Collected Short Fiction, page 413
Barbee exhaled a long, uneasy breath and moved uncertainly. A tired darkness was in her eyes. Slowly she drew her cold hand out of his fingers.
“You think so, too.”
He caught his breath and gripped the edges of the little table. “My God!” he whispered explosively. “It would be no wonder, after what you’ve lived through!”
He felt a great surge of pity, a burning anger against the old misunderstanding that had forced her to accept such delusions. He wanted to protect her, to help lead her back toward complete sanity. His throat was choked. He coughed to hide his feelings. Too much show of pity would only offend her.
In a quiet, level voice she said: “But I know I’m not insane.”
So, Barbee understood, did all lunatics. He needed time to think. He signaled the waiter and ordered two more dacquaris and looked at his watch.
“What time is it?” said April. “I’m hungry as a wolf!”
“It is getting late,” Barbee said. “But there’s one more thing I’ve got to ask about.” He hesitated, and the wary, dangerous alertness came into her face again. In a heavy and reluctant voice, he said: “You did kill the black kitten on the dock?”
“I did.”
His hands gripped the table until the knuckles showed white.
“And you did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick?”
Her bright head nodded slightly.
“And he died.”
Her calm matter-of-fact tone made Barbee cold. Her watchful, green eyes were flatly opaque. Her face was a white wax mask. He couldn’t guess what she thought or what she felt. The bridge of confidence was gone, and it left a chasm of peril between them.
“Please, April—”
His voice quivered with sympathy for her, in the defiant loneliness he knew she felt. But his feeling didn’t penetrate her hostile citadel. Barbee dropped to a note as cool and grave as hers had been, asking: “Why did you want to kill him?”
Across that tiny table her low and toneless voice was as distant as if it had come from a far-off fortress tower.
“Because I was afraid.”
Barbee’s eyes widened.
“Afraid of what—if you didn’t even know him? Of course, I had an old grudge against him—for shutting me out of his classes. But he was harmless. Just an archaeologist digging up old bones.”
“I know what he was doing.” The voice of April Bell was hard and faint and remote. “You see, I wanted to know about myself. I’ve read about everything that has been published on such cases as mine.”
Her eyes were hard and flat as polished malachite.
“Mondrick was an authority on witchcraft. On the history of the witch persecutions, and a great deal more besides. He had studied the beliefs of every primitive people. He wrote a monograph analyzing the myths of Greece as racial memories of conflict and interbreeding with a superior alien race. He dug up graves and measured skulls and studied old inscriptions. He studied differences in the people of today—tested their blood and measured their skulls and analyzed their dreams. He was an authority on ESP before Rhine ever thought of it.”
“That’s all true. So what?” asked Barbee.
“Mondrick got very cautious in what he wrote,” her far-off voice went on. “Then, a dozen years ago he quit publishing anything at all. But he had already written too much. I knew what he was doing.”
APRIL BELL paused at the waiter’s approach, automatically sipped at her drink. This made three, Barbee thought—no, it was four. She held them well enough. When the waiter was gone, she resumed in the same flat voice:
“Mondrick believed in witches.”
Barbee started. “Nonsense! He was a scientist.”
“And still he believed in witches,” she said. “That’s what frightened me. He had spent all his life trying to put witchcraft on a scientific basis. And I knew—from the way everything happened, from Mondrick’s first remarks—that he had done it.
“Most people don’t believe.” Her voice was dry, with a whisper of mockery in it now. “That is our protection, for we are the enemies of people. You can see why that has to be. Because we are different, because we have powers that are greater than men have—and still not great enough!”
With that a spark of savage and desperate hostility leaped in her green eyes. In a moment it was gone. But Barbee was feeling that same chill again, and deliberately he drained his cocktail.
“Mondrick was trying to expose us—so that men could destroy us. You can see that, Will. Perhaps he had invented a scientific test to identify witches. Years ago, I remember, he wrote a scientific paper on the correlation of blood groups and introversion. ‘Introvert’ is one of the harmless scientific words he used when he was writing about witches.”
