She moved the little running wolf upon her palm, and Barbee thought its tiny malachite eye winked at him again, as subtly malicious as he imagined her own. Eagerly she breathed: "Where did you ever find it?"
Barbee thrust his face at her, watching grimly.
"In your lost bag," he rapped flatly. "Stuck in a dead kitten's heart."
Her long body shuddered in the green robe, as if with mock horror.
"How gruesome!" Her low voice was warmly melodious. "You seem so morbid today, Barbee." Her limpid eyes studied him. "Really, you don't look well at all. I'm afraid you're drinking more than is good for you."
He nodded bitterly, ready to admit his defeat in the game they had played—if the girl indeed had played a game. He searched her sweetly sympathetic face for any sign of secret triumph, and attempted one last feeble sally, asking: "Where is your Aunt Agatha today?"
"Gone." Her fine shoulders tossed carelessly beneath the flowing hair. "She says the winter here in Clarendon hurts her sinuses, and she went back to California. I put her on the plane last night."
Barbee made a wry little bow, yielding the game— still uncertain whether Aunt Agatha had ever existed outside April Bell's imagination. He couldn't help swaying a little as he stood, and the girl came to him sympathetically.
"Really, Barbee," she urged, "don't you think you ought to see a doctor? I know Dr. Glenn, and he has been very successful with alc—with people who drink too much."
"Go on," Barbee rasped bitterly. "Call me an alcoholic—that's what I am." He turned uncertainly toward the door. "Maybe you're right." He nodded painfully. "That's the simple answer to everything. Maybe I ought to see Glenn."
"But don't leave yet." She moved ahead of him, with a serpentine grace, to stand in front of the door—and again he thought she limped very slightly on the same ankle she had injured in his dream. "I hope you aren't offended," she added softly. "That was only a suggestion from a friend."
He paused unsteadily, facing her, and caught her faint perfume—cool and clean as the scent of mountain pines in the dream. A hot yearning seized him for the ruthless power of the saber-tooth; and he was shaken with a sudden futile anger at all the frustrating complexities of this gray half-life of the waking world. He had failed to solve the riddle of April Bell. Even her grave solicitude seemed to conceal a secret mockery, and he wanted to escape again.
"Come back to the kitchenette," she was urging. "Let me make you a cup of coffee—and scramble us some eggs, if you feel like breakfast. Please, Barbee— coffee ought to help."
He shook his head abruptly—if she had won that hidden game, concealing all her guilty knowledge of the white wolf bitch that had lured him to attack blind Rowena Mondrick and hiding her sinister share in the murder of Rex Chittum, then he didn't want her gloating over his tortured bewilderment now.
"No," he said. "I'm going."
She must have seen his last resentful glance at the magazine and the gold cigar case on the stand beside the chair he thought was Troy's.
"Anyhow, have a cigar," she begged him sweetly. "I keep them for my friends."
She moved with feral ease to bring the heavy case; but he saw that disquieting suggestion of a limp again and blurted impulsively: "How'd you hurt your ankle?"
"Just tripped on the stair as I came back from driving Aunt Agatha to the airport." She shrugged lightly, offering the cigars. "Nothing alarming."
But it was alarming, and Barbee's lean hand began to shudder so violently over the cigar case that she lifted one of the strong black perfectos and clasped it in his fingers. He muttered his thanks, and stumbled blindly toward the door...
For all his disturbance, however, he had contrived to read the engraved monogram on the gold case. It was PT. The black cigar, thick and tapered, was the same imported brand Troy had offered him from the humidor on his desk. He opened the door clumsily and tried to thaw the hurt stiffness from his face and turned to face the girl.
She stood watching him, breathless. Perhaps the dark light in her eyes was only pity, but he imagined a hidden glint of sardonic glee. The green robe had opened a little, exposing her white throat, and her revealed beauty hurt like a knife driven in him. Her pale lips gave him an anxious little smile, and she called sharply: "Wait, Barbee! Please—"
He didn't wait. He couldn't endure the pity he saw or the mockery he fancied. This dull gray world of doubt and defeat and pain was too much for him, and he yearned again for the tiger's ruthless power.
