Darker Than You Think

by Jack Williamson

  The rain had turned to icy mist, but a cold yellow torrent still poured down from the cliffs, through the narrow rock chimney that was a stair to the cave. He scrambled stiffly down through it, drenched and shivering—yet queerly relieved to escape the presence of Sam Quain and that ominous box.

  The dusk was thick by the time he came splashing through ice-cold water to the parked Foundation car. It started easily, and the road was better than he had hoped. He could hear the rumble of rolling boulders as he crossed the Bear Creek ford, but the car plowed steadily through the foaming water.

  He had to turn on the lights before he came back to the highway, but nothing whispered from the dark. No sleek she-wolf sprang into the road ahead, and no police siren wailed behind him. It was eight o'clock when he parked the car on the drive beside Troy's long mansion at Trojan Hills.

  Barbee knew his way about the house, for he had been here on political stories. He let himself in through the side entrance. The dining room, to his relief, was dark. He climbed the stairs silently and rapped on the door of Troy's second-floor den. The publisher's leather-throated voice asked who the devil he was.

  "Chief, it's Barbee," he whispered apprehensively.

  "I've got to see you right away—because I didn't run over Mrs. Mondrick."

  "So you didn't?" Troy's voice, rasping through the door, sounded unbelieving. After a brief delay it added, "Come in."

  The den was a huge room with a brass-railed bar across one end, decorated with hunting trophies and long-limbed nudes in oil. The air had a faint aroma of stale cigar smoke, leather upholstery, and financial importance, and Troy had boasted that more history was made here than in the governor's mansion.

  The first thing Barbee saw was a white fur jacket on the back of a chair. A greenish glint caught his glance—the malicious malachite eye of a tiny jade wolf pinned in the fur. The jacket was April Bell's. His hands tried to clench, and it was a moment before he could go on breathing.

  "Well, Barbee?" In shirt sleeves, with a fresh cigar in his mouth, Troy stood beside a huge mahogany desk cluttered with papers and ash trays and empty glasses. His massive, pink-jowled face had a look of wary expectancy. "So your car didn't kill Mrs. Mondrick?"

  "No, Chief." Barbee made himself look away from April Bell's coat and tried to smooth his shuddering voice. "They're trying to frame me—just like they did Sam Quain!"

  "They?" Troy's reddish eyebrows lifted interrogatively.

  "It's a terrible, tremendous story, Chief—if you will only listen."

  Troy's eyes were pale and cold.

  "Sheriff Parker and the city police would be interested," he said. "And your doctors out at Glennhaven."

  "I'm not—crazy." Barbee was almost sobbing. "Please, Chief—listen to me first!"

  "Okay." Troy nodded, poker-faced. "Wait." He waddled deliberately behind the bar and mixed two Scotch and sodas and brought them back to the desk. "Shoot."

  "I did think I was going insane," Barbee admitted, "until I talked to Sam Quain. Now I know I've been bewitched—"

  He saw Troy's wide-mouthed face turn harder and tried to slow his nervous, hurried voice. He tried desperately to be convincing, telling Sam Quain's strange story of the origin and extermination of Homo lycanthropus and the rebirth of the witch folk from the genes.

  He watched intently, trying to see how Troy reacted. He couldn't be sure. The thick cigar went out and the tall forgotten glass made a wet ring on the desk, but Troy's shrewd, narrowed eyes told him nothing. He caught his breath, and his dry, tight voice finished urgently: "Believe me, Chief—you've got to believe!"

  "So Dr. Mondrick and the other Foundation men were murdered by these witches?" Troy laced his pudgy fingers together in front of his paunch, and chewed reflectively on his dead cigar. "And now you want me to help you fight this Child of Night?"

  Barbee gulped, and nodded desperately.

  Troy peered at him with blank blue eyes.

  "Maybe you aren't crazy!" A slow excitement seemed to take fire behind the stiff, ruddy mask of his face—and Barbee began to feel a breathless agony of hope. "Maybe these witches are framing you and Quain —because this theory of Mondrick's explains a lot. Even why you like some people on sight and don't trust others—because you sense that evil blood in them!"

