Darker Than You Think (32 page)

He
told about Mondrick's death, and the strangled kitten, and the rather
inexplicable fear of the surviving men who guarded that box from
Asia. He described the dream in which he had run with April Bell as a
wolf and the dog Turk had died—watching Glenn's dark, smooth
face, he could see only a calmly sympathetic professional interest.

"Last
night, Doctor, I dreamed again," he continued urgently. "I
thought I was a saber-toothed tiger—it was all queerly real.
This girl was with me again, telling me what to do. We followed Rex
Chittum's car to the mountains, and I killed him on Sardis Hill."

The
horror of that strange nightmare and its shocking aftermath had
diminished a little in the telling; he thought he had caught
something of Glenn's dispassionate calm. Yet now, as he finished, his
hoarse voice shuddered again.

"Rex
is dead—exactly as I killed him in the dream." Desperately
he searched Glenn's blandly handsome face. "Tell me, Doctor,"
he begged huskily, "how can any dream fit reality so well? Do
you think I really murdered Rex Chittum last night, under a witch's
spell? Or do you think I'm already insane?"

Carefully
Archer Glenn fitted his fingertips together.

"This
is going to take time, Mr. Barbee." His dark head nodded
gravely. "Yes, a good bit of time. I suggest that we arrange for
you to stay here at Glennhaven for at least the next few days. That
will give our staff the best opportunity to help you."

Barbee
rose shuddering out of his chair.

"But
what about it?" he croaked frenziedly. "Did I really do
those things I thought I dreamed? Or am I crazy?"

Glenn
sat still, watching him with calm sleepy eyes, until he collapsed
weakly in his own chair again.

"Things
that happen often aren't so important as the interpretation that the
mind—consciously or unconsciously—places upon them."
Glenn's deep voice sounded lazily matter-of-fact. "One point
about your narrative, however, seems to me quite significant. Every
incident you have mentioned, from Dr. Mondrick's fatal asthmatic
attack to Chittum's car accident— even the death of Mrs.
Mondrick's dog—has a perfectly natural explanation."

"That's
what is driving me mad." Barbee peered at him, trying
desperately to discover some reaction behind his deliberate
unconcern. "It all might be coincidence—but
is
it?"
Barbee's strained voice went higher. "How did I know of Rex
Chittum's death before I was told?"

Glenn
unlaced his long fingers and tapped a new cigarette carefully against
his thumbnail.

"Sometimes,
Mr. Barbee, the mind deceives us. Especially, under unconscious
stress, we are likely to distort the details of sequence or
causation. Such faulty thinking isn't necessarily insanity. Freud
wrote a whole book, you know, on the psychopathology of everyday
life."

Lazily,
he lit the cigarette with a flat gold lighter.

"Let's
take a calm look at your case, Mr. Barbee— without attempting
any offhand diagnosis. You've been driving yourself pretty hard, I
gather, at a job you aren't well adjusted to. You admit you've been
drinking more than you can assimilate. You must have realized that
such a life must end in collapse, of one kind or another."

Barbee
stiffened.

"So
you think I'm—insane?"

Glenn
shook his handsome head judicially.

"I'm
not saying that—and I do feel that you're putting an undue
emotional weight, Mr. Barbee, on the matter of your sanity. Because
the mind isn't a machine, and mental conditions aren't simply black
or white. A certain degree of mental abnormality is entirely normal,
in fact—and life would be pretty flat and dull without it."

Barbee
squirmed unhappily.

"So
let's try not to jump at any hasty conclusions until we've had time
for a complete physical and psychiatric examination." Glenn
shook his head lazily, carefully crushing out his unsmoked cigarette.
"I might comment, however, that Miss Bell evidently disturbs
you—and that Freud himself describes love as normal insanity."

Barbee
squinted at him uneasily.

"Just
what do you mean by that?"

He
slowly laced his manicured fingers together again.

"In
all of us, Mr. Barbee," his casual voice explained, "there
are hidden unconscious feelings of fear and guilt. They arise in
infancy and color our whole lives. They demand expression, and find
it in ways we seldom suspect. Even the sanest and most completely
normal individual has those secret motives working in him.

"Don't
you think it may be possible in your case— at a time when your
conscious restraints happen to be weakened by the unfortunate
combination of extreme fatigue and violent emotion and too much
alcohol— that those buried feelings in yourself have begun to
find expression in vivid dreams or even in waking hallucinations?"

Barbee
shook his head, suddenly uncomfortable. He shifted in the chair, to
look out at the reds and yellows of the hills beyond the river.
Beside the dark water a field of corn lay golden; and the silver
vanes of a windmill beyond, were flashing in the sun.

A
dull resentment smoldered in him against Glenn's shrewdly
dispassionate probing. He hated this small room, and Glenn's neat
little theories of the mind. He didn't want all his own private
shames and fears laid out on Glenn's compact diagrams. Fiercely he
began to yearn again for the free escape and the splendid power of
his dreams.

