Collected Short Fiction, page 416
VII.
BARBEE woke late. He felt groggy and ill, and the dream haunted him with a painful vividness. The stricken, waxen mask of Rex’s face stared down from the ceiling. He sat up abruptly. A clangor of agony started in his head, and a dull, leaden weariness ached in his body.
He tottered into the bathroom, holding his head. A shower, as hot and then as cold as he could stand it, washed some of the stiff pain out of him. He stirred a teaspoon of baking soda in half a glass of cold water and gulped it. If whiskey did this, he would have to cut it out.
The face in his mirror shocked him. It was bloodless and drawn, the eyes deep-sunken and red-rimmed and glittering. His pale lips twitched sardonically. This was a lunatic’s face. He had started to shave the haggard visage when the phone rang.
“Will? . . . This is Nora Quain.” Her voice was low and troubled. “Brace yourself, Will. Sam just called me from the lab—he stayed there all night. He called about Rex. Rex was driving to State College last night. The car turned over on Sardis Hill. Rex was killed.”
The phone fell out of Barbee’s trembling hands. He picked it up.
“—ghastly,” Nora was saying. “His head was cut almost off. I think you had better break the news to old Ben, Will. Rex was all he had. I think you’re his best friend. It’s an awful thing.”
“All right, Nora,” he agreed shakenly. “I’ll do it.”
She didn’t know how awful it was. Barbee wanted to scream. But he tried to shut Rex’s stiff, pallid face out of his mind. He hung up the telephone and stumbled into the kitchen and took three long gulps out of a bottle of whiskey.
He dressed awkwardly and drove down to Center Street and parked in front of Ben Chittum’s newsstand. The old man lived in two rooms at the rear. He was already opening for the day, arranging magazines in racks beside the door.
“Hi, Will,” his cracked voice called. “What’s new?”
Barbee gulped. For the moment he was speechless.
“Busy tonight, Will?” The old man dug his pipe out of a bulging pocket, “Because I’m going to cook dinner for Rex. I haven’t seen much of him since he got back. But he always liked my beef mulligan, with hot biscuits and honey, since he was a kid. I guess he’ll be here. If you would want to come—”
Barbee gulped again.
“I’ve got some bad news for you, Ben.”
The old man gasped and stared and began to tremble. The pipe dropped out of his gnarled fingers, and the stem broke on the floor.
“Rex?” he whispered.
Barbee nodded mutely.
“Bad?”
“Bad,” Barbee said. “His car went off the hairpin on Sardis Hill. He was killed.”
Ben Outturn stared blankly out of filling eyes.
“I’ve been afraid,” he whispered. “Ever since they got off the Clipper and Mondrick died. I don’t know what they’ve done—Rex wouldn’t tell me. But they’ve got a curse on them, Will. Rex ain’t the last that will die.”
He shook his head, as if angry at his tears.
“Rex always liked my beef mulligan, Will,” he said softly. “With hot biscuits and honey. Ever since he was a kid.”
Wearily he locked up the newsstand. Barbee drove him to the city morgue to await the return of the ambulance. The county sheriff arrived, and Barbee gave the old man into Parker’s kindly hands.
ANOTHER SLUG of whiskey failed to ease the throb in Barbee’s head. Tie felt weak and ill. A frenetic tension of Terror crept inexorably upon him. Desperately he tried to move deliberately, to pretend a calm sanity that he did not feel.
He had to see April Bell.
He drove to the lot behind the Trojan Arms and took the elevator to the second floor. Disregarding the “Don’t Disturb” sign outside her door, he knocked vigorously. If the chief’s still here, he thought grimly, let him crawl under the bed.
April Bell was slim and lovely in a sea-green robe, with the red hair loose about her shoulders. Her face looked pale, and she hadn’t painted her lips. Her green eyes lighted as she recognized him.
“Oh, Will—come in.”