  "You trust me?" Barbee gasped. "You'll help—" Troy's bald, massive head nodded decisively. "I'll investigate," he said. "I'll go back with you to that cave tonight and listen to Quain and maybe have a look in that mysterious box. If Quain's as convincing as you are, I'm with you, Barbee—to my last cent and my last gasp."

  "Thanks, Chief!" Barbee whispered huskily. "With you to help, we may have a chance."

  "We'll lick 'em!" Troy boomed aggressively. "You've come to the right man, Barbee—I don't get beaten by anybody. Just give me half an hour to get ready. I'll tell Rhodora that I'm mending political fences—and she can go alone to Walraven's party. Use the bathroom there if you want to wash up."

  Barbee was appalled by what he saw in the bathroom mirror. He looked as gaunt and tired and bearded and begrimed and torn as Sam Quain had been. And there was something else—something that somehow made him think of those smiling skeletons of Homo lycanthropus the giant snake had found. He wondered if the glass were faintly discolored and slightly curved—he was sure he had never looked quite like that.

  An unpleasant hunch jarred him out of that brooding puzzlement. He hurried back into the den and carefully picked up the telephone on the long desk. He was in time to hear Troy's voice.

  "Parker? I've got a man for you. This Barbee, that got out of Glennhaven and ran down the Mondrick woman. He used to work for me, you know, and now he's come to my house at Trojan Hills. No question the guy belongs in the state asylum—he has been trying to feed me the queerest yarn I ever heard! Can you come after him right away?"

  "Sure, Mr. Troy," the sheriff said. "Twenty minutes."

  "Be careful," Troy said. "I think he's dangerous. I'll try to keep him in my den on the second floor." "Right, Mr. Troy."

  "Another thing, Parker. Barbee says he has seen Sam Quain—the man you want for the Foundation murders. He says Quain is hiding in a cave up Laurel Canyon, above Bear Creek. It might be a good tip— Barbee and Quain are old friends, and they might be in the plot together. With a little persuasion, Barbee might lead you to the cave." "Thanks, Mr. Troy!"

  "That's all right, Parker. You know the Star stands for law and order. All I want is the first look inside that green wooden box. But hurry, won't you? I don't much like Barbee's looks."

  "Okay. Mr. Troy--"

  Silently Barbee replaced the receiver. The lush nudes on the walls were dancing fantastically, and a gray mist seemed to thicken about him in that long room. He stood numbed and swaying, shivering to the chill of it. He knew he had betrayed Sam Quain—perhaps even to the Child of Night.

  For this frightful blunder was all his own fault. Of course Sam Quain had sent him here—but he hadn't dare tell Quain that April Bell was a witch and rest on Troy her intimate. There was too much he had been afraid to tell, and it was too late now.

  Or was it?

  A hard new purpose steadied him. He listened and slipped off his shoes and padded silently out of the den. The door of Troy's bedroom across the hall was slightly ajar, and he glimpsed the squat publisher turning from a chest of drawers with a flat automatic in his pudgy fist.

  The picture of a red-haired girl, standing on the chest, drew Barbee's eyes from the gun. The girl was April Bell. Savagely, for a moment, he wished that he were the great snake again. But no—he shuddered away from the very notion. He didn't intend to change again.

  He ran noiselessly down the stairs and slipped out through the side door. The mud-splashed Foundation car stood where he had left it on the drive. Quivering with eagerness, he started the motor as quietly as he could and drove back to the highway before he clicked on the lights.

  He turned west and tramped on the accelerator. Perhaps he could still undo h
is blunder. If he could get back to the cave ahead of Sheriff Parker and his deputies, Sam Quain might listen to his warning. Perhaps they could carry the precious box back to the car and escape together. Now that Troy knew of Quain's plan, they must go far from Clarendon—because Preston Troy was very likely the Child of Night.

  The lightning had ceased with the fall of darkness, but the cold south wind blew steadily, laden with fine rain. The windshield wipers slowed as he stepped oh the gas, and it was difficult to see the wet road. Panic gripped him, for one skid on the slick pavement could mean defeat for Sam Quain.

  He was already slowing for the rutted side road that led toward Laurel Canyon when he knew that he was being followed. The steamy blur of the rear vision mirror showed no lights behind, but his cold intuition was too imperative to be ignored. Afraid to pause or turn, he drove on, faster.

