Darker Than You Think (34 page)

In
the music room, when Barbee got a news bulletin on the radio about a
traffic accident, a thin, pretty girl dropped a tiny sock she had
been knitting and hurried out, sobbing. He played checkers with a
pink-faced, white-bearded man who managed to upset the board every
time Barbee crowned a king and then apologized profusely for his
clumsiness. At dinner, Dr. Dilthey and Dr. Dorn made a painful and
not very successful effort to keep a light conversation going. Barbee
was glad to see the early autumn twilight thickening outside the
windows. He went back to his room, rang for the nurse, and ordered
his two permissible drinks at once.

Nurse
Etting had gone off duty, and a pert, painfully vivacious little
brunette named Jedwick brought his two jiggers of bourbon and a
mushy-looking historical novel he hadn't asked for. She fussed
needlessly about the room, laying out pajamas and felt-soled slippers
and a red robe for him and straightening the bed, obviously trying to
be cheery. He was glad when she left him alone.

The
two drinks made him very sleepy, although it was only eight by his
watch and he had slept most of the day. He began to dress for bed and
stopped to listen uneasily. Somewhere far away he had heard a thin,
strange howl.

Dogs
on the farms about Glennhaven began barking savagely, but he knew it
wasn't a dog that had howled. He hurried to the window to listen, and
caught another eerily quavering howl. It was the sleek white wolf
bitch. She was down by the river, waiting for him.

Barbee
examined the steel and reinforced glass of the window again. He saw
no trace of any silver anywhere—Glenn, in his dogmatic
materialism, must have rejected all the evidence for the mental
determination of probability. It ought to be easy enough to change
into a satisfyingly formidable snake and go down to meet April Bell.
He heard her howling again and went breathless with a trembling
eagerness.

He
turned toward the high, white hospital bed—and cold dread
stopped him. By the rational scientific logic of Dr. Glenn, he must
cherish an unconscious jealous hatred of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak.
In the mad logic of his dreams, April Bell was still resolved to
destroy them because of the unknown weapon they guarded in that
wooden box.

He
felt sick with a shuddering fear of what the snake might do.

He
delayed going to bed. He scrubbed his teeth with a new brush until
the gums bled. He took a deliberate shower and carefully trimmed his
toenails and put on white, too-large pajamas. Wrapped in the red
hospital robe with
Glennhaven
embroidered
across the back, he sat up in the one chair for an hour trying to
read the novel Nurse Jedwick had brought. All the characters,
however, seemed as gray and flat as the people he had met downstairs—

And
the she-wolf was howling again.

She
was calling, but he felt afraid to go. He wanted to close the window,
to shut out her wild cry and the angered barking of the dogs. He
started impatiently across the room and a fainter sound checked him,
shivering. It was a woman's screaming, muffled and somewhere near,
monotonous and dull, dreadful with a full abandonment to horror and
despair—and he knew Rowena Mondrick's voice.

He
slammed the window hastily, and took his book to bed. He tried not to
listen for Rowena screaming in the disturbed ward, or the white wolf
calling from the river. He tried to read again and fought the
pressure of sleep. But the words made no sense. He hated the dull
bleak world of crushing frustration where the blind woman screamed,
and yearned for the bright release of his dreams. He surrendered,
suddenly, to that new reality, and reached eagerly to snap off the
light.

The
book slipped out of his hands—

Only
he didn't have hands. He glided away from the gaunt empty thing that
lay breathing very slowly in the bed. He let his long body flow
across the rug and lifted his flat, triangular head to the window.

The
glass dissolved as his free mind reached out to find the linkage of
probability and grasp the shivering atoms to be a part of himself as
he passed. The embedded steel wire yielded more slowly, and there was
no silver. Laughing silently at Glenn's mechanistic philosophy, he
poured out silently over the sill. He dropped on the lawn in a mound
of powerful coils, and went twisting down toward the dark trees by
the river.

The
white bitch came trotting to meet him out of a clump of willows, her
long slanted eyes shining eagerly greenish. He flicked out his
slender black tongue to touch her icy muzzle, and the shining scales
of his thick body rippled to the strange ecstasy of that kiss.

"So
it was too many daiquiris," he jibed, "that made you feed
me that witchcraft yarn?"

She
laughed, her red tongue lolling.

"Don't
torment me any more," he begged. "Don't you know you're
driving me insane?"

Her
mocking eyes turned gravely sympathetic.

"I'm
sorry, Barbee." Her warm tongue licked his flat snout
affectionately. "You must be bewildered, I know—the first
awakenings are always painful and disturbing, until you learn the
way."

"Let's
go somewhere," he urged, and a shudder ran along his coils.
"Rowena Mondrick is screaming back there in her room. I can't
bear it. I want to get away from here and all this uncertainty. I
want to forget—"

"Not
tonight," the she-wolf interrupted. "We'll have fun,
Barbee, when we can. But tonight we still have work to do. Three of
our great enemies still live—Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and that
blind widow. We've got her where she can't do anything worse than
scream, but your old friends Spivak and Quain are still at work.
They're learning. They're getting ready to use the weapon in that
wooden box."