The hard, blank look was gone from her eyes. Perhaps the alcohol had affected her, after all, to dissolve the barriers of normal reserve. Now her eyes were almost luminously green, urgently appealing.
“Don’t you see, Will, I was fighting for my life? Mondrick was like my father—like all men must be. Men are not to blame. But, am I?” Her white throat pulsed as she swallowed. “It’s just the way things are. Always, everywhere, men must follow that old law: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
Her smooth, bare shoulders wearily shrugged.
“That’s it, Will.” Her dark eyes were mutely questioning. “You’ve got to see I had to do it. I made a spell—and it worked.”
Barbee sat back abruptly—as if to break some fascination that her words had cast upon him.
“You were alone?” he demanded.
The pleading went out of her eyes; again they were hard and flat and watchful, like the eyes of a hunted animal. Her face went white around the scarlet lips. Her voice once more was coldly toneless, distant.
“I was alone,” she said.
Barbee leaned forward, grimly intent.
“Mondrick spoke of a ‘secret enemy.’ Did he mean—witches?”
“I believe he did,” she said.
“Do you know any others?”
He thought that her answer was a fractional second delayed. Her eyes were opaque green screens. Her tense, waxlike face showed nothing.
“No.” Suddenly her whole body trembled, so that he knew she was fighting back tears. In the same low, flat voice she said: “Must you persecute me?”
“I’m sorry,” Barbee said. “But now, when you have told me so much, you must tell me everything. How else can I judge?” His hands closed hard on the edges of the table. “Do you know what Mondrick meant when he spoke of the Black Messiah?”
He half glimpsed, for a tiny instant, a queer little smile, too swiftly come and gone to be sure.
“No,” she said faintly. “Is that all?”
“One more question, please.” Barbee’s gray eyes strove to pierce those screens of malachite. “Do you know what proteins Dr. Mondrick was allergic to?”
Her wary hostility gave way to a genuine bewilderment.
“Allergic?” Her voice was puzzled. “That’s got something to do with indigestion, hasn’t it? Why, no, I don’t. Really, Will, I never saw him before today.”
“Thank God!” breathed Will Barbee.
He stood up, filled his lungs again, smiled at her.
“Forgive me for grilling you, April,” he begged. “But I simply had to ask those things.”
She remained seated, and her white face did not reflect his smile.
“You may go if you wish,” she said.
“Go?” he protested. “Lady, you have promised me the evening. We’ve a dinner waiting. Dances. The Fair, if you like—this is almost the last night. You don’t want me to go?”
A little eager light came into her eyes.
“You mean,” she whispered softly, “after all I’ve told you—”
Barbee grinned, and suddenly laughed. His tension had somehow evaporated completely. “If you’re a witch, I’m completely under your spells.”
She rose with a smile that grew slowly radiant.
“Thank you, Will,” she smiled. “But, please—just for tonight—won’t you help me forget that I’m—what I am?”
Barbee grinned happily.
“I’ll try, angel!”
IV.
THEY STAYED at the Fair until closing time, dancing their way from nation to nation. April Bell danced gloriously, with the tireless grace of some wild thing. She seemed to forget that she might be anything except an extremely gorgeous redhead. And Barbee did—the most of the time. But the flash of her teeth and the green mystery of her eyes shocked him more than once with disquieting recollection. It was late when they got out of a taxi at the door of her hotel.
They lingered on the sidewalk.
“You know, April”—Barbee watched the taxi pull away and looked back into her white, eager face—“I’ve a queer feeling about you.” His voice was slow and wondering. “As if you made me remember things I never knew—as if you woke something in me that has always been sleeping.”
Her eyes sparkled with a pleasant malice, and her velvet voice hummed the refrain of a song to which they had danced: “Maybe It’s Love.”
Maybe it was. Yet he was still afraid—not of her, perhaps, but of the unknown power she stirred in himself. He wanted desperately to suggest something that would make it unnecessary for them to part. He thought that she was waiting, thought eagerness was betrayed in the parting of her scarlet lips. But that alarm made him strained and awkward. Against his will, he said good night.
