"Dr. Glenn will see you right away, Mr. Barbee." Her voice was a liquid minor melody. "If you will just wait a moment, and go with Nurse Graulitz, please."
Nurse Graulitz was a muscular, horse-faced, glass-eyed blond. Her nod was a cold challenge, as if she intended to administer bitter medicine and make him say he liked it. Barbee followed her down a long, quiet corridor into a small office.
In a muffled foghorn of a voice, she asked him a series of questions, among them who was responsible for his bill and what diseases he admitted having had and how much alcohol he drank. She wrote his answers on a cardboard blank, and made him sign a form he didn't try to read. Just as he finished a door opened behind him. She rose and boomed softly at Barbee: "Dr. Glenn will see you now."
The famous psychiatrist was a tall, handsome man, with wavy black hair and sleepy hazel eyes. He held out a tanned, well-kept hand, smiling cordially. Barbee stared at him, caught with a curious, fleeting impression of forgotten close acquaintance. He had met Glenn, of course, when he covered those lectures for the Star. It must be only that, he told himself; yet he couldn't quite shake off the feeling of something older and more intimate.
"Good morning, Mr. Barbee." His voice was deep and oddly restful. "Come along, please."
His office was expensively simple, airy and attractive, with few things to distract the attention. Two big leather chairs, a couch with a clean white towel over the pillow, clock and ash tray and flowers in a bowl on a little table, a tall bookcase filled with formidable medical volumes and copies of the Psychoanalytic Review. Venetian blinds gave a view of the brilliant woods and the river and a glimpse of the highway where it turned.
Barbee seated himself, mute and uneasy.
Glenn dropped carelessly into the other chair and tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail. He looked reassuringly competent and unworried. It was queer, Barbee thought, that he hadn't felt that sense of recognition when he interviewed Glenn at the time of those lectures. The feeling expanded swiftly into a confident liking.
"Smoke?" Glenn said. "What seems to be the trouble?"
Barbee took courage from his calm, and blurted, "Witchcraft!"
Glenn seemed neither surprised nor impressed. He merely waited.
"Either I've been bewitched," Barbee told him desperately, "or else I'm losing my mind."
Glenn exhaled pale smoke.
"Suppose you just tell me about it."
"It all started Monday night, out at the airport," Barbee began speaking awkwardly at first and then with growing ease. "This red-haired girl came up to me while I was waiting for the Mondrick expedition to land in their chartered plane—"
He told about Mondrick's death, and the strangled kitten, and the rather inexplicable fear of the surviving men who guarded that box from Asia. He described the dream in which he had run with April Bell as a wolf and the dog Turk had died—watching Glenn's dark, smooth face, he could see only a calmly sympathetic professional interest.
"Last night, Doctor, I dreamed again," he continued urgently. "I thought I was a saber-toothed tiger—it was all queerly real. This girl was with me again, telling me what to do. We followed Rex Chittum's car to the mountains, and I killed him on Sardis Hill."
The horror of that strange nightmare and its shocking aftermath had diminished a little in the telling; he thought he had caught something of Glenn's dispassionate calm. Yet now, as he finished, his hoarse voice shuddered again.
"Rex is dead—exactly as I killed him in the dream." Desperately he searched Glenn's blandly handsome face. "Tell me, Doctor," he begged huskily, "how can any dream fit reality so well? Do you think I really murdered Rex Chittum last night, under a witch's spell? Or do you think I'm already insane?"
Carefully Archer Glenn fitted his fingertips together.
"This is going to take time, Mr. Barbee." His dark head nodded gravely. "Yes, a good bit of time. I suggest that we arrange for you to stay here at Glennhaven for at least the next few days. That will give our staff the best opportunity to help you."
Barbee rose shuddering out of his chair.
"But what about it?" he croaked frenziedly. "Did I really do those things I thought I dreamed? Or am I crazy?"
Glenn sat still, watching him with calm sleepy eyes, until he collapsed weakly in his own chair again.
"Things that happen often aren't so important as the interpretation that the mind—consciously or unconsciously—places upon them." Glenn's deep voice sounded lazily matter-of-fact. "One point about your narrative, however, seems to me quite significant. Every incident you have mentioned, from Dr. Mondrick's fatal asthmatic attack to Chittum's car accident— even the death of Mrs. Mondrick's dog—has a perfectly natural explanation."
"That's what is driving me mad." Barbee peered at him, trying desperately to discover some reaction behind his deliberate unconcern. "It all might be coincidence—but is it?" Barbee's strained voice went higher. "How did I know of Rex Chittum's death before I was told?"
Glenn unlaced his long fingers and tapped a new cigarette carefully against his thumbnail.
"Sometimes, Mr. Barbee, the mind deceives us. Especially, under unconscious stress, we are likely to distort the details of sequence or causation. Such faulty thinking isn't necessarily insanity. Freud wrote a whole book, you know, on the psychopathology of everyday life."
Lazily, he lit the cigarette with a flat gold lighter.
