The white bitch bristled suddenly, and Barbee saw that her greenish eyes were fixed on a frayed scrap of medieval tapestry, framed in glass and hung above the desk beside the window as if it were a special treasure. The faded pattern showed a gray, gigantic wolf snapping three chains that bound it to spring upon a bearded old man with one eye.
Puzzled at the she-wolf's snarl, Barbee lifted his flat head to study the ancient fabric. The huge wolf was Fenris, he recognized, demon of the Scandinavian mythology. Old Mondrick, he recalled, had once discussed the myth, comparing the Norse demonology to that of the Greeks. Offspring of the evil Loki and a giantess, the giant wolf Fenris had grown until the fearful gods chained him; he broke two chains, but the third magic bond held him until the dreadful day of Ragnarok when he broke free to destroy Odin, king of the gods—represented as an aged, one-eyed man. The white bitch had bared her fangs, retreating from the frayed tapestry.
"Why?" Barbee whispered. "Where is any danger?"
"There!" she growled huskily. "In that weaving, and the history it represents—and in all the myths of the wars and the marriages of men and gods and frost giants, that most men think are only fairy tales. Old Mondrick knew too much, and we let him live too long."
She paused to sniff that lethal, fetid sweetness.
"We've got to strike—now!" Her sleek body shivered. "Before these other fools rediscover all Mondrick and his wife knew—and turn this place into another trap to catch us." Her silky ears lifted, listening. "Come along, Barbee. They're just across the hall—those dear old friends of yours!"
They crossed the dark hall. Still no silver barred their path, and the long snake flowed ahead of the she-wolf through the locked door of a small corner room. Barbee stopped, lifting his flat black head in cold alarm at sight of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak.
"Why so jumpy?" The sleek bitch laughed at his start, her long eyes cold with a triumphant ferocity. "I think we're in time," she whispered. "These fools must have failed to guess the identity of the Child of Night— and your black-widow friend can't have got her warning to them yet—because they've put up no silver foil or silver wire to keep us out. I think we can put an end to these human monsters now and save the Child of Night!"
The two men in that little room didn't look so very monstrous to Barbee. Nick Spivak was wearily propped at a desk, writing. His stooped, flat-chested body seemed drained of life. He lifted his head, as Barbee peered at him, with a nervous start. Behind his thicklensed glasses, his eyes were bloodshot and haggard and feverish. Black with a stubble of neglected beard, his thin face was gray and haunted. It would wrench Mama Spivak's heart, Barbee thought, to see him now.
Sam Quain lay sleeping on a canvas cot against the wall. Drawn and grim with an utter exhaustion, his tanned, red-stubbled face was bleakly stubborn even in sleep. One of his strong arms was stretched from under the blanket, and his hand grasped a leather handle of the iron-bound coffer, even as he slept.
The box was padlocked. Barbee made a groping mental effort toward its contents and felt that heavy silver lining inside the iron and wood—a barrier that struck a cold chill through him. He recoiled uneasily, groggily aware of the sweetish lethal reek seeping from the box. The white bitch crouched beside him, ill and frightened.
"Watch your old friend Spivak!" she was gasping faintly. "He's our meat tonight."
Nick Spivak had turned apprehensively at the desk. His terrible red eyes looked straight at Barbee, yet he didn't seem to see the snake or the snarling wolf. Shuddering a little, his narrow shoulders hunched as if with cold, he turned back to his work.
Barbee let himself flow nearer, lifting his long, flat head to look over that thin, bent shoulder. He saw Spivak's quivering fingers absently turning a queer-shaped fragment of age-yellowed bone. He saw the frightened man pick up another object on the desk, and an unpleasant numbness stiffened his coils.
The object was white plaster. It looked like the cast of a disk-shaped, deep-graven stone. A part of the curved rim of the original must have been worn flat; it must have been cracked, he saw, and a little segment lost. That sweet fetor clung to it in an evil cloud, so powerful that Barbee had to draw his flat head stiffly back.
The white bitch peered fearfully at it, swaying where she stood.
