Surely she couldn't have come so far, blundering un-guided. Perhaps she was blinder than the white bitch had whispered—
He saw her then, near the bridge. A gaunt lonely figure, angular and tall, stalking on with frenzied haste. The black she wore made her oddly difficult to see—he tramped hard on his brakes, shaken with the thought that he had almost run her down. But he hadn't struck her.
She was safe. He breathed again, in immense relief, slowing the car behind her. The monstrous danger hovering over her was still suspended. He was in time to help her—and defeat one scheme of the hidden Child of Night. The little car was rolling to a halt a dozen yards behind her when he saw the headlamps in the rearview mirror.
They had swung into the road from the grounds of Glennhaven, but he thought he still had time enough. He would pick the blind woman up, he decided, and carry her straight to Sam Quain at the Foundation. That cool purpose steadied his sweaty hands on the wheel, and rekindled hope began to banish his shadowy terrors.
Such an open gesture, he felt, would surely erase Rowena's insane mistrust and allay Sam's unreasonable suspicion. It might do more. Rowena had once shared Mondrick's researches; perhaps she really had something to tell Sam Quain. Perhaps she could yet turn a light upon Barbee's own dark dilemmas—and even really identify the Child of Night.
Ahead of him, the thin woman must have heard the squeal of his brakes, for she fled frantically down the white cone of the headlamps. She stumbled on the edge of the concrete abutment, fell to hands and knees, and staggered up again as he opened the car door and leaned out to call: "Rowena! Wait—I want to help you." She seemed to start and crouch, turning back to listen. "Just let me help you into the car," he called, "and I'll take you on to see Sam Quain."
She came back toward him, still taut and doubtful.
"Thank you, sir." Her voice was hoarse and breathless. "But—who are you?"
"I'll do anything to help you, Rowena," he told her softly. "I'm Will Barbee—"
She must have recognized his voice, because she screamed before she heard his name. Her wide mouth was black as the lenses over her eyes, and her cry was a sobbing rasp of insane fear. She stumbled back from him, blundered against the concrete railing, groped over it to get her bearings, and ran wildly across the bridge.
Barbee sat stunned for a moment, but the headlamps behind were growing in the little mirror. His time was short before that pursuit should overtake them, and he knew the blind woman could never reach Sam Quain without his aid. He shifted into low gear and stepped on the accelerator—and cold consternation shook him.
He saw the white she-wolf.
He knew she shouldn't be here, because this certainly wasn't any dream. He was entirely awake; and his gaunt, hairy hands shivering on the wheel were clearly human. But the sleek white bitch seemed as real as the lean black shape that fled, and much easier to see.
She sprang gracefully out of the shadows beyond the abutment and sat on her haunches in the middle of the pavement. The headlamps gleamed on her snowy fur, and flamed luridly green in her eyes. The light must have been painful to her, but she laughed at him, long tongue lolling.
He slammed his foot against the brake pedal, but he had no time to stop the car. No time even to wonder whether she were something real or only a laughing phantom of delirium tremens. She was too close, and he swerved automatically to avoid her.
The left fender struck the concrete barrier. The wheel drove back hard against his chest, and his head must have gone over it against the windshield. The scream of tires and crash of metal and jangle of glass all dissolved into quiet darkness.
The blow against his head must have dazed him, but only for an instant. He sat back behind the wheel and got breath into his painful lungs again and felt his throbbing head. He could find no blood.
He felt gone. Shivering weakly to the chill of the night, he shrugged the thin robe closer around him. The car had stopped diagonally across the bridge. The motor was dead, but the right headlamp still burned. He could smell a faint reek of gasoline and hot rubber. Surely he was now too wide awake to see that hallucination any longer, but he couldn't help peering uneasily ahead.
"Good work, Barbee!" the white bitch purred softly. "Though I hadn't expected this to be your most dreadful shape!"
He saw her then, leering greenly at him over a quiet black form outside the white path of the lone headlamp. He couldn't make out that huddled thing—but nothing moved on the bridge beyond it, and his straining ears caught no echo of Rowena's frenetic feet. A dazed dismay drove out his breath again.