In
her eyes blazed a sudden feral fury.

"We
must stop them—tonight!"

Reluctantly,
Barbee shook his broad black head. "Must we—kill them?"
he protested faintly. "Please —think of little Pat and
poor Nora—"

"So
it's poor Nora now?" The she-wolf mocked his tone maliciously.
Her fangs nipped at the loose, scaled skin of his neck, half
playfully and yet with a savage force. "Your old friends must
die," she told him, "to save the Child of Night."

Barbee
objected no more. In this glorious awakening from the long nightmare
of life, all his values were changed. He whipped two turns of his
tapering tail around the white bitch's body and squeezed until she
gasped.

"Don't
worry about Nora," he told her. "But if a dinosaur happened
to catch Preston Troy in bed with you, it might be just too bad."

He
released her, and she shook her white fur primly.

"Don't
you touch me, snake in the grass." Her voice was honey and
vitriol.

He
reached for her again. "Then tell me what is Troy to you."

She
sprang away from his reaching tail.

"Wouldn't
you like to know?" Her white fangs grinned. "Come along,"
she told him. "We've got a job to do tonight."

The
undulations of Barbee's body thrust him forward beside her in flowing
waves of power. The friction of his polished scales made a soft
burring sound on the fallen leaves. He kept pace with the running
wolf, his lifted head level with her own.

The
night world was oddly different to him now. His scent was not so keen
as the wolf's had been, nor his vision so sharp as the saber-tooth's.
He could hear the gentle sigh of the river, however, and the rustle
of mice in the fields, and all the tiny sounds of sleeping animals
and people in the dark farm buildings they passed. Clarendon, as they
approached it, became a terrific din of drumming motors and screaming
tires and raucous horns and howling radios and barking dogs and
droning, wailing, bellowing human voices.

They
left the highway at the Cedar Street intersection and turned across
the dark grounds of the Research Foundation. Light shone yellow from
the ninth-floor windows of the gray tower where Spivak and Quain
fought their secret war against the Child of Night; and a faint,
noisome fetor was evil in the air.

The
locked front door made a path for them as they reached together to
grasp it, and they came into the painful brightness of the central
hall. That poisonous reek was stronger inside, but the snake wouldn't
be so sensitive to it. Barbee hoped, as the gray wolf had been.

Two
sharp-eyed men, both too hard and old for their university sweaters,
sat wearily playing casino at the information desk outside the
elevators. As the silent wolf and the great snake approached, one of
them dropped his dog-eared cards and felt apprehensively for the
police special at his hip.

"Sorry,
Jug, but I can't tell cards from spades." His voice was hoarse
and anxious. "I tell you, this Foundation job is getting on my
nerves. It looked pretty good at first—twenty bucks a day just
to keep people out of that laboratory—but I don't like it!"

The
other gathered up the cards. "Why not, Charlie?"

"Listen,
Jug!" The big man tilted his head. "Every dog in town has
suddenly gone to howling, and I can't keep from wondering what this
is all about. These Foundation people are afraid of something—and
it is right funny, come to think of it, the way old Mondrick died and
Chittum got killed. Quain and Spivak act like they know they're next
on the list. Whatever they've got in that mysterious box—I
wouldn't look at it for forty million!"

Jug
peered down the shadowy hall, past the creeping wolf and the crawling
snake, reaching unconsciously to loosen his own revolver.

"Hell,
Charlie, you just been thinking too much. On a special job like this,
you ain't supposed to think. It's all legal and easy—and twenty
bucks is twenty bucks." Jug stared bleakly through the wolf and
the snake. "But I'd like to know. Me, I don't take much stock in
this story about any curse the expedition dug up in those old
graves—but they did find
something."

"I
don't know," Charlie insisted. "I don't want to."

"Maybe
you think they're crazy." Jug's peering eyes roved toward the
closed doors of the elevators and the stairway, and upward toward the
vague, muffled sounds the snake could hear from the ninth floor.
"Maybe they are. Maybe they just stayed off in them damn deserts
too lone. Maybe—but I don't think so."

Charlie
blinked uneasily. "What do you think?"

"I
think they found something worth hiring special guards for." Jug
caressed the grips of his revolver. "Me, I'd like to see what
they've got in that precious box. Maybe it's really worth forty
million." His voice dropped. "Maybe it was worth a couple
of neat little murders to Mr. Spivak and Mr. Quain."

"Deal
the cards and forget that box," Charlie muttered. "This
Foundation is a respectable scientific outfit, and twenty bucks is
twenty bucks. We don't know what's going on upstairs, and we ain't
paid to guess."

He
didn't see the sleek white wolf that trotted across the corridor in
front of the desk, or the huge gray-and-black-patterned snake that
writhed after her. She paused before the locked door to the stairs,
and it became a path for her free mind web and the snake's. Jug sat
staring after them, snorting his weary impatience with Charlie's
apprehensions and mechanically shuffling the cards. He didn't seem to
see the opening in the door.