"Well?" Her voice seemed hoarse with tension. "What are you afraid of?"
Barbee gulped the rest of his own drink. His fingers drummed nervously on the table—he noticed how large and gnarled and hairy his hand seemed, beside hers. His mind had rebelled against the intolerable conflict of frantic hope and desperate doubt, and a reckless impulse told him to blurt out the truth.
"April—"
He checked himself, and caught his breath. Because her white oval face had turned remote and cold. Her long greenish eyes had narrowed alertly—almost as if she had already heard what he was going to say. He made himself go on.
"April—it's about what happened at the airport." He leaned across the little table. Something made him shiver. His voice turned suddenly hard, accusing. "You killed that black kitten—I found the body. You did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick."
Barbee had expected a violent denial. He had prepared himself to face her slashing anger. A bewildered lack of comprehension was what he had hoped for—if some youthful assassins had really kidnapped and destroyed little Fifi. He was completely at a loss when the girl covered her face with her hands, elbows propped on the little table, and began sobbing silently.
He stared at the red splendor of her hair, and bit his lip. Her despair and pain were terribly real, and a sharp knife of contrition twisted in his breast. He couldn't endure tears. All his cruel suspicions became utterly fantastic. He had been a complete fool, even to mention Aunt Agatha's kitten.
"April—really—" he floundered. "I didn't mean—"
He subsided while the stony-faced waiter set down two fresh daiquiris and went away with his two dollar bills and the empty glasses. He wanted desperately to touch April Bell's white trembling shoulder, somehow to soothe her hurt. Suddenly he didn't care what she was or what she had done. Instead, a tremendous excited curiosity to know how and why she had done it rose in him.
"Please, April," he begged faintly. "I'm very sorry."
She lifted her head, and looked silently at him out of her wet, slightly slanted eyes—or was it only that her thin brows had been artfully plucked to make them look oblique? Her eyes were huge and dark and solemn, and tears had smeared the smooth makeup on her cheeks. Her red head nodded slightly—in a hopeless little bow of tired defeat.
"So you know." It was a statement, bitterly final.
Barbee reached impulsively to take her slender hands, but she drew them back and dropped them wearily in her lap. She sat looking at him, waiting, defiantly submissive, almost haggard with her ruined makeup, for once not building any illusions—or was this just a new one?
"I don't know anything." His hurried voice was anxious and bewildered. "This is all a nightmare—too many things I can't believe, or understand. I—" He blinked, and swallowed hard. "I didn't mean to hurt you so. Please, April—believe that. I like you ... a very great deal. But ... well, you know how Mondrick died."
Her wet eyes dropped wearily. She found a handkerchief in the green leather bag that matched the gown and lent its color to her eyes. She dabbed away her tears, and unobtrusively flicked powder on her cheeks again. She sipped deliberately at her cocktail, and he saw the glass quivering in her long, slender fingers. At last she looked up solemnly.
"Yes, Will." Her voice was low and grave. "You've found me out—I guess it's no use trying to fool you any longer. The truth is hard to say, and I know it will upset you.
"But I'm a witch, Barbee."
Barbee half rose, sat down again, and nervously tossed off his daiquiri. He blinked at her hurt, earnest face and shook his head savagely. He caught his breath and opened his mouth and shut it again. At last he demanded breathlessly: "What the devil do you mean?"
"Just what I said," she told him soberly. "I didn't tell you what my parents quarreled about—I couldn't. But that was the cause. I was a witch child, and my father found it out. My mother had always known, and she stood by me—he'd have killed me if she hadn't. So he drove us both away."
CHAPTER FIVE
The Thing Behind the Veil
April Bell leaned across the little eight-sided table, her strained white face floating close to his in the thick haze of hot blue smoke and alcohol that the Knob Hill's patrons paid so well to breathe. Her husky voice was very low, and her long eyes watched his startled expression with a painful intensity, as if to estimate the impact of her words.
Barbee had a queer, numbed feeling in the pit of his stomach; it was amazingly like the effect of a tremendous slug of whisky—he was numbed, yet with a foreknowledge of warmth to come. He gulped and breathed again and nodded anxiously. He didn't quite dare speak—he didn't want to challenge the girl's confession, nor could he yet accept it.
Her white, troubled face smiled slightly, relaxing to a faint relief.
"You see," she told him slowly, "Mother was my father's second wife. Young enough to have been his daughter. I know she never loved him—I never really understood why she married him. Such a disagreeable brute, and he never had any money. Certainly she wasn't following the rules she laid down for me."
Barbee reached for a cigarette. He didn't want to interrupt the girl, and he thought she would stop if she knew the agonized intensity of his own interest. He needed something to do with his nervous hands. She shook her head when he offered the worn case to her, and her slow, hushed voice went on.
"But Mother had been in love with some other man —she never told me his name. Maybe that explains her marriage and the way she felt about men. My father never did much to make her love him. Perhaps he knew something about that other man. I know he suspected that I wasn't really his."
Careful not to let his fingers tremble, Barbee lit his cigarette.
