Darker Than You Think (43 page)

"We
read the history of that rebellion, and brought back objects enough
to tell it." Quain's drawn head nodded at the box behind him.
"Silver beads and blades and arrowheads. But silver itself
wasn't enough —the witches were cunning and strong. The men of
the Ala-shan invented another, more effective weapon, that we found
buried under those old mounds with the bones of dead witches—no
doubt to keep them dead."

Barbee
wondered forebodingly if the free mind web could detach itself from a
corpse and rove at night to feed upon the living; such an unpleasant
fact might be the basis of many a superstitious dread—if
superstitions were actually fossil fears. He wondered what that
weapon was which killed witches and kept them dead; and he shivered
to the memory of that seeping malodor from the wooden box that had
almost killed him and the white wolf bitch in Sam Quain's study. That
same lethal sweetness had clung to the disk-shaped plaster cast whose
inscriptions Nick Spivak had been deciphering when the great snake
crushed him. Was the original of that cast the weapon?

"Men
won," Quain's tired voice was rasping on. "Not all at once,
nor easily. The witch people were clever and they clung to their old
dominion. That frightful war lasted on through Acheulean and
Mousterian times. The Neanderthalers and the Cro-Magnons died—victims
of the witches, Dr. Mondrick thought. But the progenitors of Homo
sapiens survived and carried on the war. The use of the dog spread,
and the knowledge of silver, and the power of that other weapon.
Before the dawn of written history, the witch-folk had been almost
exterminated."

Barbee
moved uneasily, whispering, "Almost?"

"The
witches were hard to kill," Quain said. "One of their last
clans must have been the first priests and rulers of old Egypt—the
evidence seems clear enough in the animal and half-animal gods the
Egyptians worshipped and the demons and the evil magic they feared.
I've seen excellent portraits of long-skulled Homo lycanthropus types
on the walls of Egyptian tombs. But even that clan was finally
conquered—or absorbed —about the time of Imhotep."

Lightning
showed the grim tension on Quain's haggard face.

"For
the blood of the conquerors was no longer pure." His glittering
eyes peered hard at Barbee. "That was Dr. Mondrick's dreadful
discovery.

"We're
hybrids."

Barbee
waited, too numb to breathe.

"That
ugly fact is hard to understand." Quain frowned, shaking his
bleak head. "The two species were always deadly enemies, yet
somehow that mixture happened. The Black Mass and the Witches'
Sabbath, Dr. Mondrick believed, are survivals of bestial ceremonies
in which the daughters of men were forced to take part. There are
other clues, perhaps, in the superstition of the incubus and all the
myths about unions of gods and human women—those witch men must
have been strangely passionate! Anyhow, it happened."

Against
the boom of thunder echoing in that dark cave, Quain's tired voice
was a slow, hoarse chant.

"Down
out of the terrible past, a black river of that monstrous blood flows
in the veins of Homo sapiens. We aren't all human—and that
alien inheritance haunts our unconscious minds with the dark
conflicts and intolerable urges that Freud discovered and tried to
explain. And now that evil blood is in rebellion. Dr. Mondrick found
that Homo lycanthropus is about to win that old, hideous war of the
species, after all!"

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Rebirth
of
the Witch Folk

Barbee
sat up straight on his damp stone seat. He thought of many things—of
April Bell and the Child of Night and the laughing she-wolf licking
the pink stain of Rowena Mondrick's blood from her muzzle. He
shivered and opened his mouth and shut it again. Thunder snarled and
bellowed outside the cave, and the lightning-torn rain curtains
darkened again.

"I
know it's pretty hard to take," Sam Quain's saw-toothed voice
resumed. "But you can see the evidence all around you—even
the Bible, you recall, wisely commands the destruction of witches."

Barbee
thought of April Bell's disturbing confession of her childhood
struggles with her mother's indignant husband, and tried not to let
Sam Quain see his shudder.

"The
Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, in fact," that weary man
went on, "appears to be nothing more than a symbolic
condensation of the history of that tragic war of the species. The
serpent was a witch man, obviously. The curse his cunning brought
upon the human woman Eve and all her seed is clearly the lycanthropus
inheritance we all still carry. The serpents of our time have got
tired of eating dust, however; they want to rise again!

"The
witch folk have left a wide trail of evidence down all the ages.
There's a paleolithic painting in a cave in Ariege in southern
France, dating from the actual reign of the witches, that shows the
transformation of a witch man into an antlered stag—such
harmless shapes must have been assumed to impress the obedient human
worshippers without terrorizing them too far.

"The
witch people were still plotting to recover their lost dominion of
Egypt in the reign of Rameses III
.
Some
officers and women of his harem were tried, a surviving record
relates, for making wax images of the Pharaoh with magical
incantations to harm him. Their genes must already have been pretty
well scattered, however, and their ancient arts almost forgotten, for
them to need any such childish devices to concentrate their
destructive powers.

