Darker Than You Think (38 page)

"No—"
Barbee choked hoarsely. "I won't—"

He
sat up on the side of the bed, trembling, clammy with sweat,
violently shaking his head.

"Come,
Barbee!" Still he couldn't snap that tugging thread of
thought—or was it merely madness? "Take the deadliest
shape you can," the she-wolf urged. "Bring claws to pull
her down, and fangs to slash her throat. Because we've got to kill
her—"

"I
won't!" he shouted hoarsely, and then dropped his voice lest
Nurse Hellar should hear. "I'm through, Miss April Bell!"
he whispered bitterly. "Through being the tool of your hellish
schemes—through murdering my friends—through with you!"
"Are you, Barb—"

Shuddering,
he surged to his feet, and that taunting whisper died. His fury and
alarm had broken that dreadful thread of illusion—and he
certainly didn't intend to harm Rowena Mondrick, in his dreams or
wide awake. He walked uneasily about the room, still gasping weakly
for his breath and damp with the sweat of his panic.

That
monstrous whispering had really ceased—he paused inside his
door, listening to be sure. Near him he heard a gurgle and groan and
sob, gurgle and groan and sob—the white-bearded man who had
upset the checker board was snoring across the corridor. That was all
he heard, until a man shouted something in a harsh brittle voice on
the floor below.

He
opened his door, listening. Other men were shouting somewhere. Women
raised excited voices. Feet pounded hallways. The door of a car
slammed hard. A starter whined. A motor roared suddenly and tires
screamed as the car raced too fast around the curving drive toward
the highway.

Rowena
Mondrick had really got away—the certainty of that struck him
with a numbing, cold impact. He knew—how, he wasn't sure.
Perhaps—as suave Dr. Glenn would doubtless explain it—his
own troubled unconscious mind had merely translated all the muffled
sounds of alarm and search into the white bitch's whispering.

Silently
he put on his slippers and the robe, pausing to stuff his thin
pocketbook and his keys into the sagging pockets. He didn't know what
was fact and what illusion. He couldn't define the danger to
Rowena—he dared not believe that whispering. But this time he
intended to take a hand in whatever happened—and not as a pawn
of the Child of Night Something checked him at the door. Some dim
unease drew his eyes back to the high bed, and he was somehow vastly
grateful to find it empty. Relieved to see no vacant human husk
behind, he shuffled cautiously out into the corridor. It was
deserted. He ran silently to the head of the rear stair and paused
there when he heard Dr. Bunzel's metallic voice twanging angrily:
"Well, Nurse?"

"Yes,
Doctor," a frightened girl whispered. "What's your excuse?"
"I have none, sir."

"How
the blazes did that patient escape?" "I don't know, sir."

"Better
find out," Bunzel rapped. "You had her under restraint, in
a locked ward, with particular orders to watch her. You knew she had
been trying to get away." Scorn oiled his voice. "Did she
vanish through the wall?"

"I
think so, sir."

Bunzel
uttered an incredulous roar.

"I
mean, sir—" the girl stammered, "I don't know how she
got out."

"What
do you know about her?"

"Poor
Mrs. Mondrick—" The girl sounded as if she were trying not
to sob. "She was terribly upset, you know—ever since her
walk yesterday morning. She had been awake all night, begging me to
let her go to this Mr. Quain."

"So
what?"

"The
dogs started howling—that must have been about midnight—and
poor Mrs. Mondrick started screaming. She wouldn't stop. Dr. Glenn
had ordered a hypo if she needed it, and I decided she did. I went to
get it ready. When I came back with it, just a minute later, she was
gone."

"Why
didn't you report this sooner?"

"I
was searching the ward, sir—she isn't there."

"Look
again," Bunzel rapped. "I'm going to organize
a
systematic
search. She's acutely disturbed—I'm afraid of what she'll do."

"I
know, sir," the girl sobbed. "She's dreadfully disturbed."

"Caution
everybody not to alarm the other patients," Bunzel added. "And
don't let any word of this get outside the building. Such affairs can
result in very unfortunate publicity. I sent Dr. Dora to check with
the police. That woman must be found."

Their
voices had receded toward the front of the building, and Barbee
didn't hear the girl's reply. Silently he slipped down the rear
stair, and peered along the lighted corridor. The frightened nurse
was following the bristling little doctor into an office room. He
waited until they were gone from sight and walked out the back door.

Grim
elation steeled him, and cold purpose hurried him. Rowena Mondrick
had really escaped, as the whispering bitch had told him—but
this time he wasn't running with her monstrous pack to pull the blind
woman down. He had triumphantly defied her evil call—or was it
just his own sick unconscious?

He
was fully awake, anyhow, and in his true human shape. He knew
Rowena's danger—from the same cunning killers who had murdered
her husband with a black kitten's fur and Rex Chittum with a wreck on
Sardis Hill and Nick Spivak with a fall from the Foundation tower.
But this time he would be no reluctant tool of April Bell and her
unknown accomplices in witchcraft—or was it only common crime?

