Darker Than You Think

by Jack Williamson

  "What—" Barbee's hoarse voice caught. "What seems to be the trouble?"

  "She has this obsessive dread, as Glenn calls it, and this queer compulsion."

  "Huh?" Barbee frowned uneasily. "About what?"

  "You know how she always was about silver? Glenn calls that an obsession, and it's worse after last night. You see, we took off that quaint old silver jewelry this morning when we were dressing her scratches and bruises from falling on the pavement, and she was perfectly frantic, poor dear, when she found she didn't have it. Dr. Glenn let me go back to the house and bring her beads and bracelets, and she thanked me like I had saved her life."

  Barbee tried not to show his shudder.

  "This compulsion?" he asked faintly. "What's that?"

  "I don't understand it." The bent little nurse looked up at him with sad, bewildered eyes. "She wants to see Mr. Sam Quain. There is something she must tell him, she says, but she's quite unreasonable about it. She won't use the telephone. She won't write a note. She won't even trust me with her message. She did beg me to get him to come to see her—she wanted me to tell him she had a warning for him—but of course she isn't allowed any visitors."

  Barbee tried to swallow the harsh dryness in his throat and decided not to ask any more questions, for fear the nurse should notice his own disturbance. The car, he discovered, was still in second gear. He shifted nervously into high, driving back to Clarendon along the river road.

  "I'm so terribly sorry for poor Rowena," that plaintive whine went on. "Blind and all, and her husband hardly cold in the ground. She's still so dreadfully upset. She kept begging us to look for Turk—her big dog, you know. She let it out last night, and it didn't come back. Now she says she needs it with her, to guard her in the dark. Glenn kept asking her what she's afraid of, but she would never say."

  Barbee sat taut and cold, shivering at the wheel. He dared not look at the nurse again. He was staring straight ahead but his eyes must have been blind to the road. He heard Miss Ulford's stifled shriek, and saw a huge truck looming close ahead on the narrow Deer Creek bridge. Somehow, he had got to driving far too fast. He whipped around the truck on screaming tires and grazed safely past the concrete railings and slowed beyond, still shuddering.

  "Sorry," he whispered to the frightened nurse. "I was thinking about Rowena."

  It was fortunate, he thought, that Miss Ulford couldn't know what he was thinking. He left her at the shabby old house on University Avenue and drove back to town. It was almost noon, and he waited at his desk, fumbling impatiently with the Walraven clippings, for the time to call the Trojan Arms again.

  All his breathless eagerness to see April Bell again seemed to dry up, however, when he took hold of the telephone. He stubbornly refused to believe that she was anything more dangerous than any other alluring redhead, but he couldn't stop the panic that possessed him. Abruptly, he put the receiver back.

  Better wait until he got hold of himself, he decided. Maybe he'd be smarter not to call at all, but just drop in unannounced. He wanted to be watching her face when he mentioned that white jade pin.

  It was time for lunch, but he wasn't hungry. He stopped in a drugstore for a dose of bicarbonate, and in the Mint Bar for a shot of bourbon. That picked him up, and he went to the offices of Walraven's law firm, hoping to escape all his tormenting uncertainties for a little while and so find a fresh perspective on the alarming riddle of April Bell.

  The bland-faced politician gave him another drink, and started telling dirty stories about his political rivals.

  Colonel Walraven's genial good humor evaporated, however, when Barbee mentioned sewage bonds. He suddenly recalled a pressing appointment, and Barbee went back to his desk.

  He tried to work, but he couldn't put that guarded box out of his thoughts, or Sam Quain's unhappy threat. He couldn't forget Rowena Mondrick in that haunting dream, clutching her silver knife as she stumbled blindly after him. He couldn't stop wondering what she wanted to tell Sam Quain. And a green-eyed wolf bitch kept grinning at him from the blank page in his typewriter.

  There was no use stalling any longer, he decided suddenly. He shrugged off that irrational dread of April Bell as he hastily put away the Walraven file—and a new fear seized him, that he had waited too long.

