Her quick cold kiss astonished him. She raced back up to the road and left him lying there. Her mocking eyes haunted him, and he was sick with a stunned bewilderment. Even death was denied him. He couldn't understand—he wished April Bell had told him more of the theory of free mind webs and the linkage of matter and mind through control of probability. Perhaps she had twisted probability to save him, as she and the great saber-tooth had twisted it the other way to cause Rex Chittum's death. He only knew that he had failed to kill himself.
He lay there a long time, shivering in the thin rain, too miserable to think. He was waiting with a sick and hopeless apprehension for the white bitch, but she didn't come back. Presently he felt stronger, and the moaning gears of a van grinding up the hill aroused him with a hope of shelter from the rain.
He staggered into the blinding glare of the headlamps, waving his arms desperately; but the grimy-faced driver merely scowled at him. He shook his fist and shouted. The driver swerved the truck as if to run him down, and then ignored him.
The heavy wheel brushed him, and the van lurched on, slowing for the steep curve above. It was empty, the back yawning open. A sudden impulse sent him stumbling after it, as it paused while the driver shifted gears. He caught the edges of the body, and flung himself puffing aboard.
The black cavern of the covered body was empty except for a pile of musty-smelling army blankets that must have been used to pack a load of furniture. He wrapped himself in them and sat huddled on the hard floor, dully watching the dark road unroll behind.
The night-clad foothills flowed back around him, and the first scattered farms, and the lonely lights at a crossroads service station. Clarendon lay ahead. He knew the police would be looking for him again, armed now with Troy's description of his borrowed clothing; but still he felt too sick to try to think of any plan.
He was vanquished, and there was no sanctuary. Even death had barred its doors. Only an animal urge to keep out of the cold rain lived on in him, and a brooding apprehension of the white she-wolf's return.
No green eyes followed, however, and a faint hope glowed again in the icy night of his mind. The dark buildings of the university slid back past him as the driver slowed for the traffic light at the corner of the campus and turned left on the north river highway. He saw then that the van would pass Glennhaven, and a sudden purpose seized him.
He was going back to Dr. Glenn.
He didn't want to go back. He didn't want the false escape of insanity, or the hard refuge of a cell in the state asylum. But the white bitch would soon be following again. He needed the comforting armor of Glenn's skeptical materialism. He waited for the van to slow again on the curve beyond Glennhaven and dropped to the wet pavement.
Too stiff to run, he fell on his face. He lumbered painfully to his feet, too dazed to feel the cold rain. He was tired. He wanted a dry place to sleep, and he had almost forgotten any other purpose when a dog yelped beside a dark house across the road, shrill with panic. That aroused him, for he thought the white werewolf must be near.
Other dogs began to howl as he stumbled back down the highway to the square stone pillars at the entrance to the hospital grounds. Lights were still on in Glenn's big dwelling. He staggered up the walk to it, peering apprehensively behind. Still no green eyes followed. He leaned on the bell, and the tall psychiatrist came to the door. His tanned handsome face showed only faint surprise.
"Hello, Barbee. I thought you would come back."
Barbee stood swaying, licking at the numb stiffness of his lips.
"The police?" he whispered anxiously. "Are they here?"
Glenn smiled at his drenched and battered figure with a suave professional sympathy.
"Let's not worry about the law just now," he urged soothingly. "You really look all in, Barbee. Why don't you just relax, and let our staff help you solve your problems? That's our business, you know. We'll just telephone Sheriff Parker and the police that you're safe here, and forget your legal troubles until tomorrow. Right?"
"Right," Barbee agreed uncertainly. "Only—there's one thing you've got to know," he added desperately. "I didn't run down Mrs. Mondrick!"
Glenn blinked sleepily.
"I know her blood is on the fender of my car," Barbee said wildly. "But a white wolf killed her—I saw the blood on its muzzle!"
Glenn nodded easily.
"We can talk more about that in the morning, Mr. Barbee. But whatever has happened—in the reality situation or in your own mind—I want to assure you that I'm deeply interested in your case. You appear very much disturbed, but I intend to use every resource of psychiatry to help you."
