"Do you really want to know?" Sam Quain's feverish eyes scanned him. "The knowledge will haunt you, Barbee. It will turn the world into a menagerie of horrors. It will point unspeakable suspicions at every friend you have—if you're actually as innocent as you pretend. It may kill you."
"I want to know," Barbee said.
"It's your funeral." Quain tightened his grip on the gun. "Do you remember what Dr. Mondrick was saying Monday evening at the airport, when he was murdered?"
"So Mondrick was murdered?" Barbee murmured softly. "And the means was a little black kitten— garroted?"
Quain's unshaven face went pale and slack. His mouth hung open. His glittering, bloodshot eyes dilated, fixed on Barbee in a vacant stare of horror. The heavy gun jerked up in his hand, and he rasped hoarsely: "How did you know that?"
"I saw the kitten," Barbee said. "Several ugly things have happened that I can't understand—that's why I thought I had lost my mind." He peered uneasily at the carved wooden box beyond Quain—the combination padlock looked bright as if actually plated with silver. "I remember the last words Mondrick said: "It was a hundred thousand years ago—"
The cruel blue flicker of lightning made the dull gloom of the storm seem darker. Rain drummed on the ledge above the rock chimney, and a fresh gust of wind blew cold mist into the cave. Barbee hunched his shoulders, shivering in the old wool sweater of Sam's that Nora had given him. Thunder crashed and echoed and subsided, and Sam Quain's worn voice resumed.
"It was a time when men lived in such settings as this." His cragged head nodded into the smoke-blackened cavern. "A time when all men lived in a nightmare terror that is still reflected in the myth and superstition of every land and the secret dreams of every man. For those early ancestors of ours were hunted and haunted by another, older, semihuman race that Dr. Mondrick called Homo Lycanthropus."
Barbee started, muttering: "Werewolf-man?"
"Wolf-man," said Sam Quain. "Dr. Mondrick named them that for certain distinguishing characteristics of bone and skull and teeth—characteristics you see every day."
Barbee shuddered on the damp stone where he squatted, thinking of the long skulls and queerly sharp teeth and oddly slender bones of those articulated skeletons the giant snake and the she-wolf had found in that strange room in the Foundation tower. But he didn't speak of that—Sam Quain, he thought, would surely kill him if he did.
"A better name," Sam Quain added slowly, "might have been witch man."
Barbee felt a prickling numbness along his spine, like the feel of the wolf's hair rising. He couldn't help shivering and he was glad for the excuse of the wet, gusty wind. Water gushed in a foaming yellow fall down the rock chimney outside and began dripping from the roof of the cave. Quain paused to drag his precious box to a drier spot "That rival race wasn't ape-like," his hoarse voice resumed, dull as the continual rumble of far thunder. "The path of evolution isn't always upward, you know—the Cro-Magnons were finer specimens than you can easily find today. Our human family tree has put out some pretty funny branches—and those witch-folk must have been our strangest cousins."
Barbee peered out into the roaring rain, trying not to show the breathless desperation of his interest.
"To find the real beginning of that racial tragedy, you have to look still farther back," Quain's dead voice was rasping on. "Half a million years and more —to the first of the two major glacial ages of the Pleistocene epoch. The first ice age with its less frigid intermission lasted nearly a hundred thousand years, and it created the witch people."
"You found the evidence of that," Barbee whispered uncomfortably, "in the Ala-shan?"
"Part of it." Sam Quain nodded. "Although the Gobi plateau itself was never glaciated—its deserts turned humid and fruitful during the ice ages, and our own eolithic ancestors were busy evolving there. The witch folk sprang from another kindred type of Hominidae who were trapped by the glaciers in the higher country southwest, toward Tibet.
"Dr. Mondrick had found remains of them in a cave he excavated before the war, beyond the Nan-shan range. What we found under those burial mounds in the desert on this last trip, pieces out the story— and it makes a pretty shocking chapter."
Barbee watched the gray veils of rain.