Barbee came in and sat down wearily. Troy wasn’t in sight, but lying on the stand beside his chair was a heavy gold cigar case that he thought he had seen before. He turned back to the girl. It was easy to remember how she had looked in the dream with her red hair streaming on the wind. He thought uneasily that she seemed to limp a little as she came back to the davenport beyond the gas fireplace.
“How’ve you been, Will?” Her voice was honey and music. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”
Barbee caught his breath. He tried to keep his hands from trembling. He rose from the chair and walked across to the other end of the sofa. Her green eyes followed him with a faintly malicious interest.
“April,” he said hoarsely, “in New York you told me you were a witch.” Her white smile mocked him.
“That’s what you get for making me tight.”
Barbee’s tense hands clenched together.
“I had a dream last night.” His voice was low and forced. “I thought I was a saber-tooth. You were—well, with me. I killed Rex Chittum on Sardis Hill. This morning Rex is really dead.”
“That’s too bad.” But still her pale lips smiled, and her voice was sympathy—and mockery. “I dreamed of my grandfather the night he died.” Her green eyes were limpidly clear as mountain lakes. “Sardis Hill is dangerous.”
Barbee gulped down an uneasy breath. He wanted to sink his fingers into her white, soft shoulders and shake the evasive mockery out of her. Yet he was stiff and tense with fear of her. He shrugged and rose, as if to shake it off.
“I believe this is yours.” He found the little silver pin in his pocket. It was heavy and cold. He shivered a little as he laid it on her white, extended palm. “I want to return it.”
Her eyes were wide and dark, innocently wondering.
“Oh—that’s the pin I lost in New York. Thank you so much. It’s an heirloom. Where did you find it?”
Barbee thrust his head at her grimly.
“It was stuck in a dead kitten’s heart.”
Her long body shuddered in the green robe.
“How gruesome! Mr. Barbee, you’re so morbid today.” Her liquid eyes studied him. “You don’t look well at all. I think you’ve been drinking too much. Don’t you think that you had better see a doctor? I believe that Dr. Glenn is very successful—if you will forgive me—with dipsomania.”
“Maybe—” Barbee turned uncertainly toward the door. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Don’t go.” She rose with a feral grace—but again he thought she was concealing a limp. “Just a suggestion, from a friend.” He caught the faint scent of her as she brushed past him. It was sweet and clean, like mountain pines. It brought back his dreams. “You’re trembling. Here, have a cigar.”
As she opened the heavy gold case he contrived to read the engraved monogram. It was PT. And the cigars were the strong, black perfectos that Preston Troy used. He accepted one mechanically and stumbled blindly toward the door.
“Thanks,” he murmured.
She stood in the middle of the room, watching him with wide, challenging eyes. The green robe had opened a little to expose her white throat. Her beauty caught his breath. It hurt like a knife twisted in him.
He shut the door behind him and threw down the tapering cigar in the hall and ground it under his heel. He felt sick. Maybe Troy was old enough to be her father. But he was no longer a spring chicken himself; and twenty millions could easily make up for twenty years.
He walked slowly down the stairs, through a dull, gray mist of pain, and back to his parked car. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps he should go to Glenn. His tangle of horror and grief and pain and bewilderment and fatigue and wild longing and uncertainty and dread was passing the limits of mental endurance. He didn’t know anything else to do.
Glennhaven, he knew, ranked among the country’s best private mental hospitals. The small staff included distinguished neuropathologists and psychiatrists. Glenn’s own laboratory research, with the correlation of mental and physical types and abnormalities, had been given three columns in Time. He was a stalwart materialist. He had been a friend of the famous Houdini, and he still made a sort of hobby of exposing sham mediums. He had lectured and written articles in an effort to halt the wave of popular faith in astrologers and fortunetellers and pseudo-scientific and pseudo-religious cults of all kinds. Mind, his motto ran, was strictly and entirely a function of the body.
Who could be a better ally?
BARBEE STARTED the car and drove out Center Street and north on the new river road. Glennhaven occupied a hundred acres on the hills above the river, four miles out of Clarendon. Trees bright with autumn screened the hospital buildings and the occupational therapy shops away from the highway.
