Darker Than You Think (39 page)

The
blow against his head must have dazed him, but only for an instant.
He sat back behind the wheel and got breath into his painful lungs
again and felt his throbbing head. He could find no blood.

He
felt gone. Shivering weakly to the chill of the night, he shrugged
the thin robe closer around him. The car had stopped diagonally
across the bridge. The motor was dead, but the right headlamp still
burned. He could smell a faint reek of gasoline and hot rubber.
Surely he was now too wide awake to see that hallucination any
longer, but he couldn't help peering uneasily ahead.

"Good
work, Barbee!" the white bitch purred softly. "Though I
hadn't expected this to be your most dreadful shape!"

He
saw her then, leering greenly at him over a quiet black form outside
the white path of the lone headlamp. He couldn't make out that
huddled thing—but nothing moved on the bridge beyond it, and
his straining ears caught no echo of Rowena's frenetic feet. A dazed
dismay drove out his breath again.

"What—?"
Horror choked him. "Who—?"

The
slim she-wolf sprang lightly over that unmoving form, and came
trotting lightly to the side of the car. Her long eyes burned with a
triumphant glee. She grinned at him, licking at the fresh pink stains
on her muzzle and her fangs.

"Neat
work, Barbee!" she murmured happily. "I could feel the
linkage when I called you a while ago—a blind woman on the
highway, clothed in black and too afraid to listen for the cars,
carries a strong probability of death. We grasped it very skillfully.
I think the shape you brought was as frightful to her as any could
have been. She broke the string and lost her silver beads when yon
made her fall—and I don't think she'll be telling Sam Quain the
name of the Child of Night!"

The
white bitch turned her head, fine ears lifted to listen.

"Here
they come, Barbee—the blundering human fools from Glennhaven."
The pale rays of the still-distant headlamps struck her, and she
sprang warily back toward the shadow-clotted roadside. "We had
better go," she urged. "Drive on—just leave the dead
widow where she lies!"

"Dead?"
Barbee echoed hoarsely. "What—what have you made me do?"

"Only
your clear duty," she purred, "in our war against
mankind—and such mongrel traitors as the widow, who try to turn
the powers of our own blood against us! You've proved yourself,
Barbee—now I know you're fully with us." Her greenish eyes
peered back down the road. "Drive on!" she called sharply.
"Before they find you here!"

She
sprang silently off the pavement into the dark.

Barbee
sat numbed and breathless until the lights of the approaching car
flashed in the mirror again. An urgency of sharp alarm stirred him at
last from his apathy of unbelieving horror. He stumbled out of the
car and lurched dazedly to the flat thing the laughing bitch had
left.

That
huddled form sagged limply when he lifted it. He could feel no pulse
or breath. Warm blood wet his hands, and torn black garments showed
him all the dreadful harm the she-wolf's fangs had done. Shock and
pity turned him ill, and suddenly the dead woman was too heavy in his
shuddering arms. He laid her back on the pavement as tenderly as he
could. There was nothing else to do.

Falling
long and black across her body, his own shadow moved. Turning dully,
he saw the approaching headlamps descending the last slope to the
bridge. The wind struck his hands, and he felt the blood turn stiff
and cold. He stood beside the body, waiting, too sick to think.

"Drive
on, Barbee!" That sharp warning startled him, whispered from the
dark. "Those fools from Glennhaven don't understand the mental
manipulation of probability, and you shouldn't let them find you by
the widow's corpse." The white bitch's whispering turned soft,
huskily urgent. "Come on to my place at the Trojan Arms—and
we'll drink to the Child of Night!"

Perhaps
that was only his own terror whispering, and his own sick desire,
cloaked in the symbolism of his own unconscious. Perhaps it was
something more dreadful. He had no time left to ponder such riddles
of the mind, for the lamps of the slowing car illuminated his own
ghastly predicament.

Rowena
Mondrick lay dead in front of his battered car on the narrow bridge.
Her literal blood was on his hands, and the nurse at Glennhaven could
swear in court she had feared Mm desperately. He couldn't tell the
jury that a white were-wolf had killed her.

Panic
took hold of him. Half blinded by the approaching lights, he
scrambled into the car and kicked the starter. The motor roared, and
he tried to back away from the bridge railing. The steering wheel
refused to turn. He tumbled desperately out again, in the white glare
of the nearing headlamps, and found the left fender crumpled against
the front wheel.

Shuddering
and breathless in Ms panic, he climbed on the bent bumper and stooped
to grasp the crumpled metal with both hands. His wet fingers slipped.
He wiped them on the cold enamel, and strained again. Groaning, the
torn metal yielded.

The
other car stopped close behind them, crunching gravel.

"Well,
Mr. Barbee!" The annoyed voice twanging from behind the blinding
headlamps sounded like Dr. Bunzel's. "I see you had a little
accident"

Fumbling
beneath the bent fender, Barbee found it high enough to clear the
tire. Shading his eyes against the glare, he ran back around the
battered car, shivering with grief and terror.