"A cast of the Stone, that must be," her dry whisper rasped. "The Stone itself must be in that box—the secret that destroyed our people engraved on it and protected with that stinking emanation. We can't get at the Stone tonight." Her long tongue licked her fangs uneasily. "But I think we can stop your scholarly friend from reading that inscription."
Barbee rose in a black-patterned column to look again. Nick Spivak, he saw, had copied all the inscriptions from the plaster disk with pencil rubbings on soft yellow paper. Now he was trying to decipher them, no doubt, for the queer characters were spilled across his pages in rows and columns, mingled with his notes and guesses and tabulations in ordinary script.
"You're very strong tonight, Barbee," the she-wolf was gasping. "And I can see a certain probability of Spivak's death—a linkage close enough for you to grasp." Her red lips curled wickedly. "Kill him!" she urged. "While the link exists."
Barbee swayed uncertainly toward the stooped figure at the desk, and caught that evil sweetness again. It turned him giddy with illness, and he recoiled into a compact heap of defiance. His flat eyes shifted toward the narrow cot as Sam Quain turned a little in his sleep. A faint sympathy stirred in his cold body. He could sense the desperate purpose that armed these two lonely men in their strange citadel against the Child of Night, and a sudden pity welled up in him for Nora Quain and pink-faced little Pat.
"I won't hurt them," he whispered. "I won't touch Sam."
"This might be a good chance to get Sam out of your way with Nora." The white bitch leered at him. "But he's too near the thing in the box, and I can't find any linkage that might bring about his death tonight. Spivak is the one—and you must stop him before he unriddles that inscription."
Stiffly, painfully, Barbee thrust himself back into the lethal sweetness that hung in a paralyzing cloud around the white plaster cast on the desk. He pressed his scaled coils heavily toward the small man writing. For the man was an enemy of the Child of Night, and things were different now.
He could see the wailing desolation of Papa and Mama Spivak when they should hear the news. But the fat little tailor and his fatter wife, with their shop on Flatbush Avenue, were creatures of a remote dead dream. They weren't important any longer, any more than old Ben Chittum in his shabby newsstand. The real things, the things that mattered now, were his own savage power and the awaited arrival of the Child of Night and the fierce love of the green-eyed wolf.
Nervously, Nick Spivak was shuffling through his sheaves of yellow sheets. He flung them down impatiently and bent to frown through a pocket lens at the plaster cast, as if searching for some error in his copy. He shook his head, lighted a cigarette and crushed it out again, and frowned apprehensively toward the cot where Sam Quain slept.
"God," he muttered, "I'm jittery tonight!" He pushed the cast away and hunched grimly over his papers again. "If I could only determine that one damn character." He chewed his pencil, his pale forehead wrinkled. "The disk makers licked those devils once, and their discovery can do it again!" His narrow shoulders lifted resolutely. "Let's see again—if the alpha character really stands for unity—"
That was all he said. For Barbee had thrust his flat head between the man's wan face and the cluttered desk. Three times his long body whipped around. Then, constricting, he grasped with all his power for the linkage of probability to make himself manifest.
Nick Spivak's thin, hollowed face stiffened with horror. Behind the glasses, his red eyes popped. He opened his mouth to scream, but a savage blow from the side of Barbee's long head paralyzed his throat. The breath hissed out of his collapsing chest. He clawed with his hands and tried to stand up. The coils drew tighter and his chest caved in. His groping fingers, in a final fr
antic effort, caught the plaster disk and dashed it feebly against Barbee's ribs. The cold shock of its touch numbed and sickened Barbee, and the fearful sweetness clinging to it turned him groggy. His shuddering coils relaxed a little—and this, he thought, was only the cast; slipping inertly toward the floor, he wondered dully what the original Stone itself could do.
"Tighter, Barbee!" the white bitch was whispering. "Kill him while you can."
But Nick Spivak must have been already dead. The brittle plaster disk dropped out of his fingers and shattered into dusty fragments on the floor. Barbee recovered a little from its shocking touch and its clinging malodor and squeezed again. Bones snapped. Blood spurted across the papers on the desk.
"Quickly!" the she-wolf warned. "Quain's waking up!"
She trotted to the window, and Barbee reached to help her grasp the glass and wood and putty and steel to open a path. She shook her slender head.