"Let's take a calm look at your case, Mr. Barbee— without attempting any offhand diagnosis. You've been driving yourself pretty hard, I gather, at a job you aren't well adjusted to. You admit you've been drinking more than you can assimilate. You must have realized that such a life must end in collapse, of one kind or another."
Barbee stiffened.
"So you think I'm—insane?"
Glenn shook his handsome head judicially.
"I'm not saying that—and I do feel that you're putting an undue emotional weight, Mr. Barbee, on the matter of your sanity. Because the mind isn't a machine, and mental conditions aren't simply black or white. A certain degree of mental abnormality is entirely normal, in fact—and life would be pretty flat and dull without it."
Barbee squirmed unhappily.
"So let's try not to jump at any hasty conclusions until we've had time for a complete physical and psychiatric examination." Glenn shook his head lazily, carefully crushing out his unsmoked cigarette. "I might comment, however, that Miss Bell evidently disturbs you—and that Freud himself describes love as normal insanity."
Barbee squinted at him uneasily.
"Just what do you mean by that?"
He slowly laced his manicured fingers together again.
"In all of us, Mr. Barbee," his casual voice explained, "there are hidden unconscious feelings of fear and guilt. They arise in infancy and color our whole lives. They demand expression, and find it in ways we seldom suspect. Even the sanest and most completely normal individual has those secret motives working in him.
"Don't you think it may be possible in your case— at a time when your conscious restraints happen to be weakened by the unfortunate combination of extreme fatigue and violent emotion and too much alcohol— that those buried feelings in yourself have begun to find expression in vivid dreams or even in waking hallucinations?"
Barbee shook his head, suddenly uncomfortable. He shifted in the chair, to look out at the reds and yellows of the hills beyond the river. Beside the dark water a field of corn lay golden; and the silver vanes of a windmill beyond, were flashing in the sun.
A dull resentment smoldered in him against Glenn's shrewdly dispassionate probing. He hated this small room, and Glenn's neat little theories of the mind. He didn't want all his own private shames and fears laid out on Glenn's compact diagrams. Fiercely he began to yearn again for the free escape and the splendid power of his dreams.
Glenn's deep voice droned on.
"Perhaps you blame yourself in some way, unconsciously of course, for Mrs. Mondrick's present grave mental illness—"
"I don't think so!" he interrupted sharply. "How could I?"
"The very violence of your protest gives added weight to my random guess." Glenn's lazy smile seemed to reflect a brief, kind amusement. "It will take time, as I told you, to trace out the mechanism of your major complexes. The general pattern, however, is already apparent."
"Huh?" Barbee swallowed. "How do you mean?"
"Your college studies in anthropology, don't you see, must have given you a wide knowledge of primitive beliefs in magic and witchcraft and lycanthropy. Such a background is enough to account for the unusual direction of your fantasy expressions."
"Maybe," Barbee muttered, unconvinced. "But how do you think I could blame myself for Mrs. Mondrick's illness?"
Glenn's sleepy hazel eyes were suddenly piercing.
"Tell me—did you ever consciously desire to kill Dr. Mondrick?"
"What?" Barbee sat indignantly straight. "Of course not!"
"Think back," Glenn insisted softly. "Did you?"
"No!" Barbee rapped angrily. "Why should I?"
"Did he ever injure you?"
Barbee twisted uneasily in his chair.
"Years ago, when I was in college—" He hesitated, peering longingly at the bright world beyond the window. "Old Mondrick turned against me, at the end of my senior year," he admitted grudgingly. "I never knew why. But he dropped me, when he was forming the Research Foundation, and took Sam Quain and Rex Chittum and Nick Spivak. For a long time I was pretty bitter about that."
Glenn nodded, with a pleased expression.
"That fills out the picture. You must have wished Dr. Mondrick's death—unconsciously, remember—to avenge that old slight. You wished to kill him, and he eventually died. Therefore, by the simple timeless logic of the unconscious, you are guilty of his murder."
"I don't see that," Barbee muttered stiffly. "It all happened a dozen years ago. Anyhow, it can't have much to do with your statement that I'm to blame for Mrs. Mondrick's illness."
"The unconscious ignores time," Glenn protested gently. "And you misquote me. I didn't say that you'r'e responsible for Mrs. Mondrick's tragic illness—I merely ventured a suggestion that perhaps you blame yourself. What you tell me bears out that suggestion."
Barbee blinked angrily. "How?"
"Her unfortunate breakdown," Glenn droned calmly, "is an obvious consequence of her husband's unexpected death. If you feel unconsciously responsible for that, it follows that you must also bear the burden of her own mental disintegration."
"No!" Barbee stood up, shuddering. "I won't endure that—"
The dark handsome man nodded pleasantly.
"Exactly," Glenn told him softly. "You can't endure it consciously. That's why the guilt complex is driven down into your unconscious—where, in your memories of the courses in anthropology that Dr. Mondrick himself taught you, it finds very fitting guises in which to haunt you."
Barbee stood shivering, gulping mutely.
"Forgetting is no escape." Glenn's sleepy hazel eyes seemed implacable. "The mind demands a penalty for every adjustment we fail to make. There's a kind of natural justice in the mechanisms of the unconscious— or sometimes a cruel parody of justice—blind and inevitable."