"Father was a stern man," the girl went on. "A Puritan, really—he belonged back in old Salem. He was never actually ordained—he couldn't quite agree with any denomination—but he used to preach his own harsh faith on street corners here in town on market Saturdays, whenever he could get a few idlers to listen. He considered himself a righteous man, trying to warn the world away from sin. Actually, he could be monstrously cruel.
"He was cruel to me."
Old pain made a shadow on the girl's pale face.
"You see, I was a precocious child. Father had older children, by his first marriage, who were not. I could read a little by the time I was three. I understood people. Somehow, I could just sense what people would do, and things that would happen. My father wasn't pleased to see me more clever than my older brothers and sisters—the ones he knew were his own."
She smiled faintly.
"I think I was pretty, too—my mother always told me so. No doubt I was spoiled and vain, and sometimes nasty to the others. Anyhow, I was always in some quarrel with the older children, with my mother taking sides with me against them and my father. Of course they were all much bigger, but even then I think I was pretty clever in finding ways to hurt them."
Her oval face turned very white.
"And Father, too," she whispered. "I used to flaunt my red hair at him—it was lighter then, and my mother kept it in long curls. It happened that he and Mother were both dark-haired, and now I'm sure that other man, the one he suspected, must have been a redhead. Then I only knew that the color of my hair goaded him to fury. I was just five years old the first time he called me a witch child—and snatched me out of Mother's arms to whip me."
Her greenish eyes were dark and dry. To Barbee they seemed hard as emeralds, ruthless with an old and unforgotten hate. Her face, except for the scarlet bows of her lips, seemed white as the wolf fur flung over the chair beside her. Her hushed, hurried voice was bitter and dry—as cruel, he thought, as the parching winds of the Ala-shan must be.
"My father always hated me," she told him. "His children did—no, I never believed that I was really his. They hated me because I was different. Because I was prettier than any of the girls, and quicker than any of the boys. Because I could do things none of them could. Yes—because I was already a witch!"
She made a savage little nod.
"They all stood against me—all except Mother. I had to defend myself and strike back when I could. I knew about witches from the Bible—Father used to read a chapter at every mealtime, and then chant an endless grace before he would let us eat. I asked questions about what witches could do. Mother told me some things, and I learned a lot from the old midwife who came when my married sister had a child—she was a queer old woman! By the time I was seven years old, I had started to practice the things I had learned."
Barbee sat listening, half incredulous and yet fascinated. The girl's taut face swam close to him in the thick blue haze, mirroring all she said, a white enigma of old pain and hate and occasional glee, sullen-lipped and yet strangely lovely.
"I began with small things," she whispered. "As a child would. The first serious incident came later, when I was nearly nine. My half brother Harry had a dog named Tige. For some reason Tige always hated me. He would growl when I tried to touch him—like that Mondrick woman's ugly dog did today. Another sign, my father said, that I was a witch child sent to visit the wrath of God upon his house.
"One day Tige bit me. Harry laughed at me and called me a wicked little witch. He was going to let Tige chase me—that was what he said. Maybe he was just teasing. I don't know—but I said I'd show him that I really was a witch. I told him I'd put a spell on Tige and kill him. I did my best."
Her long eyes narrowed, and her nostrils seemed to pinch.
"I remembered all the old midwife had told me. I made up a little chant about Tige dying, and whispered it during family prayers. I gathered hairs out of his blanket and spit on them and burned them in the kitchen stove. And I waited for Tige to die."
Barbee tried to ease her painful intensity.
"You were just a child," he murmured. "Just playing."
"Tige went mad the very next week," she said quietly. "Father had to shoot him."
Her quiet seemed more startling than a scream. Barbee moved uneasily and caught his breath.
"Coincidence," he muttered.
"Maybe." A brief amusement lit the girl's face, as if she had seen his apprehensive start. "I don't think so." That shadow of old bitterness came back. "I believed in my power. Harry did. So did my father, when Harry told him. I ran to Mother, where she was sewing. Father dragged me outside, and whipped me again."
Her long trembling fingers lifted her glass, but she set it back untasted, absorbed in her narrative.
"Father hurt me cruelly, and I felt that he was savagely unjust. While he was whipping me, I screamed that I would get even. As soon as he let me go, I tried to. I slipped out to the dairy and pulled hairs out of the three best cows and the bull my father had just bought for the herd. I spat on the hairs and burned them with a match and buried them behind the barn. I made another chant."
Her long dark eyes peered somberly through the smoke.
"Probably a week afterward, the bull dropped dead."
"Coincidence," Barbee whispered faintly. "It must have been coincidence."
Her scarlet lips twisted to a wry, slight smile.
"The veterinarian said it was hemorrhagic septicemia," she said softly. "The three cows died, too, as well as the best yearling heifer and two steer calves. My father remembered the threats I had screamed, and Harry had watched me digging behind the barn. Harry tattled, and Father whipped me until I confessed that I had tried to kill the cattle."
Abruptly, with a swift, catlike grace of motion, she tossed off her drink. Her greenish eyes looked straight at Barbee, glazed and hard as if she didn't see anything. Nervously, her tense fingers started twirling the glass. The thin stem snapped, and the bowl splintered on the floor. Without seeming to notice, she went on huskily: "That was a dreadful night, Barbee. Father sent all the other children to stay at my married sister's house —to escape the taint of witchcraft, he ranted, and avoid the dreadful wrath of God. Just he and Mother and I were left, to pray it out together, Father said, and let me suffer the just retribution for my sin."
