Collected Short Fiction, page 415
He went back down to his desk in the noisy city room and began to finger through the pile of clippings. But it was hard to keep his mind on the problem of whitewashing Walraven’s somewhat shady past. The task became unsavory. Wistfully he remembered the splendid freedom and power he had enjoyed in the dream.
To hell with Walraven!
BARBEE KNEW that he had to get to the bottom of this mystery. If he were building haunted castles out of whiskey and coincidence, he wanted to know it. If he were not—well, insanity might be exciting, after all.
He stuffed the Walraven papers into his desk and got his four-year-old coupe out of the garage around the corner and drove out Center Street toward the university. In spite of Troy, he had to know what was in the green box. He supposed that Sam, Nick and Rex had taken it to the new lab—and realized that once more he was accepting his dream as fact.
He parked in front of Sam Quain’s little white bungalow on College Street. It looked exactly as it had in the nightmare—even to the same rusted tin bucket and spade in Pat’s sand pile. He knocked, and Nora opened the door.
“Why, Will—come in.”
He thought she looked pale and heavy-eyed, as if she hadn’t slept well.
“I just came by to find where Sam is,” he told her. “I wanted to get another interview on Mondrick’s Asian discoveries, and what they brought back in that mysterious box.”
She shook her blond head wearily.
“Better forget it, Will. Sam won’t tell me, even. And they guard that box as if it were worth millions. Sam had it here last night—and woke up with a nightmare about it. He thought somebody was trying to take it.”
“Where is it now?”
“This morning they carried it down to the new anthropology lab. Sam has locked himself up there, with Nick and Rex and a few students they trust. I guess they’re working on something important—but it worries me. Sam just phoned that die won’t be home tonight.” She sighed. “I hope Rex tells—”
She caught herself.
“Tells what?” Barbee demanded.
She twisted uncertainly at the corner of her apron.
“Sam didn’t want me to say anything—” The freckles stood out from the paleness of her round, worried face. “But I can trust you, Will.” Her blue eyes seemed to plead. “Oh, I’m so upset I don’t know what to do.” Barbee patted her shoulder.
“Don’t tell me unless you wish.”
“It’s nothing much.” Her tired voice was grateful. “Just that Sam took our car this morning. He’s lending it to Rex to drive to State College tonight. He’s going to make a surprise broadcast tomorrow on their radio. You won’t say anything, Will?”
“Of course not,” he promised. “Well, Pat—how are you?”
Little Patricia came slowly out of the nursery. Her eyes were red and ringed with grime, and her pink, square-jawed face seemed stubbornly set against further tears.
“I’m all right, thank you, Mr. Will,” she said in a voice that struggled not to break. “But poor Jiminy Cricket . . . he’s all dead.”
Barbee felt a frigid breath upon his spine. In an effort to cover his terrified start, he turned and coughed.
In a husky, shaken voice, he said: “That’s mighty bad. What happened?”
Pat’s wet blue eyes were solemn.
“Two big dogs came in the night,” she said soberly. “One was white and one was gray. They wanted to take daddy’s green box. They were great big dogs, but Jiminy wasn’t afraid. Jiminy ran out to stop them. The big gray dog killed him.”
Barbee looked uneasily at Nora.
“The little dog was lying on the sand pile this morning,” she said. “I think a car struck him—some of the college boys are so reckless at night. He must have crawled back into the yard before he died.”
Pat’s grimy, pink jaw was stubborn.
“No, mother . . . no,” she protested. “The big dogs did it. I saw them, like in a dream. Jiminy didn’t want the bad dogs to get us. Didn’t daddy believe me?”
“Maybe he did,” Nora said uneasily. She turned a troubled face to Barbee. “Sam turned white as a sheet when Pat told about her dream—and you look pale and nervous yourself, Will.”
“I haven’t been getting much sleep,” Barbee said. “Now I’m going to look for Sam.” He put his hand against Pat’s small back. “Too bad about Jiminy.”
He thought she started slightly from his touch.