He shut the door hard behind him and threw down the fat cigar and ground it under his heel. He felt sick, but he pulled himself up straight and marched defiantly back toward the stairs. He shouldn't feel hurt, he told himself. What if Troy were old enough to be her father? Twenty million could make up very easily for twenty years. And Troy, besides, must have seen her first Barbee walked slowly down the stairs through a gray mist of pain. Not caring whether the clerk saw him now, he staggered aimlessly out of the lobby. Perhaps she was right, he was muttering to himself— perhaps he should go to Dr. Glenn.
Because he didn't know how to get back into joyous freedom of his tiger dream—and that escape was only possible at night, anyhow, since daylight damaged the structure of the free mind web. He couldn't endure this waking half-life any longer, with its intolerable tangle of horror and grief and pain and bewilderment and fatigue and wild longing and tormenting uncertainty and staggering panic.
Yes, he decided, he must go to Glenn.
He didn't like mental institutions; but Glennhaven was classed with the nation's best, and young Dr. Archer Glenn, like his father, was recognized as a distinguished pioneer in the new science of psychiatry. Time had given him three columns, Barbee recalled, for his original research in the correlation of mental and physical abnormalities and for his own brilliant additions, while he was serving with the Navy during the war, to the revolutionary new psychiatric technique of narcosynthesis.
Like his father, Barbee knew, Archer Glenn was a stalwart materialist The elder Glenn had been a friend of the famous Houdini, and until his death his favorite hobby had been investigating and exposing sham mediums and astrologers and fortune-tellers of all kinds. The younger man still continued the campaign; Barbee had covered lectures of his for the Star, in which he attacked every pseudoreligious cult founded on a pseudoscientific explanation of the supernatural. Mind, Glenn's motto ran, was strictly and entirely a function of the body.
Who could be a better ally?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Private Hell
Barbee walked nine blocks, back to the parking lot where he had left his car. The exercise cleared the alcoholic fog rising in his brain, and made his queasy stomach feel easier. He drove north again on the new river road, over the narrow Deer Creek bridge where he had nearly crashed against a truck on the day before, and on to Glennhaven.
Standing secluded from the road behind gay walls of red-and-yellow autumn color, the buildings loomed sternly forbidding. Barbee shivered when he saw them, and tried to put down that old asylum dread. These grim fortresses, he told himself stoutly, were citadels of sanity against the unknown terrors of the mind.
He parked his car on the gravel lot behind the main building and started around to the front entrance. Glancing through an opening in the tall hedge that walled the lawn beyond, he saw a patient walking stiffly between two white-skirted nurses. His breath caught The patient was Rowena Mondrick.
Muffled in black against the chill that lingered in the sunny air, she wore black gloves and a black scarf knotted over her white hair and a long black coat. Her flat black lenses seemed to look straight at him as she turned between the nurses—and he thought he saw her start and pause.
In a moment she went on again, walking straight and proud before the women at her elbows, somehow dreadfully alone. A burning pity swept Barbee, and he knew he must talk to her. Her sick mind, he thought might still hold the answers to all the monstrous questions that stalked his own shadowed thoughts.
O
n abrupt impulse, he turned back toward her. He wanted terribly to help her, as well as himself— and it might be, he told himself hopefully, that she was caught in the same dreadful web of coincidence and contradiction and ambiguity that was smothering him. The truth, he felt, might free them both.
The blind woman and her two alert attendants were walking away from him now, toward the bright clumps of trees along the river. He ran after them through the hedge and across the dew-dampened grass, his heart hammering painfully to his sudden frantic eagerness.
"—my dog?" He caught Rowena's voice, sharp with anxiety. "Won't you even let me call poor Turk?"
The tall nurse seized her angular arm.
"You may call if you wish, Mrs. Mondrick," the stout nurse told her patiently. "But it's no use, really. We told you the dog is dead, and you may as well forget—"
"I don't believe it!" Her voice turned thinly shrill. "I can't believe it, and I need Turk here. Please call Miss Ulford for me, and have her put advertisements in all the papers to offer a good reward."
"That won't help," the stout nurse said gently. "Because a fisherman found your dog's body floating in the river yesterday morning, down below the railroad bridge. He brought the silver-mounted collar to the police. We told you last night, don't you remember?"