"What justice?" Barbee rasped harshly. "I don't see—"
"That's the point exactly." Glenn nodded genially. "You don't see, because you can't bear to look—but that doesn't stop the operation of your unconscious purposes. You blame yourself, apparently, for Mrs. Mondrick's insanity. Your buried sense of guilt demands a punishment to fit the crime. It seems to me that you're unconsciously arranging all these dreams and hallucinations just to seek atonement for causing her breakdown—at the ultimate cost of your own sanity."
Glenn smiled, as if to a lazy satisfaction with his own argument.
"Don't you see a kind of blind justice there?"
"No, I can't follow that." Barbee shook his head uneasily. "Even if I could, it wouldn't explain everything. There's still the saber-tooth dream—and Rex Chittum's death. My thoughts about Mrs. Mondrick couldn't have much to do with that, and Rex had always been my friend."
"But also your enemy," Glenn suggested suavely. "He and Quain and Spivak were chosen for the Foundation, you told me, when you were rejected. That was a cruel blow, remember. Surely you must have been jealous?"
Barbee caught his breath angrily.
"But not murderous!"
"Not consciously," Glenn droned smugly. "But the unconscious has no morals. It is utterly selfish, utterly blind. Time means nothing, and contradictions are ignored. You had wished harm to your friend Chittum, and he died. Again, therefore, you must bear the consequences of your guilty wish."
"Very convincing!" Barbee snapped. "Except you forget one point—I dreamed the dream before I knew Rex had been killed."
"I know you think so," Glenn agreed. "But the mind under stress can play odd tricks with cause and sequence. Perhaps you really invented the dream after you learned of his death, and inverted the sequence to change effect to cause. Or perhaps you expected him to die."
"How could I?"
"You knew he would be driving down Sardis Hill," Glenn said smoothly. "You knew he would be very tired, and in a hurry." The sleepy eyes narrowed slightly. "Tell me this—did you know anything about the brakes on that car?"
Barbee's jaw sagged slightly.
"Nora had told me they needed fixing."
"Don't you see the picture then?" Glenn nodded cheerfully. "The unconscious is alert to every suggestion, and it seizes every possible device for its own expression. You knew when you went to bed that Chittum had every probability of an accident on Sardis Hill."
"Probability." Barbee whispered that word, shivering. "Perhaps you're right."
Glenn's sleepy hazel eyes dwelt upon him.
"I'm not a religious man, Mr. Barbee—I reject the supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell."
The dark man smiled.
"For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It's my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem. Your werewolf and weretiger are your own private demons, Mr. Barbee. I hope they appear a little less dreadful to you now."
Barbee shook his head uncertainly.
"I don't know—those dreams were very real." Almost savagely he added: "You're pretty clever, Doctor, but there's more going on than just hallucination. Sam Quain and Nick Spivak are still guarding something in that wooden box. They're still fighting a desperate battle against—I don't know what. They're my friends, Doctor." He gulped hard. "I want to help them—not to be the tool of their enemies."
Glenn nodded with an air of satisfaction.
"Your vehemence tends to establish my suggestions —though you mustn't give too much weight to my offhand comments at this exploratory session." He shifted lazily, to look at the clock. "That's all the time we have just now. If you wish to stay at Glennhaven, we can meet again tomorrow. I think you had better rest a day or two, before we schedule your routine clinical examinations."
He nodded toward the door, but Barbee kept his seat.
"I'll stay, Doctor." His voice quivered urgently. "But there's one more question I've got to ask right now." He searched Glenn's bland brown face. "April Bell told me that she once consulted you. Has she any— any supernatural powers?"
The tall psychiatrist rose gravely.
"Professional ethics forbid me to discuss any patient," he said. "If a general answer will make you feel any easier, however, I can tell you that I helped my father investigate thousands of cases of so-called psychic phenomena of all kinds—and I have yet to see the first case in which the ordinary laws of nature fail to apply."
He turned firmly to open the door, but still Barbee waited.
"The only real scien
tific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University," he added. "Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I'm afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods."
He shook his head, with a sober emphasis.
"This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking."
His calm brown face smiled hopefully.
"Does that make you feel any better?"
"It does, Doctor." Barbee took his strong hand and felt again that sense of puzzled recognition, as if he had found some strong forgotten bond between them. Glenn, he thought, was going to be a powerful, loyal ally. "Thanks," he whispered fervidly. "That's exactly what I wanted to hear!"
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As a Serpent Strikes—
Nurse Graulitz was waiting for him in Dr. Glenn's outer office. Surrendering wearily to her competent control, Barbee telephoned Troy's office and told the publisher he wanted to spend a few days at Glennhaven for a check up.
"Sure, Barbee!" Troy's rasping voice sounded warmly sympathetic. "You've been killing yourself— and I know Chittum was your friend. Grady'll get the Star out. I believe in Archer Glenn. If there's any difficulty about financing your treatment, have him call my office—and don't worry about your job."
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