Barbee parked his car on the gravel lot behind the long, expensive-looking main building. He walked in breathlessly, tense with trepidation. His old horror of mental diseases and mental institutions turned the place into a mysterious prison. With trembling, fumbling fingers he gave his card to the efficient woman at the switchboard. He gulped in vain for his voice and whispered hoarsely that he wanted to see Dr. Glenn.
“Dr. Glenn’s very busy,” she told him. “Would Dr. Camp do? Or Dr. Mehrens?”
Barbee swallowed again, got back his voice.
“Please let Glenn know I’m here. I’ll wait until he can see me.”
She talked into a telephone that smothered her voice. The doubt on her face changed to surprise.
“Dr. Glenn will see you in ten minutes,” she said, “If you’ll just go with Nurse Graulitz, please.”
Nurse Graulitz was a muscular, horse-faced, glass-eyed blonde. She looked capable of making Joe Louis take his medicine and like it. Barbee followed her down a long, quiet corridor and into a small office. In a voice like a muffled foghorn, she asked him a series of questions, among them who was responsible for his bill and how much alcohol he drank. She wrote the answers on a cardboard blank. Just as she finished, a door opened behind her. 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, lost in a curiously strong impression that he had known Dr. Glenn long ago.
“Good morning, Mr. Barbee.” His voice was deep and quiet. “Come in, please.”
His office was expensively simple, airy and attractive, with few things to distract the attention. Two big leather chairs, a couch, clock and ash tray and a bowl of flowers on a little table, a bookcase filled with medical volumes and copies of the Psychoanalytic Review. Venetian blinds gave a view of the brilliant woods and the river.
Barbee seated himself, mute and uneasy.
Glenn dropped carelessly into the other chair and tapped a cigarette on his thumb. He looked extremely capable and unworried. It was queer, Barbee thought, that he hadn’t felt that sense of recognition when he interviewed Glenn two years ago. It expanded swiftly into liking and confidence.
“Smoke,” Glenn said. “Now, what seems to be the trouble?”
Barbee took courage and blurted: “Witchcraft!”
Glenn seemed neither surprised nor impressed. He merely waited.
“Either I’ve been bewitched, doctor,” Barbee told him desperately, “or I’m losing my mind.”
Glenn deliberately exhaled pale smoke.
“Suppose you just tell me about it.”
“It began three days ago at the New York airport,” Barbee began. “This girl came up to me while we were waiting for the Clipper—’
He told about Mondrick’s death and the strangled kitten, and the riddle of the green box, and the rather inexplicable fear that so visibly haunted the men who had been with Mondrick, and the dreams when he had run with April Bell as a wolf and as a saber-tooth.
“And today,” he finished, “Rex is dead.” His hoarse voice quivered. “Tell me, doctor—do you think I murdered him last night under a witch’s spell?” Desperately he searched Glenn’s bland face. “Or am I insane?”
Carefully Archer Glenn set his fingertips together.
“This will take time,” his calm, deep voice said slowly. “I suggest that we arrange for you to stay at Glennhaven for a few days. That will give our staff an opportunity to help you.”
Barbee rose out of his chair, tense and breathless.
“But what about it?” His voice was ragged. “Did these things happen? Or am I crazy?”
Glenn’s sleepy eyes watched him until he sat down again.
“Things that happen often aren’t so important as the interpretation that the mind—conscious or unconscious—places upon them.” The doctor’s voice sounded lazy and matter-of-fact. “You have made one point very clear. Every incident that you have mentioned, from Mondrick’s asthmatic attack to Chittum’s fatal accident, has a perfectly logical, natural explanation.”
“That’s what is driving me mad,” Barbee told him. “It all might be coincidence—but is it?” His strained voice went higher. “How did I know of Rex Chittum’s death before I was told?”
Carefully Glenn crushed out his cigarette.
“Sometimes the mind deceives us.” His voice was easy, restful. “Let’s take a calm view. You’ve been driving yourself, Mr. Barbee, and drinking a great deal. You must realize that such a life must end in collapse, of one kind or another.”