"Just
a moment, Mr. Barbee!" He heard quick footsteps on the pavement.
"You're entitled to every possible courtesy so long as you're
our guest at Glennhaven, but you ought to know you can't check out
this way, in the middle of the night, without Dr. Glenn's permission.
I'm afraid we'll have to—"

He
didn't wait to listen any longer. A voiceless dread flung him back
into the car. He slipped it into reverse and stepped hard on the gas,
bracing himself for the crash. Bumpers grated and glass tinkled. The
lights of the other car went out. The wheedling voice of the man on
the ground changed to an angered roar.

"Barbee—stop!"

But
Barbee didn't stop. He shifted into low gear again, and the light car
swerved around the ragged, flattened thing the white wolf had left.
The wheels skidded on something slippery, and the twisted fender
grazed the barrier. It didn't catch, however. He recovered control
and roared across the bridge.

The
lights of the rammed car behind him stayed out. It might take Dr.
Bunzel half an hour, he thought, to walk back to Glennhaven and a
telephone. By dawn, he knew, the police would be looking for an
insane hit-and-run killer in a red hospital robe, driving a
blood-stained coupe.

Uneasily
he watched the leap and crouch of shadows outside the feeble beam of
his single headlamp, but he failed to discover the white she-wolf.
The old coupe began pulling crazily to the left as he shifted into
high; the smash, he supposed, must have bent something. He gripped
the wheel against the demon in it and pushed the wheezing motor to
forty, trying numbly to think.

A
bitter and dreadful loneliness had seized him.

Rowena
Mondrick lay slashed to death behind him, but he couldn't stop the
perversity of horror that brought his thoughts again and again to the
university years when he and Sam Quain had boarded at her house. She
used to play anything they liked on her piano, and have Miss Ulford
serve them cookies and milk, and listen with her calm, blind patience
to all their small troubles. That time, in the sick nostalgia of his
thoughts, seemed the brightest of his life. She had been a true and
gracious friend, but she couldn't help him now.

April
Bell smiled in the darkening shadows of his mind, haunting in her
green-eyed allure. The white she-wolf, he remembered uneasily, had
asked him to come to the Trojan Arms and drink to the Child of Night.
A frightened impulse moved him to go to April Bell. She had wanted to
make coffee for him once, and perhaps she could help him yet. He was
slowing to look for her street when the exotic smile of the tall
redhead in his mind changed to the pink-smeared grin of a
white-fanged wolf. Shivering, he drove straight on.

He
had nowhere to go, and his brain seemed too dull for thought. He
turned left off the river road and drove out to the end of an empty
side street and parked among brush-thicketed vacant lots until the
cold of the dawn had seeped in through his red cotton robe and its
glow was bright in the east.

The
day alarmed him from that gray apathy of stunned bewilderment. He
couldn't help shrinking away from the greenish dawn, recalling the
she-wolf's dread of light and the pain of it to the gray wolf he once
had been. It didn't hurt him now, but it did reveal the twisted left
fender of the old coupe—and the police would be looking for
that.

He
started the car again, shuddering from the cold, and drove back
across the river road and on through the emptiest streets he could
find toward the university. Once he saw headlamps behind him, yellow
in the dawn. He drove straight on, not daring to speed or turn, and
sobbed with relief when they stopped and winked out.

He
parked again in an alley behind a lumber yard, half a mile east of
the campus. Fumbling in the gray half-light, he found pliers under
the seat and drained enough of the scalding, rusty mixture of
antifreeze and water from the radiator to wash the dark, stiffened
blood from his hands. He left the car there and limped hastily on
through the waking streets toward Sam Quain's little bungalow.

He
had to check a frantic impulse to dive into another alley when he saw
a newsboy riding a bicycle to meet him, hurling folded papers at
doorways. He caught his breath and forced himself to wait calmly at
the curb, trying his best to look like a sleepy resident and
fingering the coins in his pocket to find a dime.

"Star,
mister?"

Barbee
nodded easily. "Keep the change."

The
boy handed him a paper and hurled another at the sleeping house
behind him and pedaled on. But Barbee had seen him glance sharply at
the red hospital robe and the gray felt slippers. He would remember,
when he heard about the manhunt.

Carefully
standing so the boy couldn't see the fatal
Glennhaven
embroidered
across the shoulders of the robe, if he happened to look back, Barbee
unfolded the paper as steadily as he could. His breath stopped and
the damp newsprint rustled as a black headline struck him with the
impact of a club:
prehistoric
"curse"—or human killer—takes third victim
Nicholas
Spivak, 31, anthropologist associated with the Research Foundation,
was discovered dead this morning beneath an open ninth-floor window
of the Humane Research Foundation building near Clarendon University.
The body was found by special guards, employed by the Foundation
after sudden death had claimed two other Foundation scientists this
week.

Did
a prehistoric curse follow the recent Foundation expedition back to
Clarendon from the mounds they exhumed in Asia? The surviving members
of this private research group deny all rumors that they dug up
anything so exciting from the supposed birthplace of mankind in what
is now the desolate Ala-shan desert, but Spivak's death raises the
toll to three.

Dr.
Lamarck Mondrick, founder of the organization and leader of the
expedition, fell dead as the explorers left their chartered plane at
the municipal airport Monday evening. Rex Chittum, a younger member
of the group, died early Thursday morning when his car left the road
forty miles west of Clarendon on Sardis Hill.