"A neat example of challenge-and-response, as Toynbee might phrase it." Quain plowed grimly on. "Those trapped bands faced the challenge of the ice. Century by century the glaciers flowed higher and the game was less plentiful and the winters turned more cruel. They had to adapt, or die. They responded, over the slow millenia, by evolving new powers of the mind."
"Hub?" Barbee gasped to a shock of cold alarm, but he didn't say anything about free mind webs or Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle or the linkage of mind to matter through control of probability. He didn't want Sam Quain to kill him with that ready gun.
"Really?" he muttered uneasily. "What kind of powers?"
"It's hard to be precise about that." Quain frowned at him. "Dead minds don't leave fossils in the ground, you know. Dr. Mondrick thought they did, however, in language and myth and superstition. He studied such race memories, and he got more evidence from such experiments in parapsychology as Duke University researchers have begun."
Barbee couldn't help staring, jaw sagging.
"Those ice-bound nomads survived," Quain went on, "by evolving powers that enabled them to prey on their more fortunate cousins in the Gobi country. Telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy—certainly those. Dr. Mondrick was convinced they had a more sinister gift."
Barbee had trouble breathing.
"The evidence is nearly universal," Quain was saying. "Almost every primitive people is still obsessed with the fear of the loup-garou, in one guise or another—of a human-seeming being who can take the shape of the most ferocious animal of the locality to prey upon men. Those witch people, in Dr. Mondrick's opinion, learned to leave their bodies hibernating in their caves while they went out across the ice fields— as wolves or bears or tigers—to hunt human game."
Barbee shuddered uncontrollably, glad he hadn't told about his dreams.
"So, in their own diabolical way, those trapped Hominidae met their challenge and conquered the ice," Quain went on. "About the end of the Mindel glaciation—some four hundred thousand years ago as the evidence shows—they overran nearly all the world.
In a few thousand years, their dreadful powers had overcome every other species of the genus Homo."
Barbee uneasily recalled those huge maps of the vanished past he had seen at the Foundation, but he dared not ask about them.
"Homo lycanthropus didn't exterminate the conquered races, however—not except in the Americas, and that was their own undoing here. Usually they let the defeated breeds survive—for their slaves and their food. They had learned to like the taste of human blood, and they couldn't exist without it."
Shivering on his rock, Barbee remembered the fragrant hot sweetness of Rex Chittum's blood foaming against the fangs of the great saber-tooth. He couldn't help shaking his head in mute protest, hoping Sam Quain wouldn't see his clammy horror.
"For hundreds of thousands of years, all through the main interglacial period," Quain's harsh voice continued, "those witch-people were the hunters and the enemies and the cruel masters of mankind. They were the cunning priests and the evil gods. They were the merciless originals of every ogre and demon and man-eating dragon of every folk tale. It was an incredible, degrading, cannibalistic oppression. If you've ever wondered why the birth of any real human civilization took so long, there's the ugly answer.
"Their monstrous power lasted until after the cold came back in the Riss and Wurm glaciations of the second main ice age. But they had never been very numerous—no predators can be as numerous as the animals they feed on. Perhaps the ages had finally sapped their racial vigor.
"Anyhow, nearly a hundred thousand years ago, the ancestral types of Homo sapiens revolted. The dog had been domesticated—probably by hardy tribes that followed the retreating ice to
escape the rule of the witch-folk. The dog was a staunch ally."
Recalling Rowena Mondrick's dog Turk, that he and the white wolf-bitch had lured to death on the railroad bridge, Barbee couldn't stop himself from shivering again. Uneasy before Sam Quain's fevered, hollow eyes, he moved farther back from the cold driving rain.
"We found the evidences of that strange war under those burial mounds in the Ala-shan," Quain continued. "The true men seem to have learned to carry nuggets of alluvial silver as charms against attack by the witch-folk, and later wore silver jewelry. Dr. Mondrick believed there must be some scientific basis for the belief that only a silver weapon can kill a werewolf, but he could never establish that."
Silver atoms, Barbee recalled, had no linkage that the energy complex of a free mind web could grasp to control the incidence of probability; but he didn't mention that. He tried not to think of the quaint old silver rings and beads and brooches that had failed to save Rowena Mondrick's life.