"Not that way," she breathed quickly. "We must raise the sash. There's no screen, and I believe your old friend Spivak had a way of walking in his sleep when he got overtired. He was very tired tonight. That's the linkage I found to help you kill him."
Feebly, ill from that foul sweetness, she scratched at the catch. Barbee tried to help her and swayed weakly back, sinking in a shuddering pile on the warm, broken corpse. The she-wolf toiled frantically with supple paws and prying fangs, and the window came up with a bang. Sam Quain seemed to hear it, for he moved heavily on the cot.
"Nick," he muttered thickly. "What the devil's going on?"
He didn't get up, however, and the white bitch whispered sharply: "He can't wake now—that would break the linkage."
Clean, cold air, pouring in through the open window, began to dispel that evil sweetness. The she-wolf caught her breath and shook out her fur, and Barbee felt revived. He started rolling awkwardly toward the window, moving his crushed, still-pulsating burden. It left a reeking trail of spattered blood on the floor.
"Drop him!" the white bitch gasped. "While the linkage lasts."
It wasn't easy to move even so slight a form as Nick Spivak's, not when you were wrapped around and around it. Not when you were faint with the venom of the Stone. The cold air was clean and good, however, and Barbee's flowing strength returned. He hooked his flat head outside the window and caught the desk with his tail, lifting the broken body toward the windowsill.
"Quickly!" April Bell was urging. "We must get out of here before Quain can wake—and I've still some writing to do."
She trotted past the fallen chair, sprang lightly to the desk, and grasped the dead man's pencil in her pliant paws. Barbee had paused to ask what she wrote when Sam Quain groaned on the cot. Desperately he tightened his coils and toppled the limp weight of the crushed body over the sill. His coils slipped on a smear of blood, and he fell with it. The white bitch must have seen him fall, for her anxious voice floated after him: "Get away, Barbee—before Quain wakes!"
Hurtling downward through those nine stories of darkness, Barbee unwound his coils from the dripping, still-twitching thing that had been Nick Spivak. He flung it beneath him. Frantically he groped for the hateful husk he had left on his bed at Glennhaven, sick with fear of Sam Quain's awakening.
Beneath him, he heard the broken body crunch again on the concrete walk in front of the Foundation tower. The dull sound of yielding bone had a flat finality, and he had time to see that the last shudder of life had ceased in the misshapen frame sprawled flat in a puddle of red. Faintly, his sensitive ears caught the weary nasal voice of the guard called Charlie, inside the building: "Hell, Jug, you ain't supposed to think. I tell you again, the cause of Mondrick and Chittum dying is the coroner's business, and I don't want to know what's inside that box. Twenty bucks a night is twen—"
Barbee came crashing down—
But not upon the concrete walk beside Nick Spivak. For he had grasped his body as he fell, and that flowing change was quicker and less painful now. He fell on the floor beside his bed in the room at Glennhaven, and clambered stiffly upright.
He was a very ordinary biped, rusty with sleep. His head was choked with cold, and it throbbed from the bump against the floor. He wanted a drink. His stomach was fluttering. A dull weariness ached in him. Dr. Glenn, he thought, would doubtless tell him that he had merely rolled off the pillows on which he had propped himself to read, that all his dreadful dream had arisen afterward, from the unconscious effort to explain his fall.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Human Side
All the ruthless elation of that dream had drained away, and Barbee was flooded with a dull sickness of horror in its stead—for a stunned conviction gripped him that Nick Spivak was really dead, lying flat and broken on the walk in front of the Foundation tower.
He stood beside the bed, swaying with a gray illness, rubbing at the bruise on his temple. He fingered a smarting scratch on his neck, and remembered that the white wolf's fangs had nipped him there. He caught a long breath, and shook himself stiffly. He couldn't get rid of that sick certainty that Nick Spivak had really died in that dream.
Dazedly he snapped on the light and looked at his watch. It was two-fifteen. He reached for the clothing he had left on a chair, but the night nurse must have removed it; he found only the red robe and soft slippers. Trembling, clammy with sweat, he pulled them on. He pressed the call button, and shuffled out impatiently to meet the nurse in the hall—Miss Hellar had a gorgeous fluff of pale bleached hair and the physique of a lady wrestler.
