Darker Than You Think

by Jack Williamson

  "Please," he said. "Perhaps I can help—I do want to."

  "Now that I've told you," she whispered faintly, "what does anything matter?"

  "There are things that still might matter a good deal—to you and me." Her white face seemed dull and sad, but this time she let him take her hand across the tiny table. Earnestly he asked: "Have you ever talked about this thing to anybody who might understand—a psychiatrist, I mean, or a scientist like old Mondrick was?"

  Her bright head nodded apathetically.

  "I have a friend who knows about me—he knew my mother and I think he used to help us, back when times were hard. Two years ago, he persuaded me to go to Dr. Glenn. Young Dr. Archer Glenn, you know, here at Clarendon."

  Barbee tried to smother an instant jealous desire to know more about that friend. His fingers tightened on the girl's limp, cool hand, but he managed to nod calmly.

  "I know Glenn," he said. "Interviewed him once, while his father was still working with him—I was writing up Glennhaven for a special medical edition of the Star. Glennhaven is supposed to be about the best private mental hospital in the country. What—?"

  Anxiety caught his voice, and he had to swallow.

  "What did Glenn tell you?"

  Her pale face reflected a faint, defiant amusement.

  "Dr. Glenn doesn't believe in witches," she purred gently. "He tried to psychoanalyze me. I spent an hour a day for nearly a year, lying on a couch in his office at Glennhaven and telling him all about me. I tried to cooperate—you have to, at forty dollars an hour. I told him everything—and still he doesn't believe in witches."

  She chuckled softly.

  "Glenn thinks everything in the universe can be explained on the basis that two and two make four. If you put any kind of spell on anything, he always insisted, then wait long enough, some accident is sure to happen to it. He used big words to tell me that I was unconsciously kidding myself. He thought I was a little bit insane—a paranoiac. He wouldn't believe that I was a witch."

  A faint malice curved her crimson lips.

  "Not even when I showed him!"

  "Showed him?" Barbee echoed. "How?"

  "Dogs don't like me," she said. "Glennhaven's out in the country, you know, and the dogs off the farms across the road used to come and bark at me when I got off the bus, and chase me into the building. One day I got tired of that—and I wanted to show Glenn.

  "So I brought a little modeling clay. I mixed it with dust from around a bench at the corner, where the dogs used to stop. When I got to Glenn's office, I molded it into rough little figures of five of the dogs. I whispered a little chant and spat on them and smashed them on the floor. Then I told Glenn to look out the window."

  Glee danced in the girl's long eyes.

  "We waited ten minutes. I pointed out the dogs. They had followed me to the building. They hung around a little while, barking at the window. Then they all started away after a little terrier bitch—she must have been in heat. They ran out into the highway, all together, just as a speeding car came around the curve. The driver tried to swerve but he didn't have time. The car hit them and turned over as it skidded off the road. All the dogs were killed—I'm glad the driver wasn't."

  Barbee shook himself uneasily, and caught his breath.

  "What did Glenn say?"

  "He seemed to be delighted." April Bell smiled enigmatically. "It turned out the bitch belonged to a chiropractor who lives down the road, and he said the dogs had been digging up the grounds. He doesn't like either dogs or chiropractors—but still he wouldn't believe in witches."

  The girl shook her burnished head.

  "The dogs had died because the chiropractor's bitch happened to slip her leash, he said, and not because of any spell of mine. He went on to say that I didn't really want to give up my psychosis and we couldn't make any progress until I changed my attitude. He said my gift was just a paranoid delusion. He charged me another forty dollars for that hour, and we went ahead with the analysis."

  Barbee exhaled blue smoke into the thick blue air, and moved uncomfortably in the angular seat. He saw the waiter watching imperatively, but he didn't want another drink. He looked uncertainly back at April Bell. Her brief amusement had vanished; her face seemed tired and sad. Slowly she drew her cold hands out of his fingers.

  "And you think he was right, Barbee."

  He gripped the edges of the little table.

  "My God!" he whispered explosively. "It would be no great wonder if you showed some tendencies of insanity, after all you've lived through!"