  He knew what was behind—as certainly as if he had seen the feral flash of greenish eyes following. April Bell was after him, probably in the guise of the white werewolf. She hadn't interfered with his visit to Preston Troy because Troy was a leader of the clan. But now she was going back with him to kill Sam Quain.

  The Child of Night had won.

  A cold sickness of despair took hold of Barbee, and he shivered at the wheel. His dazed mind refused to make any rational effort to grasp and follow the details of their dark conspiracy, but he knew the reborn witch men were invincible. He couldn't go back to Sam Quain and let April Bell use him for her killer again. He couldn't return to Clarendon—that would mean a padded cell in the state asylum. A hopeless panic drove him blindly on.

  He pushed the car on west toward the hills, just because he couldn't go back. The headlamps made a white blur in the rain, and he saw a strange procession marching through it. Mondrick's blind wife, tall and terrible, leading her tawny dog and clutching her silver dagger. Old Ben Chittum, fumbling with gnarled hands and failing to light his pipe, struck dead inside. Fat Mama Spivak, wailing on the shoulder of the fat little tailor. Nora Quain, her blonde hair disheveled and her round face swollen with tears, leading little Pat, who was trying stubbornly not to cry.

  The speedometer climbed to seventy. The vacuum driven wipers stopped as he mounted the first foothills, and rain fogged the windshield. The roaring car lurched and swayed on the wet pavement, flinging white wings of water out of puddles. A farm truck with no lights burst suddenly out of the mist, and he whipped narrowly around it.

  The needle touched eighty.

  But the sleek white bitch, he knew, was following close behind him—a free mind web, riding the wind and swift as thought. He watched the misted mirror, holding the accelerator down. There was nothing his eyes could see—but his mind felt the malice of greenish eyes leering.

  The hills rose higher and the curves were steeper, but he didn't slow the car. This was the way the great saber-tooth had chased Rex Chittum. He recalled the night-cloaked hills as the tiger's eyes had seen them, and his nightmares began to haunt him.

  Once again he was the shaggy gray wolf, cracking the backbone of Pat Quain's little dog in his jaws. He was the giant snake, flowing up into the Foundation tower to crush out Nick Spivak's life. He was the tiger, with the naked witch astride him, racing up this same road to slash Rex Chittum's throat.

  He held the accelerator down and held the pitching car on the twisting road, trying to run away from those evil dreams. He tried not to think of Sam Quain waiting for help in that dripping cavern—until Sheriff Parker's men should come. He watched the steamy mirror, and he tried to get away.

  For a terrible sick eagerness was creeping upon him, more dreadful than the sleek white wolf he felt behind. In the corner of the mirror was a little sticker cut in the outline of a pterosaur—that winged, reptilian monster of the geologic past was the emblem of an oil company; and the sticker was marked with the mileage when the car was last greased. The image of that flying saurian began to haunt Barbee.

  Such a gigantic winged lizard, he felt, would make a satisfying change of shape. He would have fangs and claws to destroy all his enemies, and pinions to soar away from all this unendurable confusion of troubles, along with April Bell. He wanted to stop the car—but that urge was insanity, and he fought it desperately.

  He held the roaring car on the road, racing to escape his fears, but the sheets of rain glowing white in the headlamps seemed to make a kind of prison in which no motion moved him. He tried to overtake his lost sanity—to find some solid reality his mind could grasp —but his fevered thoughts ran on endlessly, like some frantic creature shut in a treadmill cage, and reached no goal.

  Had April Bell really snared him with black magic —or only with a normal woman's lure? Had all the dreadful knowledge that he tried to flee come from the cruel Ala-shan in that wooden box—or merely in a bottle from the Mint Bar? Was he maniac or murderer —or neither? Could Sam Quain really have been the killer, his motive some treasure in that box, all his story of the witch folk merely the clever invention of an expert anthropologist turned to crime? Or was it truth and Preston Troy the Child of Night? Had Mondrick's blind widow really been demented? What was the warning she had died trying to bring Sam Quain?

  Barbee tried not to think, and tramped harder on the gas.