"I remember," the blind woman whispered brokenly. "I had just forgotten—because I need poor Turk so very much—to warn me and guard me when they come to kill me in the dark."
"You needn't worry, Mrs. Mondrick," the tall nurse assured her cheerily. "They won't come here."
"But they will!" the blind woman cried breathlessly. "You don't know—you won't see them when they come. I warned my dear husband, long ago, of all the shocking danger. Yet I couldn't quite believe all I knew—not until they killed him—but now I know they'll come. No walls can keep them out—no barrier but silver—and you haven't left me much of that."
"You have your beads and bracelets," the stout nurse soothed her. "And you're quite safe here."
"They tried to kill me once," she whispered desperately. "Poor Turk saved me, but now he's dead and I know they'll come again. They want to stop me from warning Sam Quain—and I must do that."
She stopped abruptly, clutching with thin imploring fingers at the tall nurse's arm. Barbee checked himself behind her. He hadn't intended to eavesdrop on her, but now the shock of this accidental revelation had frozen him, speechless. For her lost dog must have died in his first dream.
"Please, Nurse," she begged frantically. "Won't you telephone Mr. Sam Quain at the Research Foundation and ask him to come see me here?"
"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Mondrick," the tall attendant told her gently. "But you know why we can't do that. Dr. Glenn says it's bad for you to see anybody until you get better. If you will just relax, and try to help us get you well again, you can soon see anyone—"
"There's no time!" she broke in sharply. "I'm afraid they'll come back tonight to kill me, and I must talk to Sam." She turned desperately to the stout nurse. "Won't you take me to the Foundation? Now!"
"You know the rules," the nurse reproved her.
"You know we can't—"
"Sam will pay you!" she gasped desperately. "And he'll be glad to explain to the doctors—because my warning will save his life. And so much more—" Her thin voice caught, and she started sobbing. "Call a cab—borrow a car—steal one!"
"We'd like to help you, Mrs. Mondrick," the stout girl said indulgently. "We'll send Mr. Quain any message you like."
"No!" Rowena whispered. "A message won't do."
Barbee gulped and started forward again, about to speak. The two nurses still had their backs to him, but Rowena had turned so that he could see her staring blind lenses and her stricken face. Pity for her caught his throat; tears blurred his sight. He wanted urgently to help her.
"Why not, Mrs. Mondrick?" the tall nurse was asking. "And what could harm Mr. Quain?"
"A man he trusts," the blind woman sobbed.
Those words halted Barbee, like a glimpse of something dreaded leering from the dark. He couldn't have spoken, because terror clutched his throat. He retreated, silent on the damp lawn, listening unwillingly.
"A man he thinks a friend," Rowena gasped.
The short nurse looked at her watch and nodded at the other.
"We've walked long enough, Mrs. Mondrick," the tall girl said pleasantly. "It's time for us to go back inside. You're tired now, and you ought to take a nap. If you still want to talk to Mr. Quain this afternoon, I think the doctor will let you call him on the telephone."
"No!" she sobbed. "That won't do."
"Why not?" the nurse said. "Surely he has a telephone."
"And so have all our enemies," the blind woman whispered hoarsely. "All those monsters, pretending to be men! They listen when I talk, and intercept my letters. Turk was trained to sniff them out, but now Turk's dead. And dear Marck's dead. There's nobody left for me to trust, except Sam Quain."
"You can trust us," the tall girl said pleasantly. "But we must go in now."
"Very well," Rowena said calmly. "I'll come—"
She started to turn, as if in quiet obedience. As the two nurses relaxed, however, she pushed at them desperately, twisted savagely free, and darted away.
"Now, Mrs. Mondrick! You mustn't do that!"
Both the startled nurses ran after her, but she moved with a frantic agility. For a moment she gained, and Barbee thought she might reach the trees above the river. He had almost forgotten her handicap, but she tripped on the nozzle of a lawn sprinkler before she had run a dozen yards and fell hard on her face.
The two nurses picked her up carefully. Holding her lean arms with a gentle firmness, they turned with her back toward the building. Barbee wanted to run when he knew they would see him. For Rowena's madness matched his own peculiar dreams too well, and he was shaken with a sudden terror of the cold frantic sanity he thought he glimpsed beyond her wild disturbance.
