eden, where the human race came from. I'm afraid they found it, Will—and things they shouldn't have found."
Wearily, he stuffed the pieces of the pipe back in his pocket.
"Rex ain't the last that's going to die."
His dark, unseeing eyes came back into focus, looking at Barbee. He seemed to become conscious of his tears and wiped at them with an angry sleeve. He shook his head and limped heavily back to move his rack of magazines inside the door.
Barbee stood watching, too shaken even to offer any aid.
"Rex always liked my beef mulligan," the old man murmured softly. "Especially with buttered hot biscuits and honey. You remember that, don't you, Will? Ever since he was just a kid."
Dazedly, he locked up the newsstand. Barbee drove him to the morgue. The ambulance hadn't come back with the body—Barbee felt mutely grateful for that.
He left the stunned old man in the kindly hands of Parker, the county sheriff, and turned automatically toward the Mint Bar.
Two double slugs of bourbon, however, failed to stop the throbbing in Barbee's head. The daylight was too bright, and that queasy sickness came back to his stomach. He couldn't forget that vacant blankness of unseeing horror in Rex's eyes, and a frenetic tension of terror crept upon him from that dark recollection.
Desperately, he fought that terror. He tried to move deliberately, tried to smile disarmingly at the casual witticisms of another early drinker. He failed. The man moved uneasily to a farther stool, and Barbee saw the bartender watching him too keenly. He paid for his drinks and stumbled back into the glare of day.
He had the shakes, and he knew he couldn't drive. He left his car where he had parked it, and took a taxi to the Trojan Arms. The front door through which April Bell had slipped so easily in his dream was unlocked now. He staggered through it and lurched straight to the stair, before the clerk could stop him.
A card hung on the doorknob of 2-C said "Don't Disturb," but he knocked vigorously. If the Chief's still here, he thought grimly, let him crawl under the bed.
April Bell was slim and tall and lovely in a sea-green robe nearly as revealing as that dream had been. Her long hair, brushed to a coppery luster, was loose about her shoulders. Her face was a pale smooth oval; she hadn't painted her lips. Her greenish eyes lighted as she recognized him.
"Will—come on in!"
He came in, grateful that the clerk hadn't overtaken him, and sat down in the big easy chair she pointed to beside a reading lamp. His employer wasn't in sight, but he wondered if this weren't Troy's chair— for April Bell would hardly be interested in the new copy of Fortune on the little table beside it, or care to smoke the cigars in that heavy gold case he thought he must have seen somewhere before.
He looked away from those things almost guiltily— they stirred a hot, illogical resentment in him; but he hadn't come here to quarrel with April Bell. She was moving, with the easy feline grace that he remembered in the dream, to sit on the sofa across from him. It was easy to picture her as she had ridden the racing saber-tooth, nude and white and beautiful, her red hair streaming in the wind—and he started to the uneasy impression that her flowing felicity of motion concealed a very slight limp...
"So you turned up at last, Barbee?" Her slow voice was huskily melodious. "I was wondering why you didn't call again."
Barbee pressed his hands against his thighs to stop their shaking. He wanted to ask her for another drink —but he had already had too many, and they didn't seem to help. He rose abruptly from the chair that must be Preston Troy's, stumbling a little on the footstool, and stalked to the other end of her sofa. Her long eyes followed him, bright with a faintly malicious interest.
"April," he said hoarsely, "the other night at the Knob Hill you told me you were a witch."
Her white smile mocked him.
"That's what you get for buying me too many daiquiris."
Barbee clenched his cold gnarled hands together to stop their shuddering.
"I had a dream last night." It was hard to go on. He peered about uncomfortably at the quiet luxury of the room. He saw a framed painting of a frail, gray, resolute little woman who must have been April's mother; and he flinched again from the business magazine and the gold cigar case beside the chair. His throat felt raw and dry.
"I had a
dream." He brought his aching eyes back to the long-limbed girl; her silent smile somehow made him think of the white bitch's grin in that first dream. "I thought I was a tiger." He forced the words out, rasping and abrupt. "I thought you were—well, with me. We killed Rex Chittum on Sardis Hill."
Her dark-penciled brows lifted slightly.
"Who's Rex Chittum?" Her greenish eyes blinked innocently. "Oh, you told me—he's one of your friends who brought back that mysterious box from Asia. The one who belongs in Hollywood."
Barbee stiffened, scowling at her unconcern.
"I dreamed we killed him." He almost shouted. "And he's dead."
"That's odd." She nodded brightly. "But not so unusual. I remember I dreamed of my own grandfather the night he died." Her voice was lightly sympathetic, silk and cream and the chime of golden bells, but he thought he heard a secret mockery within it. He searched her greenish eyes again, and found them limpidly clear as mountain lakes. "The road men ought to fix that curve on Sardis Hill," she added absently, and so dismissed his dream.
"The clerk told me you phoned yesterday morning." With lazy grace she tossed back her shining hair. "I'm sorry I wasn't up."
Barbee gulped down an uneasy breath. He wanted to sink his fingers into her satin shoulders and shake the truth out of her—or was that veiled mockery all his own imagining? He felt cold and tense with terror of her—or was it the terror of some dark monster in himself? He rose abruptly, trying not to show his shuddering.
"I wanted to bring you something, April." Her long eyes brightened expectantly, and she seemed not to notice the shaking of his hand as he felt for the little jade pin still in his coat pocket. He held it concealed, cold in his hand, and watched her face as he dropped it into her extended palm.
"Oh, Barbee!" She saw it, and the dark wonder in her eyes changed to innocent delight. "That's my precious lost pin—the one Aunt Agatha gave me. A family heirloom, and I'm so glad to have it back."
Darker Than You Think Page 16