Glenn's
deep voice droned on.

"Perhaps
you blame yourself in some way, unconsciously of course, for Mrs.
Mondrick's present grave mental illness—"

"I
don't think so!" he interrupted sharply. "How could I?"

"The
very violence of your protest gives added weight to my random guess."
Glenn's lazy smile seemed to reflect a brief, kind amusement. "It
will take time, as I told you, to trace out the mechanism of your
major complexes. The general pattern, however, is already apparent."

"Huh?"
Barbee swallowed. "How do you mean?"

"Your
college studies in anthropology, don't you see, must have given you a
wide knowledge of primitive beliefs in magic and witchcraft and
lycanthropy. Such a background is enough to account for the unusual
direction of your fantasy expressions."

"Maybe,"
Barbee muttered, unconvinced. "But how do you think I could
blame myself for Mrs. Mondrick's illness?"

Glenn's
sleepy hazel eyes were suddenly piercing.

"Tell
me—did you ever consciously desire to kill Dr. Mondrick?"

"What?"
Barbee sat indignantly straight. "Of course not!"

"Think
back," Glenn insisted softly. "Did you?"

"No!"
Barbee rapped angrily. "Why should I?"

"Did
he ever injure you?"

Barbee
twisted uneasily in his chair.

"Years
ago, when I was in college—" He hesitated, peering
longingly at the bright world beyond the window. "Old Mondrick
turned against me, at the end of my senior year," he admitted
grudgingly. "I never knew why. But he dropped me, when he was
forming the Research Foundation, and took Sam Quain and Rex Chittum
and Nick Spivak. For a long time I was pretty bitter about that."

Glenn
nodded, with a pleased expression.

"That
fills out the picture. You must have wished Dr. Mondrick's
death—unconsciously, remember—to avenge that old slight.
You wished to kill him, and he eventually died. Therefore, by the
simple timeless logic of the unconscious, you are guilty of his
murder."

"I
don't see that," Barbee muttered stiffly. "It all happened
a dozen years ago. Anyhow, it can't have much to do with your
statement that I'm to blame for Mrs. Mondrick's illness."

"The
unconscious ignores time," Glenn protested gently. "And you
misquote me. I didn't say that you'r'e responsible for Mrs.
Mondrick's tragic illness—I merely ventured a suggestion that
perhaps you blame yourself. What you tell me bears out that
suggestion."

Barbee
blinked angrily. "How?"

"Her
unfortunate breakdown," Glenn droned calmly, "is an obvious
consequence of her husband's unexpected death. If you feel
unconsciously responsible for that, it follows that you must also
bear the burden of her own mental disintegration."

"No!"
Barbee stood up, shuddering. "I won't endure that—"

The
dark handsome man nodded pleasantly.

"Exactly,"
Glenn told him softly. "You can't endure it consciously. That's
why the guilt complex is driven down into your unconscious—where,
in your memories of the courses in anthropology that Dr. Mondrick
himself taught you, it finds very fitting guises in which to haunt
you."

Barbee
stood shivering, gulping mutely.

"Forgetting
is no escape." Glenn's sleepy hazel eyes seemed implacable. "The
mind demands a penalty for every adjustment we fail to make. There's
a kind of natural justice in the mechanisms of the unconscious—
or sometimes a cruel parody of justice—blind and inevitable."

"What
justice?" Barbee rasped harshly. "I don't see—"

"That's
the point exactly." Glenn nodded genially. "You don't see,
because you can't bear to look—but that doesn't stop the
operation of your unconscious purposes. You blame yourself,
apparently, for Mrs. Mondrick's insanity. Your buried sense of guilt
demands a punishment to fit the crime. It seems to me that you're
unconsciously arranging all these dreams and hallucinations just to
seek atonement for causing her breakdown—at the ultimate cost
of your own sanity."

Glenn
smiled, as if to a lazy satisfaction with his own argument.

"Don't
you see a kind of blind justice there?"

"No,
I can't follow that." Barbee shook his head uneasily. "Even
if I could, it wouldn't explain everything. There's still the
saber-tooth dream—and Rex Chittum's death. My thoughts about
Mrs. Mondrick couldn't have much to do with that, and Rex had always
been my friend."

"But
also your enemy," Glenn suggested suavely. "He and Quain
and Spivak were chosen for the Foundation, you told me, when you were
rejected. That was a cruel blow, remember. Surely you must have been
jealous?"

Barbee
caught his breath angrily.

"But
not murderous!"

"Not
consciously," Glenn droned smugly. "But the unconscious has
no morals. It is utterly selfish, utterly blind. Time means nothing,
and contradictions are ignored. You had wished harm to your friend
Chittum, and he died. Again, therefore, you must bear the
consequences of your guilty wish."

"Very
convincing!" Barbee snapped. "Except you forget one point—I
dreamed the dream before I knew Rex had been killed."