"Hello, Mister." The tall nurse looked at him keenly, keeping a firm grip on Rowena's angular elbow. "What can we do for you?"
"I just left my car." Barbee nodded at the parking space behind him. "I'm looking for Dr. Glenn."
"Back through the hedge, please, sir." The tall girl smiled watchfully. "There's a walk around the building to the front door. You should see the girl at the desk about your appointment."
Barbee scarcely heard. He was watching Rowena Mondrick. She had stiffened at the first sound of his voice, and now she stood silent between the two nurses as if in frozen fright. The black glasses must have been lost when she fell, for her empty eyesockets were uncovered and hideous, turning her white stricken face to a dreadful mask.
"It's Will Barbee." He didn't want to talk to her now. He had overheard enough to know that anything she told him would only drag him deeper into that dark web of monstrous doubt. He felt cold and ill with terror of her—but he couldn't stop his own hoarsely rasping voice.
"Tell me, Rowena—what's your warning for Sam Quain?"
She stood facing him, tall and gaunt in her black, shrinking back from him almost as if those ghastly scars were eyes that looked upon intolerable horror. She shuddered so violently that the two nurses gripped her scrawny arms. Her pale mouth opened as if to scream, but she made no sound.
"Why did that black leopard attack you in Nigeria?" That question seemed to gasp itself out, with no volition of his own. "And what kind of leopard was it?"
Her white lips set.
"What was Dr. Mondrick really looking for—there and in the Ala-shan?" He knew she wouldn't answer, but he couldn't stop the breathless questions. "What did he and Sam bring back in that wooden box? Who would want to murder them?"
She cowered back from him, shaking her dreadful head.
"Stop it, Mister!" the stout nurse reproved him sharply. "Don't annoy our guest. If you really want to see Dr. Glenn go on around to the front."
The two nurses turned hastily away, with the shuddering woman between them.
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"Who are those secret enemies?" Barbee couldn't stop himself from running after her, or choke his frantic croaking. "Who are those killers in the dark? Who would harm Sam Quain?"
She twisted in the strong arms that held her.
"Don't you know, Will Barbee?" Her dull, shuddering voice seemed as hideous to him as her scarred face. "Don't you know yourself?"
Terror seized Barbee and took his voice.
"Better stop it, Mister," the tall nurse warned. "If you have any business here, go on to the front. If you haven't, get off the grounds."
The two marched hurriedly away, with the blind woman stumbling limply between them. Barbee turned shakenly back toward the opening in the hedge, trying not to wonder what Rowena meant. He clung to the feeble hope that Dr. Glenn could help him.
In the reverent hush of the cool, austere reception room, that slim dark priestess of old Egypt turned gracefully from her switchboard with a dreamy little smile of welcome to her temple. Barbee was shivering still; he couldn't forget Rowena's dreadful face, nor shake off his old vague terror of mental diseases and mental institutions.
"Good morning, Mr. Barbee," the priestess cooed. "May I assist you today?"
Barbee gulped in vain for his voice, and whispered that he wanted to see Dr. Glenn.
"He's still very busy," she purred serenely. "If you've come about Mrs. Mondrick, I believe she's responding splendidly. I'm afraid you can't see her, though. Dr. Glenn doesn't want her to have visitors, quite yet."
"I just saw her," Barbee rasped grimly. "I don't know how splendidly she's responding, but I still want to see Dr. Glenn." He swallowed hard. "It's— about—myself."
Her misty smile was a dreamy caress.
"Wouldn't Dr. Bunzel do? He's the staff diagnostician, you know. Or Dr. Dilthey? The head neuropathologist. Either one, I'm sure—"
Barbee shook his head.
"Tell Glenn I'm here," he interrupted hoarsely. "Just tell him I helped a white wolf bitch kill Mrs. Mondrick's dog. I think he'll find time for me."
The exotic, long-skulled girl turned gracefully. Her swift ivory fingers plugged in a line at the switchboard, and she breathed into the transmitter at her throat. Her dark, limpid eyes came back to Barbee, luminous and unsurprised.
Darker Than You Think Page 17