  Sam Quain, he recalled wearily, had warned him of all this. Knowledge of Homo lycanthropus was horror and madness. Now he could never rest. He could find no haven, anywhere. The secret hunters would trail him down, just because he knew their secret.

  The car lurched over the last dark crest and roared down the grade beyond. A yellow sign flashed in the headlamps, and he knew this was Sardis Hill. His mind could see the treacherous hairpin turn ahead, where the great saber-tooth had caught the linkage of probability to slash Rex Chittum's throat. He could feel the wet tires already skidding on the pavement; he needed no special perceptions to see the stark probability of his own death here, but he didn't try to slow the plunging car.

  "Damn you!" he whispered to the sleek she-wolf that he knew was close behind. "I don't think you'll catch me now!"

  He laughed a little, triumphantly, at her crimson grin and Sheriff Parker's men and that padded cell in the state asylum. He glanced at the rain-blurred mirror, smiling defiantly at the Child of Night. No, those secret hunters would never catch him now! He pushed harder on the gas pedal and saw the hairpin curve flash out of the rain.

  "Damn you, April!" He felt the wheels slide and didn't try to stop them. "I don't think you can make me change again."

  Skidding swiftly sidewise, the car was going off the wet pavement. The wheel twisted viciously in his hands, and he let go. The car shuddered against some boulder at the edge of the asphalt and went spinning into the dark chasm beyond. Barbee relaxed happily, waiting for the crash.

  "Good-bye," he breathed to the white were-wolf.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Child of Night

  The pain was less than Barbee had feared. The silence of the long spinning fall ended suddenly when the car struck a hard granite ledge. Tortured metal screamed hideously, as if in mockery of human agony. His body was seized and torn and crushed. For an instant the torture was unendurable, but he scarcely felt the final impact.

  After the merest second of darkness, he was conscious again. One front wheel of the car still spun above him; he could hear the diminishing purr and click of the bearings. Liquid was splashing near him. The fear of fire took hold of him when he smelled the raw reek of gasoline, and he dragged himself feebly from beneath a cruel weight of wreckage.

  A brief elation lifted him when he found that no important bones were broken. Oddly, his bruised and aching body wasn't even bleeding. Shuddering from the icy bite of the rain-laden wind, he was staggering back toward the pavement when the white bitch howled above him.

  He tried to run from the eerily triumphant quaver of her wail, but a trembling sickness had taken his strength. He stumbled on the wet rubble and couldn't get up. Cowering helplessly back against a dripping boulder, he lay staring
up at the sleek she-wolf.

  "Well, Barbee!" She had paused at the edge of the road where the car had left it on the curve above, peering down at him with greenish sardonic eyes. Her voice was April Bell's, bright with a kindly malice. "So you tried to get away?"

  He caught up a handful of gravel and flung it at her weakly.

  "Damn you!" he sobbed. "Won't you even let me die?"

  Ignoring his angered voice and the futile spatter of gravel, she came bounding gracefully down the stony slope. He tried to pull himself up the rough face of the boulder, and slipped back into gray illness. He heard the light patter of her paws and smelled the pleasant fragrance of her wet fur close to him and felt her warm tongue licking his face.

  "Get away!" He sat up painfully and tried weakly to push her away. "What the devil do you want?"

  "Only to help you when you need me, Barbee." She sat on her haunches in front of him, white fangs smiling. "I followed you here to grasp a linkage of probability and help you free yourself. I know it must be painful and confusing, but you'll soon feel better."

  "Oh!" he muttered bitterly. "You think so?"

  He relaxed against the jagged rock, staring at her. One slim forepaw was lifted, and her greenish eyes shone with a friendly amusement. Even as a wolf she was beautiful, slenderly graceful as the red-haired girl, her clean fur snowy white. Yet he shuddered back from her.

  "Get the hell away!" he rapped hoarsely. "Can't you even let me die?"

  "No, Barbee." She shook her delicate head. "Now you'll never die."

  "Huh?" He shivered. "Why not?"

  "Because, Barbee—" Her pointed ears lifted suddenly, and she turned quickly to listen with a motionless alertness. "I'll tell you," she murmured swiftly. "Sometime. Now I can feel another forming linkage that we must prepare to use—it involves your friend Sam Quain. But he can't harm you yet, and I'll come back."