“I don’t think Sam will tell you anything,” Nora said. “If he does, Will, won’t you let me know?” She went with him to the door, dropped her; voice out of Pat’s earshot. “Please, Will—I’m frightened!”
The campus was gay with autumn, and leaves were falling. Barbee remembered the scents that had been so vivid in his dream. He sniffed the cool air, but his dull nostrils caught no more than a faint, familiar acrid whiff from the chemistry lab.
On the drive he met six freshmen, guarded by an equal number of sophomores, marching toward the stadium with the cage that held the Clarendon tiger. This mascot was the tawny, life-size model of a snarling sabertooth that had been an exhibit in the university museum until it was first abducted by State College raiders.
The sight brought wistful memories to Barbee. For the Muleteers had been the four heroes who crossed the mountains in Rex’s antique, stripped-down Cadillac on the eve of a homecoming game and snatched the tiger out of the very midst of a State College rally. But that was many years ago.
He parked in front of Anthropology Hall. There were classrooms in the ground-floor wings. The white, ten-story concrete tower housed the museum, the Mondrick Library of Science, the departmental offices, and offices and laboratory of the Clarendon Foundation.
Three husky pipe-smoking sophomores were idling in the hall. It seemed to Barbee that they eyed him rather sharply. The elevator was manned by a vigorous senior in a football sweater. He stopped Barbee.
“Sorry, library and museum not open today.”
“But I want to see Mr. Quain.”
The youth seemed to brace himself, as if to hold that line.
“Mr. Quain is busy.”
“Then let me see Mr. Spivak or Mr. Outturn.”
“Sorry—no visitors allowed.”
“Then take up a note,” Barbee said. He scrawled on a card:
SAM: It will save us both trouble if you will talk to me now.
The quarterback took up the note and returned after ten minutes with Sam Quain. Barbee was appalled by Sam’s appearance. No wonder Nora was worried. His face was haggard and unshaven, and his red, hollow eyes looked desperate.
“Come with me, Will.” Barbee followed him across the hall into an empty classroom. “Listen.” His voice was tired and strained. “You had better lay off,” he said urgently. “For your own sake, Will!”
“There’s some things I’ve got to know,” Barbee protested. “What was Mondrick trying to say when he died? What have you got in that green box?” His voice quivered. “And who is the Black Messiah?”
Flatly, Sam Quain said: “You’ve asked me that before.”
“I still want to know,” Barbee said. “You’re afraid of something, Sam. Why else have you turned this building into a fortress? What is it? Sam, this thing’s driving me crazy!”
“We’re old friends, Will.” he said at last. “Won’t you leave us alone with this—while we’re-Still friends? Can’t you forget that you’re a prying newshawk?”
“But you don’t understand,” Barbee protested. “I do know a little. I can feel that you’re putting up a terrific fight against—‘something! I want to get in it on your side.”
Sam Quain’s voice was flat and cold:
“Long ago Mondrick decided not to trust you. Will. Maybe you’re all right.
Maybe you aren’t. We simply can’t afford to take chances.” His stubborn face was bleak and dangerous. “If you don’t stop, Will—we’ll have to stop you. I’m sorry. But that’s just the way it is.”
He shook his unkempt bronze head. “Now I’ve got to go.”
“Wait, Sam,” Barbee began. “Think of Nora—”
BUT Quain strode back across the hall and the elevator doors shut in Barbee’s face. Baffled. Barbee wandered aimlessly out of the gray tower that had become a strange citadel.
He looked up at the high windows. His very sanity, he felt, was locked up in that green box.
He drove back to town—there was nothing else to do. He called at Walraven’s law office. Walraven gave him a drink and spent an hour explaining that his connection with the highway-department scandal was entirely innocent.
Barbee went back to his desk. But he couldn’t put the green box out of his mind. Or Sam Quain’s threat. Or the fact that Jiminy Cricket was dead—for the repetition of coincidence began to hint of something else.
His telephone rang.
“Barbee? . . . Hello, Will. This is Gilkins, at the Trojan Arms. . . . Yes, Miss Bell has just come in. She looked a little pale, but. she said she’s all right. . . . No, she left word that she’s out if anyone calls. . . . Don’t let on about the tip.”