  For it was almost two o'clock. She should have been gone from her apartment hours ago, he knew—if she were actually a reporter on the Call. He hurried down to his car, went back to his own apartment to get the white jade pin, and drove too fast out North Main Street to the Trojan Arms.

  It didn't surprise him to see Preston Troy's big blue sedan in the parking lot behind the apartment-hotel. One of Troy's more gorgeous ex-secretaries, he knew, had an apartment on the top floor.

  Barbee didn't stop at the desk—he didn't want to give April Bell warning enough to make up any more tales about Aunt Agatha. He meant to drop the little jade wolf in her hand, and watch the expression in her greenish eyes. He didn't wait for the elevator but climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  Still, he wasn't surprised when he saw Troy's squat figure waddling down the corridor ahead of him—the ex-secretary, he supposed, must have moved down into a new apartment. He started looking for the numbers. Here was 2-A, and 2-B; the next should be 2-C—

  His breath went out.

  For Troy had stopped ahead of him, at the door of 2-C. Barbee stood slack-jawed, staring. The heavy little man in the sharp-creased double-breasted suit and shrieking purple tie didn't knock or touch the buzzer. He opened the door with his own key. Barbee caught the haunting velvet huskiness of April Bell's voice, intimate and low, and the door closed again.

  Barbee stumbled back to the elevator and punched the down button savagely. He felt sick, as if from a blow in the stomach. It was true, he reminded himself, that he had no claim whatever upon April Bell. She had mentioned other friends, he remembered, besides Aunt Agatha. Obviously she couldn't live here on her newspaper earnings.

  But he couldn't help feeling sick.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As a Saber-Tooth Slays—

  Barbee went back to the noisy city room—there was nothing else to do. He didn't want to think any more about April Bell, and he sought relief from all the cruel perplexities that leered from the shadows of his mind in his old anodynes: hard work and raw whisky.

  He got out the Walraven file again and hammered out a feature article on the boyhood hardships of "Clarendon's First Citizen," numb to the sordid facts that had to be omitted. He went out to cover a stop-Walraven meeting of indignant citizens, and put tongue in cheek to write it up the way Grady said Troy wanted it written, as a sinister gathering of the evil henchmen of unspecified interests.

  He was afraid to go home.

  He tried not to let his thoughts dwell upon the reasons, but he loitered about the newsroom until the third edition went to press, and then stopped to have a few drinks with some of the gang in the bar across the street.

  Somehow, he was afraid to go to sleep. It was long past midnight, and he was reeling with whisky and fatigue, when he tiptoed down the creaking hall and let himself into his little apartment in the gloomy old house on Bread Street.

  He hated the place suddenly, with all its vague musty smells and the faded, dingy wall paper and the cheap, ugly furniture. He hated his job on the Star and the cynical dishonesties of his article on Walraven. He hated Preston Troy. He hated April Bell, and he hated himself.

  He felt tired and lonely and bitter, and suddenly very sorry for himself. He couldn't do the lying stuff that Troy demanded of him, and yet he knew he lacked the fortitude to quit. It was Dr. Mondrick who had killed his pride and confidence, he thought bitterly, years ago when that gruff old scientist abruptly shattered his planned career in anthropology and refused to state a reason. Or was that idle blame-laying, and the fatal fault a part of himself? Anyhow, his life was wrecked and squandered. He could see no future—and he was afraid to sleep.

  He dawdled in the bathroom, and tilted up th
e bottle on the chiffonier to drain the last gulp of whisky. With the vague hope that it might somehow explain his dream, he took one of his old textbooks from the shelves and tried to read the chapter on lycanthropy.

  The book cataloged the queerly universal primitive beliefs that human beings could change into dangerous carnivorous animals. He skimmed the list of human wolves and bears and jaguars, human tigers and alligators and sharks, human cats and human leopards and human hyenas. The were-tigers of Malaysia, he read, were believed invulnerable in the transformed state—but the careful, objective language of the academic authority seemed very dull and dry beside the remembered reality of his dream. His eyes began to blur and ache. He laid the book aside and crawled reluctantly into bed.

