Darker Than You Think (7 page)

"The
world must be told—if the time for the telling is not already
past. So get what I'm going to tell you. Please broadcast my
statement, if you can. Film a record of the evidences we brought
back." His worn boot touched the wooden box. "Get it on the
air and into print tonight—if you can."

"Sure,
doc." A radio announcer grinned, moving up his microphone.
"That's our business. I'll make a wire recording, and rush it
back to the studio—if your story is politically okay. I suppose
you're going to give your angle on the Chinese situation?"

"We
saw a great deal of the war in China," Mondrick told him
solemnly, "but I'm not going to talk about it. What I have to
say is more important than the news of any war—because it will
help you understand why wars are fought. It will explain a good deal
that men have never understood, and a good many things we've been
taught to deny."

"Okay,
doc." The radio man adjusted his equipment. "Shoot."

"I'm
going to tell you—"

Mondrick
coughed, and caught his breath again. Barbee heard his laborious
wheezing, and saw the quick alarm on Sam Quain's drawn face. Quain
offered a handkerchief and Mondrick wiped sweat off his
forehead—while Barbee, hunched in his topcoat, stood shivering
in the moist east wind.

"I'm
going to tell you some stunning things, gentlemen." Mondrick
stumbled hoarsely on. "I'm going to tell you about a masked and
secret enemy, a black clan that plots and waits unsuspected among
true men—a hidden enemy, far more insidious than any of your
modem fifth columns that scheme the ruin of nations. I'm going to
tell you of the expected coming of a Black Messiah—the Child of
Night—whose appearance among true men will be the signal for a
savage and hideous and incredible rebellion."

That
weary, shattered man gasped painfully again.

"Prepare
yourselves for a jolt, gentlemen. This is a terrible thing—and
you may doubt it, at first, as I did. It is really too dreadful to
believe. But you'll have to accept it, as I did, when you see the
unpleasant things we have brought back from those pre-human burial
mounds in the Ala-shan.

"My
discoveries there—or, rather, ours—solve many enigmas."
His haggard eyes moved gratefully toward the three men guarding the
iron-strapped box, and he bowed a little to them. "We've found
the answers to riddles that have baffled every science—and to
other mysteries so obvious, so much a part of our daily lives, that
most of us are never even conscious they exist "Why, gentlemen,
is evil?"

His
lead-hued face was a mask of pain.

"Have
you ever sensed the malignant purpose behind misfortune? Are you ever
puzzled by the world's discord, by the shadow of war abroad and the
clamor of strife at home? Reading the daily news of crime, are you
ever shocked and appalled at the monstrosity of man? Have some of you
wondered, sometimes, at the tragic division in yourselves—at
the realization that your unconscious minds hold wells of black
horror?

"Have
you wondered—"

Mondrick
choked and bent. He labored to breathe again, pressing both quivering
hands against his sides. An ominous blue touched his face. He coughed
into a handkerchief, and mopped his face again. His voice, when he
could speak again, was strained and shallow, pitched in a higher key.

"I've
no time to catalog all the dark riddles in our lives," he
gasped. "But—listen!"

Disturbed
by a sense of a veiled and monstrous tension mounting, Barbee looked
uneasily around him. A photographer was slipping a fresh film pack
into his camera. The radio man was fussing with his tape recorder.
Mechanically, the bewildered reporters were taking notes.

April
Bell, beside him, stood in a frozen pose. White with pressure, both
her hands gripped the top of her snakeskin bag. Dilated, greenish
black, her long eyes were staring at Mondrick's sick face, fixed with
a peculiar intensity.

Briefly,
Barbee wondered about April Bell. Why did she frighten him? What was
the key to her strong attraction for him—what stronger call
than the flaming lure of her bright hair had overbalanced his vague
alarm? How much of what Mondrick would call good was in her, and how
much of evil, and what was the point of conflict?

Unconscious
of Barbee, she kept staring at Mondrick. Her pale lips moved
silently. Her white hands twisted the snakeskin bag with a kind of
savagery—as if it were something alive, Barbee felt uneasily,
and her fingers were rending claws.

The
gasping old man seemed to win his fight for breath.

"Remember,
gentlemen," he wheezed laboriously, "this is no whim of the
moment. I first suspected the frightful facts thirty years ago—when
a shocking incident made me see that all the work of Freud, with his
revealing new psychology of the unconscious, was merely a penetrating
description of the minds and behavior of men, not really an
explanation of the evil we see.

"I
was then a practicing psychiatrist, out at Glenn-haven. I gave up my
medical career—because the truth I suspected made a mockery of
all I had been taught and a cruel sham out of my efforts to aid the
mentally ill. Unfortunately, I quarreled rather bitterly with old Dr.
Glenn—father of the Glenn who heads Glennhaven now—because
of that unfortunate incident.