Barbee hung up and tried to get back to the article. But his notes on Walraven’s thrift and honor and philanthropy became a meaningless jumble, and a green-eyed wolf bitch grinned at him from the blank sheet in the machine. After an hour he decided that he had to see April Bell.
He was going to return the silver pin.
It didn’t surprise him to see Preston Troy’s big blue sedan on the parking lot behind the Trojan Arms. He knew that one of Troy’s more gorgeous ex-secretaries had an apartment on the top floor.
April had told him the number of her second-floor apartment. He walked past the closed elevator doors and up the stairs. On the second floor he saw Troy in the hall ahead of him. The short man opened April Bell’s door with his own key. Barbee caught the haunting ring of her welcoming voice, and the door closed again.
He stumbled slowly back down the stairs. He felt sick, as if from a blow in the stomach. It was true that he had no claim upon April Bell. She had mentioned a friend, and he had known that she couldn’t live here on her newspaper earnings.
But still he felt sick.
VI.
BARBEE WENT BACK to his desk. He didn’t want to think about April Bell, or the green box, or his werewolf dream. He sought escape in his old anodynes: work and alcohol.
He finished the Walraven article mechanically. He made his routine calls at police headquarters and Sheriff Parker’s office. He covered a lecture on the Pan-American economic front and a stop-Walraven meeting of the taxpayers’ association. At last, when the paper was put to bed, he stopped at the Elite Bar with some of the boys for a few more drinks.
He was afraid to go home.
It was three, and he was reeling with whiskey and fatigue, when he climbed the creaking front steps to the old house on Broad Street. Suddenly he hated it, with its musty smells and faded paper and outmoded furniture. He hated himself. He was tired and lonely and bitter, and he could see no better future.
He was afraid to go to sleep. He dawdled in the bathroom and tried to look at a book in the library. But cold and fatigue drove him to bed. Drowsiness crept upon him. And suddenly all his dread was turned to eagerness.
The Clarendon tiger flashed into his mind. He dwelt upon the sleek, tawny power of the huge saber-tooth, upon its ferocious claws and the terrible, cruel white curves of its fangs. Eagerly he shrugged off all his worries and frustrations. He made the remembered effort—this time it was easier.
His body flowed, but not to wolf form this time. He was a twelve-foot saber-toothed tiger. He sprang to the floor, landing with a catlike ease. Curiously he looked back at the bed. His body lay there, pale, drawn, scarcely breathing. It was queer that such an ungainly husk should be a dwelling for the magnificent power that he felt.
The air of the house was choking with smells of moldering books and neglected laundry and stale tobacco and spilled whiskey. He padded swiftly to the back door—the great beast’s eyes could see clearly, even by the faint rays that came through the windows from the street light on the corner.
He fumbled with his paw for the key in the lock—and then remembered the art he had learned. A circle of the door grew misty and vanished. He walked through it and out into the foul odors of burned rubber and oil upon the street. He trotted toward the Trojan Arms.
April Bell came down to meet him on the parking lot behind the building. This time she was not wolf, but woman. But he knew, when she came through the locked door, that her body, like his own, was left behind. She was nude, and her hair fell in loose red waves to her white breasts.
“You are very strong, Will, to take a tiger’s form.”
Admiration was warm in her velvet voice, dancing in her limpid green eyes. She came to him, and the cool, smooth pillar of her body was electric against his fur. She scratched playfully behind his ears, and he made a deep, pleased pur.
“I’m still weak,” she told him. “The thing in Quain’s green box almost killed me. I’m glad you’re strong, Will. Because we have a job to do tonight.”
He lashed his tail in dim alarm.
“What job?”
“Rex Chittum drove out of town an hour ago in Sam Quain’s roadster,” she told him. “He’s planning to make a surprise broadcast on the State College radio about the Black Messiah. We’re going to stop him.”
“No,” protested Barbee. “Rex is my friend—”
His scalp tingled to her caressing fingers.
“They are the enemies of the Black Messiah,” she said. “We must fight them to save our own lives.”
