Darker Than You Think (30 page)

"Gone."
Her fine shoulders tossed carelessly beneath the flowing hair. "She
says the winter here in Clarendon hurts her sinuses, and she went
back to California. I put her on the plane last night."

Barbee
made a wry little bow, yielding the game— still uncertain
whether Aunt Agatha had ever existed outside April Bell's
imagination. He couldn't help swaying a little as he stood, and the
girl came to him sympathetically.

"Really,
Barbee," she urged, "don't you think you ought to see a
doctor? I know Dr. Glenn, and he has been very successful with
alc—with people who drink too much."

"Go
on," Barbee rasped bitterly. "Call me an alcoholic—that's
what I am." He turned uncertainly toward the door. "Maybe
you're right." He nodded painfully. "That's the simple
answer to everything. Maybe I ought to see Glenn."

"But
don't leave yet." She moved ahead of him, with
a
serpentine
grace, to stand in front of the door—and again he thought she
limped very slightly on the same ankle she had injured in his dream.
"I hope you aren't offended," she added softly. "That
was only
a
suggestion
from a friend."

He
paused unsteadily, facing her, and caught her faint perfume—cool
and clean as the scent of mountain pines in the dream. A hot yearning
seized him for the ruthless power of the saber-tooth; and he was
shaken with a sudden futile anger at all the frustrating complexities
of this gray half-life of the waking world. He had failed to solve
the riddle of April Bell. Even her grave solicitude seemed to conceal
a
secret
mockery, and he wanted to escape again.

"Come
back to the kitchenette," she was urging. "Let me make you
a cup of coffee—and scramble us some eggs, if you feel like
breakfast. Please, Barbee— coffee ought to help."

He
shook his head abruptly—if she had won that hidden game,
concealing all her guilty knowledge of the white wolf bitch that had
lured him to attack blind Rowena Mondrick and hiding her sinister
share in the murder of Rex Chittum, then he didn't want her gloating
over his tortured bewilderment now.

"No,"
he said. "I'm going."

She
must have seen his last resentful glance at the magazine and the gold
cigar case on the stand beside the chair he thought was Troy's.

"Anyhow,
have a cigar," she begged him sweetly. "I keep them for my
friends."

She
moved with feral ease to bring the heavy case; but he saw that
disquieting suggestion of a limp again and blurted impulsively:
"How'd you hurt your ankle?"

"Just
tripped on the stair as I came back from driving Aunt Agatha to the
airport." She shrugged lightly, offering the cigars. "Nothing
alarming."

But
it was alarming, and Barbee's lean hand began to shudder so violently
over the cigar case that she lifted one of the strong black perfectos
and clasped it in his fingers. He muttered his thanks, and stumbled
blindly toward the door...

For
all his disturbance, however, he had contrived to read the engraved
monogram on the gold case. It was
PT.
The
black cigar, thick and tapered, was the same imported brand Troy had
offered him from the humidor on his desk. He opened the door clumsily
and tried to thaw the hurt stiffness from his face and turned to face
the girl.

She
stood watching him, breathless. Perhaps the dark light in her eyes
was only pity, but he imagined a hidden glint of sardonic glee. The
green robe had opened a little, exposing her white throat, and her
revealed beauty hurt like a knife driven in him. Her pale lips gave
him an anxious little smile, and she called sharply: "Wait,
Barbee! Please—"

He
didn't wait. He couldn't endure the pity he saw or the mockery he
fancied. This dull gray world of doubt and defeat and pain was too
much for him, and he yearned again for the tiger's ruthless power.

He
shut the door hard behind him and threw down the fat cigar and ground
it under his heel. He felt sick, but he pulled himself up straight
and marched defiantly back toward the stairs. He shouldn't feel hurt,
he told himself. What if Troy were old enough to be her father?
Twenty million could make up very easily for twenty years. And Troy,
besides, must have seen her first Barbee walked slowly down the
stairs through a gray mist of pain. Not caring whether the clerk saw
him now, he staggered aimlessly out of the lobby. Perhaps she was
right, he was muttering to himself— perhaps he should go to Dr.
Glenn.

Because
he didn't know how to get back into joyous freedom of his tiger
dream—and that escape was only possible at night, anyhow, since
daylight damaged the structure of the free mind web. He couldn't
endure this waking half-life any longer, with its intolerable tangle
of horror and grief and pain and bewilderment and fatigue and wild
longing and tormenting uncertainty and staggering panic.

Yes,
he decided, he must go to Glenn.

He
didn't like mental institutions; but Glennhaven was classed with the
nation's best, and young Dr. Archer Glenn, like his father, was
recognized as a distinguished pioneer in the new science of
psychiatry.
Time
had
given him three columns, Barbee recalled, for his original research
in the correlation of mental and physical abnormalities and for his
own brilliant additions, while he was serving with the Navy during
the war, to the revolutionary new psychiatric technique of
narcosynthesis.