Barbee sat tense.
“So you think I’m—insane?”
Glenn’s brown, handsome face smiled reassuringly.
“Let’s not jump to hasty conclusions,” he said gravely. “But I might comment that Miss Bell evidently disturbs you—and that Freud himself describes. love as normal insanity.”
He placed the fingers of his two hands together again.
“In all of us, Mr. Barbee, there are hidden unconscious feelings of fear and guilt. Don’t you think that it is possible—at a time when your conscious restraint happens to be weakened by the combination of alcohol and fatigue and emotion—that these buried ideas have begun to find expression in vivid dreams or even waking hallucinations?”
SHAKING his head, Barbee looked uneasily out at the red and yellow and lingering green of the hills. Beside the dark river lay a field of golden corn, and the silver vanes of a windmill, beyond, were flashing in the sun. He wanted to escape from this small room and Glenn’s shrewd probing. Dimly he began to long for the freedom and the power of his dreams.
Glenn’s calm, grave voice went on:
“You had been intensely interested in Mondrick and his work. From these friends you had absorbed a pretty wide scientific knowledge of the universal primitive beliefs in magic and witchcraft and lycanthropy. No doubt those facts have given an unusual direction to your fantasy expressions.” His sleepy hazel eyes were suddenly piercing.
“Tell me—did you ever consciously desire to kill Dr. Mondrick?” Barbee squirmed uneasily in his chair.
“When I was in college—” He hesitated, gulped. “Mondrick excluded me from his advanced classes and admitted Sam, Nick and Rex. For a long time I was pretty bitter about it.”
Glenn nodded with an expression of enlightenment.
“That explains a good deal. You wished Mondrick’s death and he died. Therefore, by the simple timeless logic of the unconscious, you are guilty.”
“But there’s Rex,” Barbee protested. “My friend.”
“But also,” Glenn suggested suavely, “your enemy. He, Sam and Nick were chosen, remember, when you were rejected. You must have been jealous.”
Barbee caught his breath angrily.
“But not murderous!”
“Unconsciously, I mean,” Glenn said smoothly. “Remember, the unconscious it utterly selfish, utterly blind. Time means nothing to it. It ignores contradictions. You wished harm to Rex. He died. Therefore you are guilty. Your weretiger dream is the natural—the inevitable—expression of that elemental unconscious guilt.”
Barbee nodded reluctantly.
“Maybe.” Almost savagely he added: “But Sam and Nick are still my friends. They are fighting a desperate battle. I want to help them—not to be the tool of their enemies!”
Glenn’s sleepy eyes smiled.
“Your vehemence seems to prove what I have told you.” He looked lazily at the clock. “If you wish to stay at Glennhaven, we can discuss your case again tomorrow.”
Barbee kept his seat.
“There’s one question I’ve got to ask,” he said urgently. “April Bell told me that she was once your patient.” He searched Glenn’s bland face. “Tell me, has she any . . . any supernatural powers?”
The tall psychiatrist rose gravely.
“Professional ethics forbid me to discuss a patient,” he said. “But if a general answer will satisfy you, I have investigated thousands of cases of so-called psychic phenomena of all kinds—and I have yet to find the first case where the common laws of nature fail to hold.”
He opened the door, but still Barbee waited.
“The most convincing material I have seen is Dr. Rhine’s,” he went on. “But others have failed to duplicate his results with ESP, and his laboratory methods have been gravely questioned.”
He shook his head soberly.
“This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomenon 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 super-atom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.”
His calm brown face smiled again.
“Does that make you feel better?”
“It does, doc.” Barbee took his strong hand. Again he was aware of a flood of instinctive liking, almost of kinship. “And thanks. That’s what I wanted to hear.”
NURSE GRAULITZ was waiting for him in the outer office. Putty in her capable hands, Barbee telephoned Troy that he wanted to spend a few days at Glennhaven for his nerves.