"Thanks," Barbee muttered. "But you still think I killed her."
"All the evidence is pretty convincing." Still smiling, Glenn stepped cautiously back. "You mustn't try to leave again, and you'll have to move into a different ward in the morning."
"The disturbed ward," Barbee said bitterly. "I'll bet you still don't know how Rowena Mondrick got out of there!"
Glenn lifted his shoulders unconcernedly.
"Dr. Bunzel is still upset about that," he admitted casually. "But we needn't worry about anything else tonight. You look pretty uncomfortable. Why don't you just go on back to your room and take a hot bath and get some sleep—"
"Sleep?" Barbee echoed hoarsely. "Doctor, I'm afraid to sleep—because I know that same white wolf is coming back for me. She's going to change me into some other shape and make me go with her to kill Sam Quain. You won't be able to see her—even I can't see her yet—but no walls can keep her out."
Glenn smiled again, nodding in meaningless agreement.
"She's coming!" Barbee's voice turned high. "Listen to the dogs!"
He could hear the frightened dogs howling at every farm down the wind. He gestured toward the sound, shaking with a wave of frantic panic. Glenn merely waited in the doorway, his brown face blandly smooth.
"That white wolf is April Bell," Barbee whispered huskily. "She murdered Dr. Mondrick. She made me help her kill Rex Chittum and Nick Spivak. I saw her standing over Mrs. Mondrick's body, licking her fangs." His teeth chattered. "She'll come back the moment I sleep, to make me change again and go with her to hunt Sam Quain."
Glenn shrugged again, professionally placid.
"You're tired," he said. "You're excited. Just let me give you something to help you sleep—"
"I won't take anything." Barbee tried to keep his ragged voice from screaming. "This is something more than madness—I've got to make you understand! Listen to what Sam Quain told me tonight—"
"Now, Mr. Barbee," Glenn protested blandly. "Let's be calm—"
"Calm?" Barbee gasped hoarsely. "Listen to this!" Clutching the door facing to hold himself upright, dripping muddy pools on the mat, he launched desperately into the story: "There are witches, Doctor—Mondrick called them Homo lycanthropus. They evolved in the first ice age, and haunted men until every myth and legend of werewolves and vampires and evil spirits is a racial memory of their free mind webs, preying on mankind."
"So?" Glenn nodded sympathetically, unimpressed.
"And Mondrick discovered that the human race today is a hybrid mixture—"
Barbee's troubled voice ran desperately on. Once he recalled Sam Quain's disquieting suspicion that Glenn himself might be a witch man, but he dismissed the idea instantly. That odd sense of recognition and confident liking was awake again. He was glad to see the quiet attentiveness on Glenn's gravely sympathetic face. All he wanted was the competent aid of Glenn's skeptical scientific mind.
"Now, Doctor!" A bleak challenge broke into his husky whisper as he finished. "What do you say to that?"
Deliberately, with that old reflective gesture, Glenn fitted the capable brown fingers of his two hands together.
"You're ill, Mr. Barbee," his deep voice said soberly. "Remember that. You're too ill to see reality except in a distorting mirror of your own fears. Your story of Homo lycanthropus, it seems to me, is a kind of warped hysterical pa
rallel to the truth."
Barbee tried to listen—and shuddered when he heard the dogs still howling behind him.
"It's true that some of the parapsychology boys have interpreted their findings as scientific evidence for the existence of a spirit separate from the body that can somehow influence the probability of events in the real world and may even survive after physical death."
Glenn nodded as if pleased with his own argument "It's also true that men are descended from savage animals. We've all inherited traits that are no longer useful in civilized society. The unconscious mind does sometimes seem a dark cave of horrors, and the same unpleasant facts are often expressed in the symbolism of legend and myth. It's even true that interesting throwbacks do occur."
Barbee shook his head in a weary protest.
"But you can't explain those witches away," he gasped hoarsely. "Not when they're looking for the linkage of probability to kill Sam Quain right now!" He looked uneasily behind him, shrinking from the frightened howling of the dogs. "Think of poor Nora," he whispered. "And dear little Pat! I don't want to murder Sam tonight—that's the reason I'm afraid to sleep!"