"Greek
mythology, as Dr. Mondrick discovered, is actually largely a folk
memory of another lycanthropus clan. The god Jupiter, carrying away
the daughters of men to become the mothers of less powerful gods and
heroes, is obviously a witch who hadn't lost his powers—or his
passions. Proteus, the strange old man of the sea who could change
his shape at will, was another master lycanthrope.

"That
same terrible history is repeated in Scandinavia—as in the folk
memories of every other people. The giant wolf Fenris was born of
another unnatural union, to become the demon of the Norsemen. Sigmund
the Volsung was another mixed-blood witch, who found it necessary to
put on a wolf skin to help him become a wolf."

Barbee
shuddered again, and resolutely said nothing of April Bell's fur
coat.

"The
witch covens of the Middle Ages, finally forced completely
underground by the just wrath of the Inquisition, were nothing more
than a few surviving clans of mongrel witches, trying to keep alive
the arts and ceremonies of that old pagan breed. The devils they
assembled to worship usually took animal form—they were
transformed witches. The notorious Gilles de Rais, tried for his
heresy in the fifteenth century, was probably about a quarter
lycanthropus—too weak and ignorant to escape the hangman for
his lurid crimes.

Joan
of Arc, burned for witchcraft in the same century, was no doubt
another mongrel lycanthrope, whose human side was finally dominant."

Barbee
shifted uncomfortably on his hard stone, thinking of Rowena Mondrick.

"In
more recent times," Sam Quain said, "the witch hunters of
the Zulus still carried on the necessary work of the Inquisition.
Even in Europe, that monstrous pagan cult was never fully
extirpated—
la
vecchia religione
is
a pathetic survival that still has followers today among the peasants
of Italy."

Emphatically,
Sam Quain shook his head.

"No,
Barbee, you can't escape the evidence. Dr. Mondrick found it in every
field of knowledge. The inmates of all our prisons and asylums are
the victims of that dark legacy, driven by the criminal urges of
their lycanthropus strain or insane with the conflict of witch and
man—that's what splits a personality!

"Blood
groups and cephalic indices yield more evidence—nearly every
man you examine shows some physical characteristics inherited from
lycanthropus. Freud's exploration of the unconscious revealed another
well of dreadful evidence—that he failed to recognize.

"Then
there are all these recent university experiments with
parapsychology—although most of the researchers don't yet
suspect the unpleasant facts they are about to uncover, and naturally
the witches are trying to minimize or discredit their amazing
findings.

"The
evidence turns up in every land and every age. Dr. Mondrick used to
keep a reminder of that on his desk—a little Roman lamp whose
design showed the she-wolf caring for Romulus and Remus. He used to
call that a clever bit of witch propaganda.

"There's
all that—and volumes more." Sam Quain nodded heavily at
the Oriental box behind him. "Not to mention the very convincing
exhibits we have there."

Numbed
with an increasing dread, Barbee shook himself uneasily.

"I
don't quite get it," he muttered. "If Homo lycanthropus was
really exterminated—"

"You
know Mendel's laws of inheritance—we studied them together
under Dr. Mondrick." Quain's drawn face almost smiled, and
Barbee was pierced by a painful longing for the unsuspecting
pleasures of those dead student days. He shook his head uncertainly,
and Sam Quain explained: "The units in the germ cell which
govern inheritance, you remember, are called genes—the number
in man is several thousand, and each causes or helps to cause a
certain characteristic to appear in the individual; one dominant
gene, for instance, causes dark eyes. Each baby inherits a double set
of genes from its parents—sex is really a device for
reshuffling the genes, and the laws of probability insure that every
person will be unique."

"Probability—"
Barbee couldn't help echoing that word in a brooding whisper, or
wondering what un-guessed possibilities might lie in the mental
control of probability.

"Genes,
you recall, can be either dominant or recessive," Quain went on.
"We receive our genes in pairs, one from each parent, and the
dominant gene can hide the presence of a recessive partner—one
dominant gene for dark eyes can conceal the recessive gene that
causes blue eyes. That one happens to be harmless, but some are
sinister."

Barbee
sat licking at his dry lips.

"One
such ugly recessive," Quain said, "is the gene that makes
deaf-mutes. Normal hybrid deaf-mutes— that is, people with one
recessive gene for deafness and one dominant gene for hearing—can't
be distinguished from normal people by any ordinary test. They are
carriers of deaf-mutism, however. If two such carriers happen to
marry, the chance reshuffling of the genes will make one child in
four completely normal— inheriting a dominant gene for normal
hearing from each parent. Two more children, on the average, will be
normal hybrids—carriers, with one recessive gene for deafness
and one matching gene for hearing which is dominant and so conceals
the taint. The unfortunate fourth child, on the average, will be born
a deaf-mute—condemned to live and die in silence because of the
chance inheritance of two recessive genes for deafness."

Barbee
shifted uncomfortably to whisper: "What has that to do with
witches?"

"Quite
a lot," Sam Quain said. "Human blood—or germplasm, to
use a more accurate word—still carries the taint of Homo
lycanthropus. The witch folk aren't really dead—because their
genes live on, handed down with those of Homo sapiens."