  A warm surge of pity rose in him, and turned to burning anger against all her old misfortunes, against the ignorance and the cruel fanatacism of her stern father who had forced her to accept such pitiful delusions. He felt an imperative urge to shelter her, to help her back toward complete sanity. The hot, foul atmosphere of the crowded bar began to choke him. He coughed to hide his feelings. Too much show of pity would only offend her.

  Quietly she said: "I know I'm not insane."

  So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics. He didn't know what to say next. He wanted time to think—to analyze her curious confession and check all these evasive uncertainties against the ruthless fact of Mondrick's death. He looked at his watch, and nodded toward the dining room. "Shall we eat?"

  She nodded eagerly. "I'm hungry as a wolf!"

  That word checked Barbee—reminding him of Aunt Agatha's odd jade pin. She was already reaching, with her swift feline felicity of action, for the white fur beside her, but Barbee sat heavily back in the angular chair.

  "Let's have another drink." He signalled the waiter and ordered two more daiquiris before he turned to face her slight frown of puzzlement. "It's late," he said, "but there's one more thing I've got to ask about." He hesitated and saw that wary, dangerous alertness come back to her white, taut face. Reluctantly, he demanded: "You did kill that kitten?"

  "I did."

  His hands gripped the table until the knuckles snapped.

  "And you did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick?"

  In the haze of smoke, her bright head nodded slightly. "And he died."

  The calm matter-of-factness of her tone sent a shiver down Barbee's spine. Darkly greenish, her watchful eyes seemed flatly opaque. Her oval face was a lifeless, waxen mask. He couldn't guess what she thought or what she felt. The bridge of confidence was swept away, and it left a chasm of peril between them.

  "Please, April—"

  Quick sympathy quivered in his voice. He wanted urgently to reach and comfort the defiant loneliness he knew she felt, but his impulsive effort failed to penetrate her hostile citadel. Barbee dropped to a note as cool and gravely impersonal as hers had been, asking: "Why did you want to kill him?"

  Across that tiny table her low and toneless voice was as distant as if it called from within a far-off fortress tower.

  "Because I was afraid."

  Barbee's brows went up.

  "Afraid of what?" he demanded. "You said you didn't even know him. And how could he have harmed you? I did have an old grudge against him, of course— for dropping me from his little circle of disciples when he organized the Foundation. But he was harmless— just a scientist, digging for knowledge."

  "I know what he was doing." The girl's voice was hard and cold and still remote. "You see, Barbee, I always wanted to know about myself—and the power born in me. I didn't study psychology in college, because all the professors seemed stupidly wrong. But I've read nearly everything that has been published on such unusual cases as mine."

  Her eyes were hard as polished malachite.

  "Did you know Mondrick was an outstanding authority on witchcraft? Well, he was. He knew all the history of the witch persecutions, and a great deal more besides. He had studied the beliefs of every primitive race—and those beliefs were something more to him than strange fairy stories.

  "You know the myths of Greece, for instance—full of illicit love affairs between the gods and human girls. Nearly all
the Greek heroes—Hercules and Perseus and the rest—were supposed to have illegitimate immortal blood. They all had remarkable powers and gifts. Well, years ago Mondrick wrote a monograph analyzing those legends as racial memories of conflict and occasional interbreeding between two prehistoric races—the tall Cro-Magnons, perhaps, he suggested in that first paper, and the brutish Neanderthalers.

  "But you worked under him, Barbee—you must know the range of his interests. He dug up graves and measured skulls and fitted broken pots together and deciphered old inscriptions. He looked for differences in the people of today—tested their blood and measured their reactions and analyzed their dreams. He had an open mind for everything that most scientists throw out because it doesn't fit their own preconceptions. He was an authority on extrasensory perception and psychokinesis before anybody else thought of the words. He tried every avenue to find what he wanted."

  "That's true," Barbee said. "So what?"

  "Mondrick was always cautious in what he wrote," the girl's far, cold voice went on. "He covered up his real meaning with harmless scientific words-—to keep from exciting too many people, I suppose, before his proofs were ready. Finally, a dozen years ago, he quit publishing anything at all—he even bought up and burned the copies of his early monographs. But he had already written too much. I knew what he was doing."