"I
turned to other fields—looking for evidence to disprove the
thing I feared. It didn't exist. I studied abroad, and finally
accepted a faculty position at Clarendon University. I tried to
master anthropology, archeology, ethnology—every science
bearing on the actual nature of mankind. Item by item, my research
turned up facts to confirm the most dreadful thing a man has ever
feared."

The
sick man stooped and sobbed for breath again.

"For
years," he whispered painfully, "I tried to work alone. You
will presently understand just what that meant—and how
extremely difficult it was for me to find aid. I even allowed my dear
wife to help me, because she already shared my secret. She lost her
eyes— and proved by her great sacrifice that all our fears were
well founded.

"But
I did, at last, find men whom I could trust." Mondrick's pallid
face briefly tried to smile. His hollowed eyes glanced once more at
the hard, taut faces of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum,
warm with a deep affection. "And I trained them to share—"

The
old man's voice sobbed and stopped. He bent double, livid-faced,
laboring to breathe. Sam Quain held him to keep him from falling
until that hard paroxysm ended.

"Forgive
me, gentlemen—I'm subject to these attacks." His voice
seemed fainter; he daubed weakly with the handkerchief at his
sweat-drenched face. "Bear with me, please," he gasped.
"I'll try to hurry on— through all this background that
you must have—if you're to understand."

Sam
Quain whispered something, and he nodded heavily.

"We
had a theory," his shallow voice rasped hastily, as if racing
with time. "We wanted proof—to warn and arm true mankind.
The evidence we needed could exist only in the ashes of the past. Ten
years ago I gave up my chair at the University to search the old
cradles of the human and semihuman races—to find that
convincing proof.

"You
can guess a few of the difficulties and the perils we had to
face—I've no time to list them. The Torgod Mongols raided our
camps. We almost perished of thirst, and we all but froze to death.
Then the war drove us out—just when we had located the first
pre-human sites."

He
toiled to breathe again.

"It
used to appear that those dark huntsmen already knew that we
suspected them and were trying to cut us down before we could expose
them. The State Department didn't want us to go back. The Chinese
government tried to keep us out. The Reds held us as spies—
until we convinced them we were after something bigger than military
information. Man and nature stood against us.

"But
these are tough boys with me!"

The
old man bent, heaving to another paroxysm.

"And
we found what we were after," he whispered triumphantly. "Found
it—and brought it safely home, from those prehuman sites."
Once again his boot touched the green wooden box that his three
companions guarded. "We brought it back—and here it is."

Once
again he straightened, struggling to breathe, painfully searching the
faces before him. Barbee met his dull, haggard eyes for an instant
and saw in them the stark conflict of dreadful urgency and deadly
fear. He understood that long preamble. He knew that Mondrick wanted
desperately to speak—to blurt the bald facts out—and knew
that a sick dread of disbelief restrained him.

"Gentlemen,
don't condemn me yet," he croaked laboriously. "Please
forgive me, if all these precautions appear unnecessary. You'll
understand them when you know. And now that you're somewhat prepared,
I must speak the rest abruptly. I must break the news, before I'm
stopped."

His
blotched face twitched and shivered.

"For
there is danger, gentlemen. Every one of you— every person who
hears this news—is himself in deadly danger. Yet I beg you to
listen
...
for I still hope
...
by spreading the truth
...
too far for them to kill enough to stamp it out entirely
...
to defeat those secret clansmen."

Mondrick
fought for breath again, doubled and shuddering.

"It
was a hundred thousand years ago—"

He
strangled. His own frantic hands came up to his throat, as if he
strove to open a way for his breath. A bubbling sound rattled in his
throat. His contorted face and clawing hands turned a cyanotic blue.
He swayed to his knees, sagging in Sam Quain's arms, gagging on words
he couldn't speak.

"That
couldn't be!" Barbee caught Quain's shocked whisper. "No—there
are no cats here!"

Blinking,
Barbee shot a bewildered glance at April Bell. She stood stiffly
motionless, staring at the gasping explorer. Dilated in the gloom,
her eyes were strange and black. White as her white fur, her fixed
face held no expression. Both her hands clutched her snakeskin bag,
twisting savagely.

But
where was any cat?

The
bag was closed now, and he saw nothing of her happy black kitten.
Anyhow, why should the stricken man be gasping anything about a cat?
Shivering to the cold east wind, Barbee peered back at Mondrick.

Sam
Quain and Nick Spivak had laid the struggling man on his back. Quain
ripped off his own khaki shirt and folded it under Mondrick's head
for a pillow. But Rex Chittum, Barbee noticed, stayed beside that
heavy wooden box, his roving eyes warily alert—as if its
contents were more important than the old explorer's last agony.

For
Mondrick was dying. His wild hands fought for air again and fell. His
mottled face turned lax and lividly pale. He kicked convulsively and
lay still again. As surely as if the garroter's iron collar were
being screwed down against his throat, he was strangling to death.