Nervously, her red-nailed fingers spun the stem of the shattered glass.
"I'll never forget that night. Mother cried and tried to make excuses for me and begged for mercy—I remember her down on her knees, on the splintered pine floor before my father, as if he had been another angry deity. But he didn't pay much attention to her prayers. He stamped up and down that gloomy little room, and shouted his questions and his cruel accusations at Mother and me, and read from the Bible by the light of a smelly coal-oil lamp. Again and again he read that terrible line: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Afraid she might cut her trembling hand on the daggerpoint of the broken glass, Barbee lifted it out of her fingers. She didn't seem to notice.
"It went on all night," she whispered. "Father would make us kneel and pray. He would walk the floor and sob, and curse my mother and me. He would jerk her up when she knelt at his feet and cuff her about the room and warn her not to shelter a witch child in her bosom. Finally he would snatch me out of her arms, and whip me again, until he nearly killed me. And then he would read out of the Bible.
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
She paused, her long eyes staring at his hands. Barbee looked down and saw a bright red drop on his finger. Carefully, he set the broken glass stem in the ash tray. He wiped the blood on his handkerchief, and lit another cigarette.
"He would have killed me, too," the girl's hoarse, bitter voice went on. "Mother fought him, the last time, to make him let me go. She broke a chair over his head, but that didn't seem to hurt him much. He dropped me on the floor, and started for his shotgun leaning by the door. I knew he meant to kill us both, and I screamed out a chant to stop him."
Her husky voice caught, and she swallowed hard.
"It worked. He fell on the floor, just as he reached the gun. The doctors said later that it was a cerebral hemorrhage. They told him he had better learn to control his temper. I don't suppose he ever did, because he dropped dead the day he got out of the hospital and heard that Mother had taken me and run away to California."
Barbee was a little startled to discover that the waiter had swept up the shattered glass and set two fresh daiquiris on the tiny table. April Bell lifted her drink thirstily. Barbee found two more dollars in his flat pocketbook, and wondered briefly what the dinner check would come to. He sipped at his own drink, and carefully held himself from interrupting.
"I never knew exactly what Mother believed." That answered the question he hadn't dared to ask. "She loved me. I think she could have forgiven me anything. She only made me promise, when we were safe out of Father's house, that I would never try to make another spell. I didn't—so long as she lived."
She set back her empty glass, her white fingers steady again.
"Mother was all right—you'd have liked her, Barbee. You couldn't really blame her for not trusting men, and she did all she could for me. As the years went by, I think she almost forgot all that had happened back here at Clarendon. I know she wanted to. She would never talk of coming back, even to visit her old friends here. I know it would have shocked her horribly to know what I was—what I really am."
That hardness had melted from the girl's greenish eyes; they seemed liquid now, huge and dark and queerly eager. "I kept my promise not to work any more spells," she told him softly. "But nothing could stop my knowledge of the powers awakening and growing within me. Nothing could keep me from feeling what other people thought and foreseeing things that were going to happen."
"I know." Barbee nodded. "That's what we call the nose for news."
She shook her bright head gravely.
"It's more than that," she insisted quietly. "Other things happened. I didn't work any more spells—not on purpose. But things happened that I couldn't help."
He listened, and tried not to let her see him shiver.
"There was a girl at school," she said. "I didn't like her, anyhow—she was too nasty-nice, always quoting t
he Bible and meddling in other people's lives like those half sisters I hated. Once she won a journalism scholarship that I had set my heart on. I knew she had cheated to get it. I couldn't help wishing something would happen to her."
"And," Barbee breathed, "did it?"
"It did," April told him gently. "The day that girl was supposed to accept the scholarship, she woke up ill. She tried to go to the auditorium anyhow and fainted on the way. It was acute appendicitis—the doctors said. She nearly died. If she had—"
Nearly black, her long eyes stared straight at Barbee. He saw the bleak memories in them, of dread and pain. He saw her white body shudder in the daring gown.
"Another coincidence, you can say. That's what I wanted to think, Barbee. Because I didn't really hate that girl. I thought I'd lose my mind until the doctors said she would pull through. But that wasn't the only incident. Other things kept happening, almost as serious. I grew to be afraid of myself."
Her voice sank.
"Don't you see, Barbee?" Her dark eyes begged him to understand. "I didn't make any conscious spells, but still that power was working in me. When such seeming accidents always follow the acts and wishes of a person, it gets to be beyond the realm of coincidence. Can't you see?"
Barbee nodded. After a while he remembered to breathe again. At last he muttered huskily, "I guess so."
"Please try to see my side of it," the girl urged softly. "I didn't ask to be a witch—I was born this way."
Barbee drummed nervously on the table with his knuckles. He saw the waiter coming back and impatiently waved him away. He gulped, and said uneasily: "Look here, April—do you mind if I ask a few more questions?"
Her white shoulders shrugged with a mute and weary bitterness.
Darker Than You Think Page 7