Like
his father, Barbee knew, Archer Glenn was a stalwart materialist The
elder Glenn had been a friend of the famous Houdini, and until his
death his favorite hobby had been investigating and exposing sham
mediums and astrologers and fortune-tellers of all kinds. The younger
man still continued the campaign; Barbee had covered lectures of his
for the
Star,
in
which he attacked every pseudoreligious cult founded on a
pseudoscientific explanation of the supernatural. Mind, Glenn's motto
ran, was strictly and entirely a function of the body.

Who
could be a better ally?

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Private
Hell

Barbee
walked nine blocks, back to the parking lot where he had left his
car. The exercise cleared the alcoholic fog rising in his brain, and
made his queasy stomach feel easier. He drove north again on the new
river road, over the narrow Deer Creek bridge where he had nearly
crashed against a truck on the day before, and on to Glennhaven.

Standing
secluded from the road behind gay walls of red-and-yellow autumn
color, the buildings loomed sternly forbidding. Barbee shivered when
he saw them, and tried to put down that old asylum dread. These grim
fortresses, he told himself stoutly, were citadels of sanity against
the unknown terrors of the mind.

He
parked his car on the gravel lot behind the main building and started
around to the front entrance. Glancing through an opening in the tall
hedge that walled the lawn beyond, he saw a patient walking stiffly
between two white-skirted nurses. His breath caught The patient was
Rowena Mondrick.

Muffled
in black against the chill that lingered in the sunny air, she wore
black gloves and a black scarf knotted over her white hair and a long
black coat. Her flat black lenses seemed to look straight at him as
she turned between the nurses—and he thought he saw her start
and pause.

In
a moment she went on again, walking straight and proud before the
women at her elbows, somehow dreadfully alone. A burning pity swept
Barbee, and he knew he must talk to her. Her sick mind, he thought
might still hold the answers to all the monstrous questions that
stalked his own shadowed thoughts.

On
abrupt impulse, he turned back toward her. He wanted terribly to help
her, as well as himself— and it might be, he told himself
hopefully, that she was caught in the same dreadful web of
coincidence and contradiction and ambiguity that was smothering him.
The truth, he felt, might free them both.

The
blind woman and her two alert attendants were walking away from him
now, toward the bright clumps of trees along the river. He ran after
them through the hedge and across the dew-dampened grass, his heart
hammering painfully to his sudden frantic eagerness.

"—my
dog?" He caught Rowena's voice, sharp with anxiety. "Won't
you even let me call poor Turk?"

The
tall nurse seized her angular arm.

"You
may call if you wish, Mrs. Mondrick," the stout nurse told her
patiently. "But it's no use, really. We told you the dog is
dead, and you may as well forget—"

"I
don't believe it!" Her voice turned thinly shrill. "I can't
believe it, and I need Turk here. Please call Miss Ulford for me, and
have her put advertisements in all the papers to offer a good
reward."

"That
won't help," the stout nurse said gently. "Because a
fisherman found your dog's body floating in the river yesterday
morning, down below the railroad bridge. He brought the
silver-mounted collar to the police. We told you last night, don't
you remember?"

"I
remember," the blind woman whispered brokenly. "I had just
forgotten—because
I
need
poor Turk so very much—to warn me and guard me when they come
to kill me in the dark."

"You
needn't worry, Mrs. Mondrick," the tall nurse assured her
cheerily. "They won't come here."

"But
they will!" the blind woman cried breathlessly. "You don't
know—you won't see them when they come.
I
warned
my dear husband, long ago, of all the shocking danger. Yet I couldn't
quite believe all I knew—not until they killed him—but
now I know they'll come. No walls can keep them out—no barrier
but silver—and you haven't left me much of that."

"You
have your beads and bracelets," the stout nurse soothed her.
"And you're quite safe here."

"They
tried to kill me once," she whispered desperately. "Poor
Turk saved me, but now he's dead and I know they'll come again. They
want to stop me from warning Sam Quain—and I must do that."

She
stopped abruptly, clutching with thin imploring fingers at the tall
nurse's arm. Barbee checked himself behind her. He hadn't intended to
eavesdrop on her, but now the shock of this accidental revelation had
frozen him, speechless. For her lost dog must have died in his first
dream.

"Please,
Nurse," she begged frantically. "Won't you telephone Mr.
Sam Quain at the Research Foundation and ask him to come see me
here?"

"I'm
very sorry, Mrs. Mondrick," the tall attendant told her gently.
"But you know why we can't do that. Dr. Glenn says it's bad for
you to see anybody until you get better. If you will just relax, and
try to help us get you well again, you can soon see anyone—"

"There's
no time!" she broke in sharply. "I'm afraid they'll come
back tonight to kill me, and I must talk to Sam." She turned
desperately to the stout nurse. "Won't you take me to the
Foundation? Now!"