"Please, Mr. Barbee." Glenn's calm voice was warmly sympathetic. "Won't you try to understand? Your fear of sleep is nothing more than your fear of those unconscious wishes which sleep sets free. The witch of your dreams may turn out to be nothing except your guilty love of Nora Quain, and your thoughts of murder only the natural consequence of an unconscious jealous hatred of her husband."
Barbee clenched his fists, shaken with a silent wrath.
"You deny such ideas now," Glenn said calmly. "You must learn to accept them, to face them and dispose of them on a realistic basis. That will be the objective of our therapy. There's nothing unique about such fears. All people express them—"
"All people," Barbee broke in huskily, "are tainted with the witch blood."
Glenn nodded easily.
"Your fantasy expression of a fundamental truth. All people experience the same inner conflicts—"
Barbee heard footsteps behind him on the walk and turned with a muffled sob of terror. It wasn't the sleek white bitch, however, but only horse-faced Nurse Graulitz and muscular Nurse Hellar. He looked accusingly back at Glenn.
"Better go with them quietly, Mr. Barbee," the tall psychiatrist told him gently. "They'll put you to bed and help you get to sleep—"
"I'm afraid to sleep," Barbee sobbed. "I won't—"
He caught his breath and tried to run. The two white-starched Amazons caught his arms, and he surrendered to a chilled exhaustion. They took him back to his room in the annex. A hot shower stopped the chattering of his teeth, and the clean bed was insidiously relaxing.
"I'll be watching the hall," Nurse Hellar told him. "I'll give you a shot if you don't go right to sleep."
He needed no shot. Sleep tugged and beckoned. It was a silken web that meshed him, a tireless insistent line that drew upon him unceasingly. It was a ruthless pressure, a driving wind, a soothing song. It became a screaming agony of need.
Yet he found it—until something made him look at the closed door. The bottom panels were silently dissolving. The white wolf-bitch came trotting through the opening. She sat down on her haunches in the middle of the room, watching him with amused, expectant eyes. Her long red tongue lolled beside her shining fangs.
"You can wait till daylight," he told her wearily.
"But you can't change me—because I'm not going to sleep."
Her greenish eyes smiled limpidly.
"You don't need to sleep." She spoke with the warm velvet voice of April Bell. "I've just told your half brother what happened tonight on Sardis Hill—and he's very happy about it. He says you must be very powerful, because even the nurses didn't notice. He says you can change when you like now, without the aid of sleep—because, you see, you no longer have any human resistance that has to be relaxed."
"What's all this?" Barbee sat up quickly on the edge of the bed, frowning in puzzlement. "What didn't the nurses notice?"
The white bitch grinned maliciously.
"Don't you know, Barbee?"
"Know what?" he rasped, annoyed. "And who's my half brother?"
"Didn't Archer tell you anything?" The she-wolf shook her slender head. "No, he wouldn't. He probably meant to spend a whole year awakening your ancestral powers, the way he did mine—at forty dollars an hour. But the clan can't wait. I cut you free tonight because we've got to do something about Sam Quain and your human taint made you too reluctant."
Barbee blinked confusedly.
"I don't get any of this," he muttered. "I don't even believe I have a half brother. Of course I never knew my parents. Mother died when I was born, and my father was soon afterward committed to the state asylum. I was brought up in an institution till I started to attend the university and came to board with Mrs. Mondrick."
"That's all a fairy tale." The she-wolf laughed silently. "Of course there really was a Luther Barbee— but he and his wife were paid to adopt you. They happened to find out what an inhuman little monster you were. That's why the woman had to be killed and the man put away—before they talked too much."
Barbee shook his head unbelievingly. "Then what—" he muttered unwillingly. "What am I?"
"You and I are special beings, Barbee." The bitch smiled redly. "We were bred from mankind, by a special art and for a special end—but we are neither of us more than slightly human."
Barbee nodded reluctantly.
"Sam was telling me about Homo lycanthropus," he murmured dazedly. "About the taint in the blood of men and the rebirth of the witch race from the genes."