  April Bell paused while the slow waiter brought the change out of Barbee's lone twenty, automatically sipping at her drink. That made three, he thought—no, it must be four. She held them well enough. When the waiter was gone, she resumed in the same flat voice: "Mondrick believed in witches."

  "Nonsense!" Barbee started. "He was a scientist."

  "And he still believed in witches," she insisted. "That's what frightened me today. Most scientists, so-called, reject the evidence without a look, but Mondrick had spent his whole life trying to put witchcraft on a scientific basis. He went to the Ala-shan to find new evidence. And I knew today—from the way everything happened, from the fear on those men's faces and Mondrick's cautious first remarks—that he had found what he wanted."

  "But—not that!"

  "You don't believe, Barbee." Her dry voice was edged again with a veiled mockery. "Most people don't. That fact is our chief protection—for we are the enemies of people." Her red lips curved at his incredulous amazement. "You can see why men must always hate us—because we are different. Because we have inborn powers greater than are given men—and yet not great enough!"

  A savage spark of wild hostility lit her greenish eyes, as she half whispered that. In a moment they were dark again, expressionless and hard, but Barbee had glimpsed a naked, stark ferocity that he couldn't forget. His own glance dropped uneasily, and he deliberately drained his cocktail.

  "Mondrick was trying to expose us—so that men could destroy us," her hard voice rapped. "That's what frightened me tonight. Perhaps he had invented a scientific test to identify witches. Years ago, I remember, he wrote a scientific paper on the correlation of blood groups and introversion—and introvert is one of the harmless scientific terms he used to use when he was really writing about witches.

  "Can't you understand, Barbee?"

  Her low, husky voice was suddenly pleading, and that hard blankness had gone from her eyes. Perhaps the alcohol had affected her, after all, to dissolve the barriers of normal reserve. Now her eyes seemed warm, as intimately appealing as her voice.

  "Don't you see, Will, that I was fighting tonight for my life? Can you blame me for using all my own poor weapons against such a great and cunning enemy as old Mondrick? For he was my enemy—as that stupid dairy man was, and all true men must be. Men aren't to blame. I know that, Barbee. But then—am I?"

  Tears wet her limpid eyes.

  "I can't help it, Barbee. The trouble began when the first witch was hounded and stoned to death by the first savage man. It will go on till the last witch is dead. Always, everywhere, men must follow that old Biblical law: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

  Her naked shoulders shrugged hopelessly.

  "That's me, Will," she whispered bitterly. "You wanted to break the pretty little shell of my illusion. You weren't satisfied with my performance as a human woman—though I can't believe it's really so bad. You had to see the thing beyond my veil."

  Wearily, she reached for her white fur again.

  "So here I am," she told him quietly. "A hunted enemy of all the human breed. Old Mondrick was the ruthless human hunter—cunningly seizing every resource of science to track down and wipe out me and my kind. Can you blame me if I made a feeble little spell to save myself? Can you blame me if it worked?"

  Barbee moved to rise, and sat back abruptly. He shook himself, as if to break the fascination of her liquid eyes and shining hair and softly pleading voice.

  "Your kind?" he echoed sharply. "Then you aren't alone?"

  The warmth left her long eyes; again they narrowed, flat and cruel and wary, the eyes of a pursued and desperate animal. Her face went whiter, and her voice turned coldly toneless.

  "I'm quite alone."

  Barbee leaned forward, grimly intent. "Mondrick spoke of a 'secret enemy.' Do you think he meant—witches?" "He did."

  "Do you know any others?"

  Her answer, he thought, was a fractional second delayed. Her eyes were screens for thought, opaque and hard. Her tense white face showed nothing.

  "No." Suddenly her whole body trembled, so that he knew she was fighting back tears. In the same flat and lifeless voice, she asked: "Must you persecute me?"

  "I'm sorry," Barbee whispered. "But now, when you have told me so much, you must go on and tell me everything. How else can I judge?" His hands closed hard on the edges of the little table. "Do you know what Mondrick meant when he spoke of a leader coming—the Child of Night?"