  A were-tiger, it occurred to him, would make a peculiarly satisfactory transformation. Enviously, he recalled the tawny ferocity of the Clarendon tiger—the reconstructed saber-tooth he had seen the freshmen carrying down University Avenue that morning. Dozing, he dwelt wistfully upon the deadly power of that extinct predator, lingering longingly upon each remembered detail of its ferocious claws and the terrible, cruel snarl of its white saber-fangs. And all his dread of sleep was changed into burning eagerness.

  This time it was easier. The flow of change was scarcely painful. He sprang to the floor beside his bed, landing in that awkwardly narrow space with a catlike, silent ease. Curiously he turned to look back at the slumbering form between the sheets, a gaunt, shrunken thing, deathly pale and still.

  For a moment he stood wondering how that feeble, ugly husk could ever have been a dwelling for all the splendor of raw power that he felt within him now. But the odors of the room were foul to him, the rank smells of moldering books and neglected laundry and stale tobacco and spilled whisky; and the narrow walls too close for his magnificent dimensions.

  He squeezed into the shrunken front room, and padded across it to the door—his new eyes saw everything in the room with a wonderful clarity, even by the faint light that seeped under the drawn blinds from the street lamp on the corner. He fumbled with his huge paw for the key in the lock—and then remembered the art April Bell had taught him.

  Nothing anywhere was absolute, and only probabilities were real. His free mind was a moving pattern, an eternal complex of mental energy that grasped atoms and electrons by the linkage of probability to be its vehicle and its tools. That mental web could ride the wind, and slip through wood or common metal— the only barrier was lethal silver.

  He made the effort he remembered. The door grew misty. The metal of screws and lock and hinges appeared and dissolved again. He slipped through the opening and padded carefully down the hall past the slow breath-sounds of Mrs. Sadowski's other tenants.

  The street door yielded also. A late drunk weaving uncertainly up the sidewalk outside brushed against his tawny coat and peered through him vacantly, hiccoughed once, and staggered happily on. He stalked out into the evil reeks of burned rubber and dropped cigarettes on the pavement and trotted away toward the Trojan Arms.

  April Bell came down to meet him beside the tiny, ice-rimmed lake in the little park across the street. This time she wasn't wolf, but woman. He knew, however, as soon as he saw her slip out through the unopened front door of the apartment-hotel, that she had left her real body sleeping behind. She was entirely nude, and her hair fell in loose red waves to her white breasts.

  "You must be strong, Will, to take such a shape!" Admiration warmed her velvet voice and danced in her limpid greenish eyes. She came to meet him, and her tall body felt smooth and cool against his fur. She scratched playfully behind his ears, and he made a deep pleased purr.

  "I'm glad you're so powerful," she whispered. "Because I'm still not feeling well—your old friend Quain nearly killed me with that clever trap in his study. And I was just about to try to call you, Will. You see, we have another job to do tonight." He lashed his tail in sudden dim alarm. "Another?" He thought of blind Rowena Mondrick falling on the pavement as she chased him with her silver blade in that other dream. He growled softly at the woman beside him. "I don't want another job."

  "Nor did I." She tickled him below the ears. "But I just found out that Rex Chittum drove out of town an hour ago in Sam Quain's car. He was working with Quain all day at the Foundation, and now I've found out that he has arranged to broadcast tomorrow from the radio station at State College. I'm afraid he's planning to finish that scientific announcement that old Mondrick started at the airport." Her low voice was a crystal melody. "We must stop him, Will." "Not Rex!" Barbee protested sharply. "Rex is an old, good friend—" His scalp tingled to her cool, caressing fingers. "All your old, good friends are human beings, Will," she purred. "They are enemies of the Child of Night, cunning and ruthless and strong. They are grasping every resource of science to seek us out and strike us down. We must use the few feeble weapons in our hands."

  She chucked him lightly under his mighty jaw. "Surely you see that, Will?"

  He nodded his massive head, yielding to her inexorable logic. For this was life, with the white frost crisp beneath his huge pads and the woman's soft hand brushing sparks from his tawny coat. The world in which Rex Chittum once had been his friend was now no more than a dim nightmare of bitter compromise and deadly frustration. Recalling the desperate eagerness for escape that had shaped his flow into the saber-tooth's form, he growled again in glad relief.