"Why, Mr. Barbee! I thought you were asleep—"
"I've got to see Glenn," he told her. "Right now."
Her broad, alarming face broke into a gentle smile.
"Of course, Mr. Barbee." Her masculine voice tried to be soothing. "Why don't you just go back to bed, while we see—"
"Lady," Barbee interrupted grimly, "this is no time to show off your maniac-buttering technique. I may be crazy and I may not—I hope that's all I am. Crazy or not, I've got to talk to Glenn. Where does he sleep?"
Nurse Hellar crouched a little, as if she faced an opponent in the ring.
"Don't get fresh," Barbee advised her sharply. "I imagine you know how to handle common lunatics, but I believe my case is just a little different." He thought she nodded in uneasy agreement, and he tried to leer malevolently. "I think you'll run when I turn into a big black rat."
She retreated, turning a little pale.
"All I want is to talk to Glenn for five minutes— right away," Barbee told her. "If he doesn't like it, let him put it on my bill."
"That would come pretty high," Nurse Hellar warned. Barbee grinned at her, dropping to all fours. "But I won't try to stop you," she said shakily. "I'll show you his house."
"Smart girl!"
He stood up again. Nurse Hellar stepped back watchfully and waited for him to walk ahead of her down the hall to the stairs—he couldn't put aside a disquieting idea that she really believed he could turn himself into a rat. From the rear door of the annex she pointed out Glenn's dark mansion, and he thought she seemed relieved when he left her.
Lights sprang on in the upper windows of Glenn's brick house before he reached it, and he knew Nurse Hellar must have telephoned. The tall, suave psychiatrist himself, clad in a rather barbaric dressing gown, opened the front door before Barbee had found the bell. Glenn looked sleepier than ever.
"Well, Mr. Barbee?"
"It has happened again," Barbee blurted. "Another dream—that I know is more than just a dream. This time I was a snake. I—I killed Nick Spivak." He paused to catch a rasping breath. "I want you to call the police. They'll find him lying dead under an open ninth-floor window in front of the Humane Research Foundation building—and I'm his murderer!"
Barbee mopped his wet forehead, peering anxiously to see Glenn's reaction. The psychiatrist blinked his heavy-lidded hazel eyes, and shrugged easily in that splendid robe. He smiled a little, sympathetically, tilting back his tousled, curly head—and something in the movement woke in B
arbee that warm, inexplicable sense of recognition.
"Won't you?" Barbee insisted sharply. "Won't you call the police?"
Calmly, Glenn shook his head. "No, we can't do that."
"But Nick's dead!" Barbee shivered. "My friend—" "Let's not be hasty, Mr. Barbee." Glenn lifted his tall shoulders lazily. "If there is really no corpse, we should be troubling the police department for nothing. If there is, we might find it awkward to explain how we knew about it." His brown face smiled likably. "I'm a strict materialist—but the police are brutal materialists,"
Barbee's teeth chattered. "Do you think I—I really killed him?"
"By no means," Glenn told him smoothly. "Hellar assures me that you were sound asleep in your room until a few minutes ago. However, I do see another very interesting possibility, which might explain your dream."
"Huh?" Barbee caught his breath. "What's that?" Glenn blinked sleepily.
"You've been trying to solve a mystery which surrounds the behavior of your old friend Quain and his associates in the real world." Glenn's deep voice was casual and slow. "Consciously, you have failed to reach any certain solution. But the unconscious, remember, is often more astute than we ordinarily suspect."
Deliberately, he set the tips of his long brown fingers together.
"Unconsciously, Mr. Barbee," he continued gravely, "you may have suspected that Nick Spivak would be thrown out of a certain window tonight. If your unconscious suspicion should happen to tally neatly enough with reality, the police might find his body where you dreamed it fell."
"Nonsense!" Barbee stiffened angrily. "Only Sam was with him—"
"Exactly!" Glenn's handsome head made a slight I-told-you-so nod. "Your conscious mind rejects the notion that Sam Quain might be a murderer—and even your rejection has an emphasis which appears significant, because it suggests that unconsciously you may want Sam Quain to die for murder."
Darker Than You Think Page 20