"What—?" Horror choked him. "Who—?"
The slim she-wolf sprang lightly over that unmoving form, and came trotting lightly to the side of the car. Her long eyes burned with a triumphant glee. She grinned at him, licking at the fresh pink stains on her muzzle and her fangs.
"Neat work, Barbee!" she murmured happily. "I could feel the linkage when I called you a while ago—a blind woman on the highway, clothed in black and too afraid to listen for the cars, carries a strong probability of death. We grasped it very skillfully. I think the shape you brought was as frightful to her as any could have been. She broke the string and lost her silver beads when yon made her fall—and I don't think she'll be telling Sam Quain the name of the Child of Night!"
The white bitch turned her head, fine ears lifted to listen.
"Here they come, Barbee—the blundering human fools from Glennhaven." The pale rays of the still-distant headlamps struck her, and she sprang warily back toward the shadow-clotted roadside. "We had better go," she urged. "Drive on—just leave the dead widow where she lies!"
"Dead?" Barbee echoed hoarsely. "What—what have you made me do?"
"Only your clear duty," she purred, "in our war against mankind—and such mongrel traitors as the widow, who try to turn the powers of our own blood against us! You've proved yourself, Barbee—now I know you're fully with us." Her greenish eyes peered back down the road. "Drive on!" she called sharply. "Before they find you here!"
She sprang silently off the pavement into the dark.
Barbee sat numbed and breathless until the lights of the approaching car flashed in the mirror again. An urgency of sharp alarm stirred him at last from his apathy of unbelieving horror. He stumbled out of the car and lurched dazedly to the flat thing the laughing bitch had left.
That huddled form sagged limply when he lifted it. He could feel no pulse or breath. Warm blood wet his hands, and torn black garments showed him all the dreadful harm the she-wolf's fangs had done. Shock and pity turned him ill, and suddenly the dead woman was too heavy in his shuddering arms. He laid her back on the pavement as tenderly as he could. There was nothing else to do.
Falling long and black across her body, his own shadow moved. Turning dully, he saw the approaching headlamps descending the last slope to the bridge. The wind struck his hands, and he felt the blood turn stiff and cold. He stood beside the body, waiting, too sick to think.
"Drive on, Barbee!" That sharp warning startled him, whispered from the dark. "Those fools from Glennhaven don't understand the mental manipulation of probability, and you shouldn't let them find you by the widow's corpse." The white bitch's whispering turned soft, huskily urgent. "Come on to my place at the Trojan Arms—and we'll drink to the Child of Night!"
Perhaps that was only his own terror whispering, and his own sick desire, cloaked in the symbolism of his own unconscious. Perhaps it was something more dreadful. He had no time left to ponder such riddles of the mind, for the lamps of the slowing car illuminated his own ghastly predicament.
Rowena Mondrick lay dead in front of his battered car on the narrow bridge. Her literal blood was on his hands, and the nurse at Glennhaven could swear in court she had feared Mm desperately. He couldn't tell the jury that a white were-wolf had killed her.
Panic took hold of him. Half blinded by the approaching lights, he scrambled into the car and kicked the starter. The motor roared, and he tried to back away fr
om the bridge railing. The steering wheel refused to turn. He tumbled desperately out again, in the white glare of the nearing headlamps, and found the left fender crumpled against the front wheel.
Shuddering and breathless in Ms panic, he climbed on the bent bumper and stooped to grasp the crumpled metal with both hands. His wet fingers slipped. He wiped them on the cold enamel, and strained again. Groaning, the torn metal yielded.
The other car stopped close behind them, crunching gravel.
"Well, Mr. Barbee!" The annoyed voice twanging from behind the blinding headlamps sounded like Dr. Bunzel's. "I see you had a little accident"
Fumbling beneath the bent fender, Barbee found it high enough to clear the tire. Shading his eyes against the glare, he ran back around the battered car, shivering with grief and terror.