"We read the history of that rebellion, and brought back objects enough to tell it." Quain's drawn head nodded at the box behind him. "Silver beads and blades and arrowheads. But silver itself wasn't enough —the witches were cunning and strong. The men of the Ala-shan invented another, more effective weapon, that we found buried under those old mounds with the bones of dead witches—no doubt to keep them dead."
Barbee wondered forebodingly if the free mind web could detach itself from a corpse and rove at night to feed upon the living; such an unpleasant fact might be the basis of many a superstitious dread—if superstitions were actually fossil fears. He wondered what that weapon was which killed witches and kept them dead; and he shivered to the memory of that seeping malodor from the wooden box that had almost killed him and the white wolf bitch in Sam Quain's study. That same lethal sweetness had clung to the disk-shaped plaster cast whose inscriptions Nick Spivak had been deciphering when the great snake crushed him. Was the original of that cast the weapon?
"Men won," Quain's tired voice was rasping on. "Not all at once, nor easily. The witch people were clever and they clung to their old dominion. That frightful war lasted on through Acheulean and Mousterian times. The Neanderthalers and the Cro-Magnons died—victims of the witches, Dr. Mondrick thought. But the progenitors of Homo sapiens survived and carried on the war. The use of the dog spread, and the knowledge of silver, and the power of that other weapon. Before the dawn of written history, the witch-folk had been almost exterminated."
Barbee moved uneasily, whispering, "Almost?"
"The witches were hard to kill," Quain said. "One of their last clans must have been the first priests and rulers of old Egypt—the evidence seems clear enough in the animal and half-animal gods the Egyptians worshipped and the demons and the evil magic they feared. I've seen excellent portraits of long-skulled Homo lycanthropus types on the walls of Egyptian tombs. But even that clan was finally conquered—or absorbed —about the time of Imhotep."
Lightning showed the grim tension on Quain's haggard face.
"For the blood of the conquerors was no longer pure." His glittering eyes peered hard at Barbee. "That was Dr. Mondrick's dreadful discovery.
"We're hybrids."
Barbee waited, too numb to breathe.
"That ugly fact is hard to understand." Quain frowned, shaking his bleak head. "The two species were always deadly enemies, yet somehow that mixture happened. The Black Mass and the Witches' Sabbath, Dr. Mondrick believed, are survivals of bestial ceremonies in which the daughters of men were forced to take part. There are other clues, perhaps, in the superstition of the incubus and all the myths about unions of gods and human women—those witch men must have been strangely passionate! Anyhow, it happened."
Against the boom of thunder echoing in that dark cave, Quain's tired voice was a slow, hoarse chant.
"Down out of the terrible past, a black river of that monstrous blood flows in the veins of Homo sapiens. We aren't all human—and that alien inheritance haunts our unconscious minds with the dark conflicts and intolerable urges that Freud discovered and tried to explain. And now that evil blood is in rebellion. Dr. Mondrick found that Homo lycanthropus is about to win that old, hideous war of the species, after all!"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rebirth of the Witch Folk
Barbee sat up straight on his damp stone seat. He thought of many things—of April Bell and the Child of Night and the laughing she-wolf licking the pink stain of Rowena Mondrick's blood from her muzzle. He shivered and opened his mouth and shut it again. Thunder snarled and bellowed outside the cave, and the lightning-torn rain curtains darkened again.
"I know it's pretty hard to take," Sam Quain's saw-toothed voice resumed. "But you can see the evidence all around you—even the Bible, you recall, wisely commands the destruction of witches."
Barbee thought of April Bell's disturbing confession of her childhood struggles with her mother's indignant husband, and tried not to let Sam Quain see his shudder.
"The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, in fact," that weary man went on, "appears to be nothing more than a symbolic condensation of the history of that tragic war of the species. The serpent was a witch man, obviously. The curse his cunning brought upon the human woman Eve and all her seed is clearly the lycanthropus inheritance we all still carry. The serpents of our time have got tired of eating dust, however; they want to rise again!