  "Then let's go," she urged, and he let her leap astride him. She was no burden to his new and boundless strength. He carried her back down Main to Center Street, and out past the yellow-blinking signal at the corner of the campus, and on toward the mountain road.

  They passed dark sleeping houses beside the highway. Once a dog began to howl impotently behind them. The moon was down and the clear sky frosted with the autumn constellations. Even by the colorless light of the stars, however, Barbee could see everything distinctly—every rock and bush beside the road, every shining wire strung on the striding telephone poles.

  "Faster, Will!" April's smooth legs clung to his racing body. She leaned forward, her breasts against his striped coat, her loose red hair flying in the wind, calling eagerly into his flattened ear. "We must catch them on Sardis Hill."

  He stretched out his stride, rejoicing in his boundless power. He exulted in the clean chill of the air, the fresh odors of earth and life that passed his nostrils, and the warm burden of the girl. This was life. April Bell had awakened him out of a cold, walking death. Remembering that frail and ugly husk he had left sleeping in his room, he shuddered as he ran. "Faster!" urged the girl.

  The dark plain and the first foothills beyond flowed back around them like a drifting cloud. He found a limit, however, even to the saber-tooth's power. As the road wound up the dark, tree-dotted flanks of the higher foothills, his pounding heart began to ache.

  "I know this country," he gasped. "Sam Quain's father used to have a little ranch up here before he died. I used to come out here to ride and hunt with Sam. And this is the road we took—the four Muleteers, Sam called us—when we rescued the Clarendon tiger from State. We rolled boulders on the road to stop the Indians while we changed a tire on Sardis Hill."

  His mighty flanks heaved to his labored breathing.

  "It must be twenty miles ahead," he wheezed. "The grades are steep—I'm afraid we can't get there."

  "The grades are steeper for your old friend's car," the urgent girl called back. "And there's a reason we must catch him on Sardis Hill—or let him go unharmed."

  "What reason?" he breathed.

  "We're never quite so powerful as we feel in this free state," she whispered in the rushing wind. "Because our usual bodies are left behind, and our moving mind complexes can draw only upon the chance energies that they happen to grasp from the atoms of the air or other substances we possess, by the linkage of probability. All our power lies in that control of probability, and we must strike where it will serve."

  He shook his immense sleek head, impatient with the intricacies of her ex
planation. The involved paradoxes of mathematical physics had always baffled him; now he felt content with the saber-tooth's surging might, without troubling to analyze the atomic structure of power.

  "What probability?" he said.

  "I think Rex Chittum is quite safe from us," whispered the girl on his back, "so long as he is driving carefully along a straight, level road—Quain must have briefed him and armed him against us, and the probability of any harm to him is too slight for us to grasp.

  "So go faster!" Her slim cool fingers clutched his tawny fur. "We must catch him on Sardis Hill, because the probability of his death will be far greater when he starts down that double curve—I've a sense for such things, and I can tell. The man's afraid. He'll drive too fast, in spite of all Quain told him."

  The girl lay flat upon his wide, striped shoulders.

  "Faster!" she screamed on the screaming wind. "And we'll kill Rex Chittum on Sardis Hill!"

  He shuddered beneath her and lay closer to the black road as he ran. The dark hills wheeled beside them, as if carried on two turning platforms. They passed the first pines; he caught the clean fragrance, and his eyes could see every needle and cone, distinct in the starlight.

  Beyond the pines, red tail lamps winked and disappeared again.

  "There!" the white girl called. "Catch him, Barbee!"

  He stretched himself again, and the dark hills flowed. His long muscles ached and his pads were bruised and his heaving lungs breathed raw pain, but he overtook the glaring red tail lamps that fled toward Sardis Hill. He came up behind the car, grinding up the last long grade toward the saddle of the pass.

  It was the little tan convertible, he saw, that Nora had bought while Sam was away. The top was down in spite of the chill of the night—it didn't work well, he remembered. Hunched over the wheel, bundled in a black overcoat, Rex Chittum looked scared and cold.