"Just a moment, Mr. Barbee!" He heard quick footsteps on the pavement. "You're entitled to every possible courtesy so long as you're our guest at Glennhaven, but you ought to know you can't check out this way, in the middle of the night, without Dr. Glenn's permission. I'm afraid we'll have to—"
He didn't wait to listen any longer. A voiceless dread flung him back into the car. He slipped it into reverse and stepped hard on the gas, bracing himself for the crash. Bumpers grated and glass tinkled. The lights of the other car went out. The wheedling voice of the man on the ground changed to an angered roar.
"Barbee—stop!"
But Barbee didn't stop. He shifted into low gear again, and the light car swerved around the ragged, flattened thing the white wolf had left. The wheels skidded on something slippery, and the twisted fender grazed the barrier. It didn't catch, however. He recovered control and roared across the bridge.
The lights of the rammed car behind him stayed out. It might take Dr. Bunzel half an hour, he thought, to walk back to Glennhaven and a telephone. By dawn, he knew, the police would be looking for an insane hit-and-run killer in a red hospital robe, driving a blood-stained coupe.
Uneasily he watched the leap and crouch of shadows outside the feeble beam of his single headlamp, but he failed to discover the white she-wolf. The old coupe began pulling crazily to the left as he shifted into high; the smash, he supposed, must have bent something. He gripped the wheel against the demon in it and pushed the wheezing motor to forty, trying numbly to think.
A bitter and dreadful loneliness had seized him.
Rowena Mondrick lay slashed to death behind him, but he couldn't stop the perversity of horror that brought his thoughts again and again to the university years when he and Sam Quain had boarded at her house. She used to play anything they liked on her piano, and have Miss Ulford serve them cookies and milk, and listen with her calm, blind patience to all their small troubles. That time, in the sick nostalgia of his thoughts, seemed the brightest of his life. She had been a true and gracious friend, but she couldn't help him now.
April Bell smiled in the darkening shadows of his mind, haunting in her green-eyed allure. The white she-wolf, he remembered uneasily, had asked him to come to the Trojan Arms and drink to the Child of Night. A frightened impulse moved him to go to April Bell. She had wanted to make coffee for him once, and perhaps she could help him yet. He was slowing to look for her street when the exotic smile of the tall redhead in his mind changed to the pink-smeared grin of a white-fanged wolf. Shivering, he drove straight on.
He had nowhere to go, and his brain seemed too dull for thought. He turned left off the river road and drove out to the end of an empty side street and parked among brush-thicketed vacant lots until the cold of the dawn had seeped in through his red cotton robe and its glow was bright in the east.
The day alarmed him from that gray apathy of stunned bewilderment. He couldn't help shrinking away from the greenish dawn, recalling the she-wolf's dread of light and the pain of it to the gray wolf he once had been. It didn't hurt him now, but it did reveal the twisted left fender of the old coupe—and the police would be looking for that.
He started the car again, shuddering from the cold, and drove back across the river road and on through the emptiest streets he could find toward the university. Once he saw headlamps behind him, yellow in the dawn. He drove straight on, not daring to speed or turn, and sobbed with relief when they stopped and winked out.
He parked again in an alley behind a lumber yard, half a mile east of the campus. Fumbling in the gray half-light, he found pliers under the seat and drained enough of the scalding, rusty mixture of antifreeze and water from the radiator to wash the dark, stiffened blood from his hands. He left the car there and limped hastily on through the waking streets toward Sam Quain's little bungalow.
He had to check a frantic impulse to dive into another alley when he saw a newsboy riding a bicycle to meet him, hurling folded papers at doorways. He caught his breath and forced himself to wait calmly at the curb, trying his best to look like a sleepy resident and fingering the coins in his pocket to find a dime.
"Star, mister?"
Barbee nodded easily. "Keep the change."
The boy handed him a paper and hurled another at the sleeping house behind him and pedaled on. But Barbee had seen him glance sharply at the red hospital robe and the gray felt slippers. He would remember, when he heard about the manhunt.