  He half glimpsed, for a tiny instant, a queer little smile—too swiftly come and gone for him to be sure she had smiled at all. Her fine shoulders lifted above the strapless gown.

  "How could I know?" she said. "Is that all?"

  "One more question—and then we'll eat." Barbee's gray eyes strove to pierce those hard screens of unfeeling malachite. "Do you know what proteins Dr. Mondrick was allergic to?"

  Her wary hostility gave way to a genuine bewilderment.

  "Allergic?" Her voice was puzzled. "That has something to do with hay fever and indigestion, hasn't it? Why no, of course I don't. Really, Will, I didn't know Mondrick personally—only his work. I don't think I ever saw him before tonight."

  "Thank God!" breathed Will Barbee.

  He stood up and filled his lungs gratefully with the heavy bar fumes, smiling down at her.

  "That was a pretty cruel grilling," he said. "Forgive me, April—but I just had to know those things."

  She remained seated, and her tired face failed to reflect his eager smile.

  "Forgiven," she said wearily. "And we'll skip the dinner. You may go when you wish."

  "Go?" he protested quickly. "Lady, you have promised me the evening. You said you were hungry as a wolf, and the Knob Hill chef is famous for his steaks. We can dance after dinner—or maybe take a drive in the moonlight. You don't want me to go?"

  The hard screens vanished from her eyes, and he saw a tender delight.

  "You mean, Barbee," she whispered softly, "even after you've seen the strange, poor thing behind my veil—"

  Barbee grinned, and suddenly laughed. His tension had somehow evaporated completely. "If you're a witch, I'm completely under your spells."

  She rose with a smile that grew slowly radiant.

  "Thank you, Will." She let him take her fur coat, and they started toward the dining room. "But, please," she whispered huskily, "just for tonight— won't you try to help me forget that I'm—what I am?"

  Barbee nodded happily.

  "I'll try, angel."

  CHAPTER SIX

  As a Wolf Runs—

  They stayed at the Knob Hill until closing time. The steaks were perfect. The dance band playe
d, he felt, for the two of them alone; and April Bell moved in his arms with a light, smooth grace that made him think of some wild creature. They spoke of nothing graver than the music and the wine, and she seemed to forget that she might be anything more dangerous than a very gorgeous redhead. So did Barbee—most of the time.

  The white flash of her perfect teeth, however, reminded him now and then of the white jade pin he had brought in his pocket—he knew it must be hers, but still he didn't quite dare return it. The greenish mystery of her long eyes shocked him more than once with a disquieting awareness that the haunting riddle of Mondrick's death was still not really solved, that her own strange confession had only added another new enigma.

  He wanted to drive her home, but her own maroon convertible was parked on the lot behind the nightclub. He walked her to it, opened the door for her, and then caught her arm impulsively as she started to slide under the wheel.

  "You know April—" He hesitated, not quite certain what he meant to say, but the bright expectancy on her face made him go on. "I've a feeling about you that I don't understand. A funny feeling—I can't explain—"

  He paused again, awkwardly. Her white face was lifted to him; he wanted to kiss her, but that sudden preemptory emotion demanded expression.

  "An odd feeling that I've known you somewhere, before tonight." His voice was bewildered, groping. "That you are part of something—old and somehow very important—that belongs to us both. A feeling that you wake something sleeping in me." He shrugged, helpless.

  "I want to tell you," he whispered. "But I can't quite pin it down."

  She smiled in the darkness, and her velvet voice hummed a bit of a song to which they had danced: "Maybe It's Love."

  Maybe it was. Years had passed since the last time Barbee had really thought himself in love, but as he recalled the experience it had never seemed quite so disturbing as this. He was still afraid—not of the dark-lipped girl who seemed to be waiting for his kiss, not even of the twentieth-century sorceress she pretended to be, but rather of that vague and strangely terrifying feeling she aroused, of awakening senses and powers and old half memories in himself. There was nothing he could actually put into words, but he couldn't help shivering again.