He yielded to that inexorable logic. For this was life. The world in which Rex Chittum had been his friend was no more than a vague nightmare of bitterness and despair and endless frustration.
He let the tall girl leap astride of him. She was no burden to his new and boundless strength. He carried her back past the orange-flashing blinker at Center and Main, and west past the campus toward the mountain road.
They passed dark houses. Once a frightened dog began to howl impotently behind them. The moon had set, and the black sky was frosty with the autumn constellations. Even in the colorless light of the stars, however, Barbee could see distinctly.
“Hurry!” April’s smooth, tapering legs clung to his powerful body. She bent forward eagerly, her loose red hair flying in the wind. “We must catch him on Sardis Hill.”
Running, Barbee rejoiced in his ruthless strength. He exulted in the chill of the air, and the odors that passed his nostrils, and the warm pressure of the girl upon him. This was life. She had awakened him out of a walking death.
“Faster!” she urged.
The dark plain flowed back like a drifting cloud. But there were limits even to the saber-tooth’s strength. As the road wound up into the dark flanks of the foothills, his pounding heart began to ache.
Barbee knew this country. Sam’s father had owned a ranch in these same hills. He had ridden over it with Sam on vacations. It was over this same road that the four Muleteers, sophomores, had fled with the rescued Clarendon tiger. They had rolled boulders into the road to stop the pursuit while they changed a tire on Sardis Hill.
“There!” cried April. “Can you overtake him, Will?”
FAR AHEAD, a car was grinding up Sardis Hill. Its gears snarled in the darkness. Its tail lamps were two glaring red eyes. Barbee spurred himself to a new and desperate effort. The dark hills flowed again, and he came up behind the car.
It was the little tan roadster that Nora had bought while Sam was gone. Rex Chittum turned to look back down the road, as if apprehensive of pursuit. His dark, curly head was bare. For all his strain and fatigue, and the black stubble on his chin, he still looked handsome as a picture star.
“I can’t hurt him,” Barbee growled. “We were in school together. I used to lend him money when he couldn’t pay for books he had bought. Think of old Ben at the newsstand. It would break his heart.”
Clear and sweet and pitiless, her limpid voice said:
“Run, Will. We do what we must because we are what we are.” Her electric fingers caressed his heaving flank. “To save our own lives and defend the Black Messiah! Wait, now—just behind. Wait till he’s on the hairpin. Now!”
She crouched forward on him. Her fingers clutched his fur. Her bare heels dug into his flanks, and their pressure was sweet. The logic of bounding life conquered the dreary convention of death.
“Spring!”
Barbee cast off his weakness. He called up a desperate strength and leaped. His claws scratched paint, cut the fabric of the lowered top. He slipped, caught himself on the spare tire, swayed forward again.
Rex looked back. His drawn, haggard face slowly twisted and congealed into a stiff mask of fear, as if he had been made up for a role in a drama of horror.
“Now!” screamed April Bell. “His throat!”
Swiftly, mercifully, the white sabers flashed. Perhaps that was needless. Perhaps shock itself would have been enough. Dead hands let go the wheel. The roadster straightened, went off the sharp curve at the hairpin’s end.
Barbee leaped again. He twisted in the air, landed with catlike skill on the slope below the curve. But April lost her balance and came down clinging to him with both hands. She made a sob of pain and grasped at her ankle, and then whispered: “Watch!”
The hurtling roadster struck sixty feet below them, upside down. It bounced, rolled, broke a sapling, stopped at last against a boulder. It was a mass of twisted metal, and the bloody thing half under it lay still.
“No,” murmured April Bell. “I think they won’t notice the slashes.” She looked toward the misty cone of the zodiacal light, already high in the east, and clutched again at her ankle. Her voice was faintly alarmed. “Darling, I’m hurt—and the night is nearly gone. Take me home.”
Weary and a little sick, Barbee carried her back down Sardis Hill. She was heavy as a leaden statue. He lurched and swayed, shivering to a strange chill. All his mad elation was gone. He couldn’t forget the horror on Rex’s face, or the grief that old Ben would feel.