"The witch folk have left a wide trail of evidence down all the ages. There's a paleolithic painting in a cave in Ariege in southern France, dating from the actual reign of the witches, that shows the transformation of a witch man into an antlered stag—such harmless shapes must have been assumed to impress the obedient human worshippers without terrorizing them too far.
"The witch people were still plotting to recover their lost dominion of Egypt in the reign of Rameses III. Some officers and women of his harem were tried, a surviving record relates, for making wax images of the Pharaoh with magical incantations to harm him. Their genes must already have been pretty well scattered, however, and their ancient arts almost forgotten, for them to need any such childish devices to concentrate their destructive powers.
"Greek mythology, as Dr. Mondrick discovered, is actually largely a folk memory of another lycanthropus clan. The god Jupiter, carrying away the daughters of men to become the mothers of less powerful gods and heroes, is obviously a witch who hadn't lost his powers—or his passions. Proteus, the strange old man of the sea who could change his shape at will, was another master lycanthrope.
"That same terrible history is repeated in Scandinavia—as in the folk memories of every other people. The giant wolf Fenris was born of another unnatural union, to become the demon of the Norsemen. Sigmund the Volsung was another mixed-blood witch, who found it necessary to put on a wolf skin to help him become a wolf."
Barbee shuddered again, and resolutely said nothing of April Bell's fur coat.
"The witch covens of the Middle Ages, finally forced completely underground by the just wrath of the Inquisition, were nothing more than a few surviving clans of mongrel witches, trying to keep alive the arts and ceremonies of that old pagan breed. The devils they assembled to worship usually took animal form—they were transformed witches. The notorious Gilles de Rais, tried for his heresy in the fifteenth century, was probably about a quarter lycanthropus—too weak and ignorant to escape the hangman for his lurid crimes.
Joan of Arc, burned for witchcraft in the same century, was no doubt another mongrel lycanthrope, whose human side was finally dominant."
Barbee shifted uncomfortably on his hard stone, thinking of Rowena Mondrick.
"In more recent times," Sam Quain said, "the witch hunters of the Zulus still carried on the necessary work of the Inquisition. Even in Europe, that monstrous pagan cult was never fully extirpated—la vecchia religione is a pathetic survival that still has followers today among the peasants of Italy."
Emphatically, Sam Quain shook his head.
"No, Barbee, you can't
escape the evidence. Dr. Mondrick found it in every field of knowledge. The inmates of all our prisons and asylums are the victims of that dark legacy, driven by the criminal urges of their lycanthropus strain or insane with the conflict of witch and man—that's what splits a personality!
"Blood groups and cephalic indices yield more evidence—nearly every man you examine shows some physical characteristics inherited from lycanthropus. Freud's exploration of the unconscious revealed another well of dreadful evidence—that he failed to recognize.
"Then there are all these recent university experiments with parapsychology—although most of the researchers don't yet suspect the unpleasant facts they are about to uncover, and naturally the witches are trying to minimize or discredit their amazing findings.
"The evidence turns up in every land and every age. Dr. Mondrick used to keep a reminder of that on his desk—a little Roman lamp whose design showed the she-wolf caring for Romulus and Remus. He used to call that a clever bit of witch propaganda.
"There's all that—and volumes more." Sam Quain nodded heavily at the Oriental box behind him. "Not to mention the very convincing exhibits we have there."
Numbed with an increasing dread, Barbee shook himself uneasily.
"I don't quite get it," he muttered. "If Homo lycanthropus was really exterminated—"
"You know Mendel's laws of inheritance—we studied them together under Dr. Mondrick." Quain's drawn face almost smiled, and Barbee was pierced by a painful longing for the unsuspecting pleasures of those dead student days. He shook his head uncertainly, and Sam Quain explained: "The units in the germ cell which govern inheritance, you remember, are called genes—the number in man is several thousand, and each causes or helps to cause a certain characteristic to appear in the individual; one dominant gene, for instance, causes dark eyes. Each baby inherits a double set of genes from its parents—sex is really a device for reshuffling the genes, and the laws of probability insure that every person will be unique."
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