She was flying back to Clarendon. He was leaving by rail, too early to see her again. She would be glad to have him call her in Clarendon. She gave him the number of her apartment, in the Trojan Arms.
Barbee’s employer owned the Trojan Arms, and he knew that the cheapest apartment in the building leased for a hundred a month. For a cub reporter, he reflected rather grimly, April Bell was doing very nicely.
He promised to call, and reluctantly let her go.
A few hours later he was on the Streamliner, rolling back toward the Middle West. He still had the little silver pin that he had found in the black kitten’s heart—no doubt it belonged to April Bell, but he had felt its return too delicate a matter to approach. That endless afternoon, with the sharp little throb in his head keeping time to the rhythm of the wheels, he turned the pin for a long time in his palm, staring—
Wondering—
The tiny malachite eye was the same color as the eyes of April Bell—when she was in her most wary and alarming mood. The fine detail of the silver wolf’s limbs and snarling head had been cut with a careful skill, and it was dark with age. A very odd trinket, it was cut with a wiry, lean-lined type of workmanship he had never before seen.
REMEMBERING the white-wolf coat, Barbee wondered what the symbol meant to April Bell. Suddenly he had the disconcerting impression that the malachite eye had winked at him, maliciously. He was almost asleep. He was hypnotizing himself with the damned pin. He resisted a sudden violent impulse to throw it out of the car.
That was insanity. Of course, he was afraid of April Bell. He had always been afraid of women. Even the most approachable female made him a little uneasy. The more they mattered, the more afraid he was. His hunch couldn’t mean anything. The pin got on his nerves just because it stood for April Bell. He would have to begin cutting down the whiskey—that was all the trouble, really.
If he threw the pin away, it would be an admission that he believed April Bell to be—actually—just what she had said. He couldn’t accept that. He put the pin firmly back into his vest pocket.
His uneasy thoughts of April Bell were not so easy to put away. He was haunted with the faint but disturbing possibility that she really was—he dreaded the word—a witch. That, somehow, she had been born with a unique and dangerous-mental power to twist the laws of probability. Unlikely. But was it utterly impossible?
He bought a magazine. But his mind refused to leave those disquieting channels. Why had Mondrick and his companions been so obviously terrified? They had taken elaborate precautions against disaster, clearing the dock and surrounding themselves with policemen. But disaster had struck in spite of them. That seemed to indicate that the peril was something greater even than those four frightened men had believed.
Something much more alarming than one exotic, green-eyed redhead.
His unwilling speculations ran on. If April Bell were indeed a witch, there might very reasonably be others. The others might be more powerful and less charming to go dancing with. Perhaps they were organized, waiting for the Black Messiah to lead them in a Saturnalian rebellion.
Barbee’s aching eyes had closed, and he pictured the Black Messiah. A tall, lean, commanding figure, standing amid shattered rocks, terrible in a long black robe. Barbee peered under the black hood to see if he could recognize the face—and a white skull grinned at him.
He woke with a start. He must be getting too old to drink so much and sleep so little. He rose and walked up and down the aisle, hoping that would wake him and stop the throb in his head. It didn’t.
He returned to his seat. His eyes ached, and he gave up trying to read. He was bored with the bridge game two seats ahead, and the two Iowa women discussing family history across the aisle. He was desperately sleepy—
And afraid to sleep.
He couldn’t understand that fear. It was a slow, creeping dread, as if he knew that the dim apprehensions that haunted him now would possess him in his sleep. But it wasn’t entirely—fear. It was mingled with a frantic yearning, for some obscure and triumphant escape.
Neither could he quite understand the way he felt about April Bell. He thought he ought to feel a shocked horror of her. After all, she was either a witch or a lunatic. In one way or another she had almost certainly caused Mondrick’s death. But the thing he shuddered at was the feeling she awakened in himself. She roused something frightful, chained, yet dangerous.