Carefully standing so the boy couldn't see the fatal Glennhaven embroidered across the shoulders of the robe, if he happened to look back, Barbee unfolded the paper as steadily as he could. His breath stopped and the damp newsprint rustled as a black headline struck him with the impact of a club: prehistoric "curse"—or human killer—takes third victim Nicholas Spivak, 31, anthropologist associated with the Research Foundation, was discovered dead this morning beneath an open ninth-floor window of the Humane Research Foundation building near Clarendon University. The body was found by special guards, employed by the Foundation after sudden death had claimed two other Foundation scientists this week.
Did a prehistoric curse follow the recent Foundation expedition back to Clarendon from the mounds they exhumed in Asia? The surviving members of this private research group deny all rumors that they dug up anything so exciting from the supposed birthplace of mankind in what is now the desolate Ala-shan desert, but Spivak's death raises the toll to three.
Dr. Lamarck Mondrick, founder of the organization and leader of the expedition, fell dead as the explorers left their chartered plane at the municipal airport Monday evening. Rex Chittum, a younger member of the group, died early Thursday morning when his car left the road forty miles west of Clarendon on Sardis Hill.
Samuel Quain, another Foundation associate, is being sought for questioning in connection with Spivak's death, according to police Chief Oscar Shay and Sheriff T. E. Parker, who hinted that his testimony is expected to throw new light on the oddly coincidental previous deaths.
Laughing at the curse theory, Shay and Parker hinted that a green-painted wooden box which the explorers brought back from Asia may hold a more sinister explanation of these three fatalities.
Quain is believed to have been alone with Spivak in the tower room from which Shay and Parker state that he fell or was hurled to his death—
The paper dropped out of Barbee's cold fingers. Perhaps murder had been done—he shuddered at the recollection of Dr. Glenn's diabolical suggestions, and shook his bare head frantically. Sam Quain couldn't be the killer—that was unthinkable.
Yet a killer there must be. Rowena Mondrick made four dead—too many for mere coincidence. Beyond the grotesque web of contradiction and enigma, he thought he could distinguish a ruthless brain working cunningly to bring about these seeming accidents. The Child of Night—if that phrase meant anything.
But who—he shrank from that question, shivering in the first cold sunlight; and he hurried on along the quiet streets again toward Sam Quain's house, trying to look as if a morning stroll in a flapping red robe were quite an ordinary event.
The chill autumn air had a smoky crispness. The world, as it came to his senses, was entirely normal and believabl
e. A milk truck rattled across the street in front of him. A woman in a vivid yellow wrapper appeared briefly on a doorstep to pick up the morning paper. An overalled man with a black lunch pail, probably a bricklayer waiting for a bus at the corner, grinned amiably as Barbee came by.
Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might —just might—be the monstrous Child of Night.
His heart stopped when a siren split the morning hush. A police car lurched around the corner ahead and came drumming down the pavement toward him. He couldn't breathe and his knees turned weak, but he set his face in an empty grin and stumbled blindly on. He waited for the cold official voice to hail him, but the car didn't pause.
He shuffled swiftly on, his feet numb and aching in the thin felt slippers. The police radio, he knew, must already be snarling out the orders to pick him up. Probably his abandoned car had already been reported, and that prowl car was racing to investigate. The hunt would spread from there, fast.
He walked two more blocks, and still the police car hadn't come back. He limped breathlessly around the last corner into Pine Street, and stopped when he saw the black sedan parked in front of Sam Quain's small white house. Terror made a hard constriction in his throat, for he thought the police were waiting for him here.
In a moment, however, he saw the lettering on the car door—only the name of the Research Foundation. He had almost forgotten Sam Quain's grim predicament in the desperation of his own, but Sam was also wanted. He must have come here, it occurred to Barbee, to wait with his family for the law.
Barbee managed to breathe again. A glow of hope thawed his consternation, and he limped hurriedly up the walk to the door. Sam Quain would surely talk to him now, in this hour of their mutual extremity. Together, they might break the monstrous web that had snared them both. He knocked eagerly.
Darker Than You Think Page 22