Still
he didn't know all the rules of this strange game, or the stakes, or
the players. But he was a rebel pawn, and now he meant to play it to
the finish, for himself, on the human side.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

The
Most Frightful Shape

Breathless
in the frosty dark, shivering a little in the red cotton robe, Barbee
found the shabby old coupe on the gravel lot where he had left it,
behind the main building. He dug for the keys in his pocket, and
started the cold motor as silently as he could. A floodlight came on
suddenly as he was backing toward the drive; and a heavy man in
wrinkled whites darted from the building, shouting at him.

He
didn't stop. He let the car lunge forward to the racing motor,
swerved narrowly past the gesturing attendant to reach the drive, and
came skidding recklessly to the dark highway. Anxiously he peered
into the little rearview mirror; it showed no pursuit, and he slowed
as much as he dared, turning back toward Clarendon along the new
river road and watching breathlessly for the blind fugitive.

He
was afraid to drive too slowly, for he had to find her first. Before
the attendants came to drag her back to scream her life out in the
disturbed ward at Glennhaven. Or before she died, as her husband had,
slain by a hand from mad nightmare.

He
held the car at forty, desperately scanning the dark roadsides. He
could see the glow of distant headlamps along the main highway to the
west, but he met no traffic on the river road. Once the eyes of some
animal winked yellow in the dark and vanished as they turned. Nothing
else moved, and his hope ebbed when he saw the concrete barriers of
Deer Creek bridge.

For
that narrow bridge—where the truck had almost killed him as he
drove back from his first vain attempt to see Rowena—was a full
two miles from Glennhaven.

Surely
she couldn't have come so far, blundering un-guided. Perhaps she was
blinder than the white bitch had whispered—

He
saw her then, near the bridge. A gaunt lonely figure, angular and
tall, stalking on with frenzied haste. The black she wore made her
oddly difficult to see—he tramped hard on his brakes, shaken
with the thought that he had almost run her down. But he hadn't
struck her.

She
was safe. He breathed again, in immense relief, slowing the car
behind her. The monstrous danger hovering over her was still
suspended. He was in time to help her—and defeat one scheme of
the hidden Child of Night. The little car was rolling to a halt a
dozen yards behind her when he saw the headlamps in the rearview
mirror.

They
had swung into the road from the grounds of Glennhaven, but he
thought he still had time enough. He would pick the blind woman up,
he decided, and carry her straight to Sam Quain at the Foundation.
That cool purpose steadied his sweaty hands on the wheel, and
rekindled hope began to banish his shadowy terrors.

Such
an open gesture, he felt, would surely erase Rowena's insane mistrust
and allay Sam's unreasonable suspicion. It might do more. Rowena had
once shared Mondrick's researches; perhaps she really had something
to tell Sam Quain. Perhaps she could yet turn a light upon Barbee's
own dark dilemmas—and even really identify the Child of Night.

Ahead
of him, the thin woman must have heard the squeal of his brakes, for
she fled frantically down the white cone of the headlamps. She
stumbled on the edge of the concrete abutment, fell to hands and
knees, and staggered up again as he opened the car door and leaned
out to call: "Rowena! Wait—I want to help you." She
seemed to start and crouch, turning back to listen. "Just let me
help you into the car," he called, "and I'll
take
you on to see Sam Quain."

She
came back toward him, still taut and doubtful.

"Thank
you, sir." Her voice was hoarse and breathless. "But—who
are you?"

"I'll
do anything to help you, Rowena," he told her softly. "I'm
Will Barbee—"

She
must have recognized his voice, because she screamed before she heard
his name. Her wide mouth was black as the lenses over her eyes, and
her cry was a sobbing rasp of insane fear. She stumbled back from
him, blundered against the concrete railing, groped over it to get
her bearings, and ran wildly across the bridge.

Barbee
sat stunned for a moment, but the headlamps behind were growing in
the little mirror. His time was short before that pursuit should
overtake them, and he knew the blind woman could never reach Sam
Quain without his aid. He shifted into low gear and stepped on the
accelerator—and cold consternation shook him.

He
saw the white she-wolf.

He
knew she shouldn't be here, because this certainly wasn't any dream.
He was entirely awake; and his gaunt, hairy hands shivering on the
wheel were clearly human. But the sleek white bitch seemed as real as
the lean black shape that fled, and much easier to see.

She
sprang gracefully out of the shadows beyond the abutment and sat on
her haunches in the middle of the pavement. The headlamps gleamed on
her snowy fur, and flamed luridly green in her eyes. The light must
have been painful to her, but she laughed at him, long tongue
lolling.

He
slammed his foot against the brake pedal, but he had no time to stop
the car. No time even to wonder whether she were something real or
only a laughing phantom of delirium tremens. She was too close, and
he swerved automatically to avoid her.

The
left fender struck the concrete barrier. The wheel drove back hard
against his chest, and his head must have gone over it against the
windshield. The scream of tires and crash of metal and jangle of
glass all dissolved into quiet darkness.