Desperately he tried to put her out of his mind.
At last it was time to eat. He lingered in the dining car, and then listened for an hour to a bald, seedy-looking advocate of Union Now. Even after he was in his berth he tried to read again, until his aching eyes blurred. But the first night he had played poker till dawn, and most of the last he had spent with April Bell. Sleep pressed upon him with an urgency that became resistless.
APRIL BELL was calling to him.
Her voice came clearly across all the miles from Clarendon. It was a ringing, golden chime. It throbbed in his brain. It shimmered out of the dark in waves of pure yellow light. Then Barbee thought he could see her in some dark, far-off place.
Only she wasn’t a woman.
Her urgent velvet voice was human, still. Her limpid, green eyes were the same. But she was a white she-wolf, sleek and wary and powerful. Her clear woman voice rang to him:
“Come, Will Barbee, for I need you.”
He was aware of the heavy green curtains about his berth, and the steel and glass of the Pullman, and the swift, muffled click of the wheels. He knew that Clarendon was still hundreds of miles ahead.
“I’m coming,” he answered, “as fast as the train will bring me.”
“But there’s a faster way,” the white wolf called. “I can show it to you. You have my silver pin? Then take it in your hand.”
In a numb, groping, sleep-drugged way, Barbee thought he fumbled for his vest in the net above him and found the tiny silver pin. Dimly he wondered how she knew he had it. For he hadn’t dared to speak of it.
“Now, Will,” she called across the dark, misty void between them. “You can change, as I have changed. You can run as the wolf runs, trail as the wolf trails, kill as the wolf kills. You are a wolf, Will. Just turn loose. Let your body flow—”
Barbee’s numb fingers clutched the pin. He made a groping effort to obey. And there was a curious, painful flux of his body—as if he had twisted it into positions never assumed, had called on muscles never used. Pain smothered him in darkness.
“Keep trying, Will!” Her urgent voice stabbed through the darkness. “If you fail, you will die. But you can do it. Just let go. You are a wolf. Just let your body change—”
And suddenly he was free.
Those painful bonds had snapped. He slipped down through the green curtains and ran along the aisle. The sleepy porter, hurrying with a hot-water bottle, didn’t seem to see him. He slipped through the blinds and leaped down to the weed-grown embankment.
Free—
No longer was he imprisoned in the slow, clumsy, insensitive body he had always known. Surely four nimble feet were better than two. A smothering cloak had been lifted from his senses.
Free, and swift, and strong!
He trotted ahead of the smelly, pounding train, out of the reek of wet steam and cinders and hot metal. The earth was damp under his springy pads. The night refreshed him with the clean chill of autumn. A breath of wind swept away the tarry odor of the creosoted ties and brought a symphony of farmyard and woodland odors.
He liked the aroma of the wet weeds, and even the dew that splashed his shaggy gray fur. Far ahead of the laboring train, he paused to listen to the tiny rustlings of field mice, and caught a cricket with a flash of his paw.
Elation lifted him, a clean, vibrant joy that he had never known. He lifted his muzzle toward the setting half-moon and uttered a quavering, long-drawn howl of pure delight. Somewhere beyond a dark row of trees a dog began to bark in a frightened and breathless way. He sniffed and caught the scent of that ancient enemy. His hackles lifted. Dogs would learn not to bark at him.
But the wolf bitch was calling:
“Hurry, Will—I need you.”
He caught her scent, and it guided him. It was clean and fragrant as pine. The speed of his running was dreamlike. The furious barking of the angered dog was remote behind him, and lost.
CLARENDON had been hundreds of miles ahead. But the dark world flowed as he ran. In a very little time Barbee was trotting up the river road, past Trojan Hills—as Preston Troy had named his broad, rolling estate south of Clarendon and above the river valley where Troy’s mills stood. The lights, were out in the huge brick house, but a lantern was bobbing about the stables, where perhaps the grooms were tending a sick horse. He heard a soft, uneasy whicker, and paused to sniff the strong, pleasant pungence of horses.