"Quain knows too much," the white bitch observed. "The technique of gathering the genes by mental control of genetic probability was perfected here at Glennhaven," she added. "Your own famous father finished the work nearly thirty years ago."
Barbee shivered, clutching the iron bedpost.
"Who was my father?"
"The older Dr. Glenn," the she-wolf said. "That makes Dr. Archer Glenn your half brother. He is a few years older than you and a slightly less successful genetic experiment."
Barbee gulped uneasily, thinking of that odd feeling of warm kinship toward the tall psychiatrist—was it a recognition of their common dark inheritance? He whispered huskily: "My mother?"
"You knew her." The white bitch laughed at his shocked wonderment. "She was a woman your father had selected for her genes—he brought her to Glennhaven as a nurse. She was richly gifted with our ancestral legacy, but unfortunately never able to overcome the unfortunate influence of her tragic human taint. She was foolish enough to believe your father loved her, and she never forgave him when she learned the truth. She joined our human enemies—but you were already born."
Goose flesh roughened Barbee's skin.
"She wasn't—" he gulped— "Rowena Mondrick?"
"Miss Rowena Stalcup, then," the white bitch purred. "She wasn't aware of her own ancestral powers until your father began arousing them. A bit of a prude, I believe—she was horrified at the idea of bearing you out of wedlock, even when she thought you would be human."
The white bitch snickered, and Barbee caught his breath.
"And I killed her!" he gasped faintly. "My own mother!"
"Nonsense, Barbee!" The she-wolf lolled her scarlet tongue, still laughing at him. "You needn't be so squeamish about the extermination of a mongrel traitress, but I'm the one who killed her. Your car on the bridge merely completed the linkage of probability, so that I could get her throat."
She nodded brightly, licking her cruel white fangs.
"But—" Barbee whispered strickenly, "if she was really my mother—"
"She was our enemy." The white bitch snarled savagely. "She pretended to join your father's coven and then used the arts she had learned to escape him and carry the secrets of the clan to old Mondrick— that's what first put Mondrick on our trail. Rowena worked with him until one of us tore out her eyes years ago in Nigeria, when sh
e was about to uncover one of those Stones—those disk-shaped weapons of something deadlier than silver—that our ancient human enemies buried with our murdered ancestors to keep them in their graves."
Barbee nodded uncomfortably, recalling that lethal reek seeping from the silver-lined box that had nearly killed them in Sam Quain's study, and that malodorous plaster cast of some circular object that Nick Spivak had been working over when the great snake killed him. He clutched the bedpost with both hands until his knuckles cracked, but he couldn't stop the shudder of foreboding that swept him.
"That should have been a lesson to her," the white bitch was whispering. "But she still helped old Mondrick all she could. She's the one who warned him to test you when he was about to take you into the Foundation."
"She was?" Barbee shifted doubtfully on the bed. "But she was always so kind and friendly," he protested, "even after that. I thought she liked me—"
"She loved you, I imagine," the she-wolf said. "After all, you did have some strong human traits— that's why we decided to set you free. Perhaps she hoped you would revolt from the coven, when the time came, as she had done. She didn't know how strong your inheritance would be."
Barbee stared a long time at the wolf's red grin.
"I wish—" he whispered hoarsely, "I wish I had known."
"Don't upset yourself," she advised him. "The woman died, you remember, trying to warn Sam Quain."
Barbee blinked uneasily, breathing: "What was it she wanted to tell Sam?"
"The name of the Child of Night." The she-wolf sat leering at him redly. "But we stopped her—and you played your own role very cleverly, Barbee, pretending to be his friend and begging for a chance to help him and trying to comfort his crying wife."
"Huh?" Barbee rose from the bed. He felt suddenly cold, and he stood swaying with a gray illness. "You don't—" he whispered breathlessly. "You can't mean— that I—"
"I do, Barbee!" The she-wolf pricked up her triangular ears, her greenish eyes dancing with a malicious pleasure in his deep perturbation. "You're one of us—the powerful one we've bred to be our leader. You're the one we call the Child of Night"
Darker Than You Think Page 27
