Collected Short Fiction, page 417
“Sure, Will.” The publisher’s rasping voice was sympathetic. “You’ve been killing yourself—and I know Chittum was your friend. Glenn’s just the man to fix you up. We’ll get the Star out. And don’t worry about your job.”
Yielding again to Miss Graulitz, Barbee decided that he didn’t need to drive back to Clarendon for his toothbrush and pajamas, or even to attend Rex Outturn’s funeral. Obediently he followed her to the big red-tiled dormitory.
She showed him the library, the music room, the games room, the dining room. She introduced him to several persons—leaving him a little confused as to which were patients and which staff members.
She left him at last, at his own room on the second floor, with the injunction to ring for Nurse Etting if he wanted anything. He sat down wearily on the side of the bed. The room was small but comfortable, with bath adjoining. He had been given no key for the door. He noticed that the windows were of reinforced glass, steel-framed, adjusted so that nothing much larger than a snake could escape through them.
So this was madness!
He sighed and wearily mopped his sticky palms and his forehead. He didn’t feel insane—but, then, did any lunatic ever? He was merely confused and exhausted from a struggle with problems that were too much for him. It was good to rest for a while.
Sometimes he had wondered about insanity. He had supposed that it must be strange and thrilling, with a conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat.
He began to want a drink. Perhaps he could have smuggled in a bottle. At last he decided to put Nurse Etting to the test. He pushed the button that hung on a cord at the head of his bed.
Nurse Etting was rangy and tanned. She had a comic-strip buck-toothed face. Her rolling walk suggested that her legs were bowed. She reminded him of a rodeo queen he had once interviewed.
Yes, she told him in a flat, nasal voice, he could have one drink before dinner and not more than two afterward. She brought him a generous jigger of very good Bourbon and a glass of soda.
“Thanks,” Barbee said defiantly. “Here’s to the snakes!”
He tossed off the whiskey. Unimpressed, Nurse Etting rolled out with the empty glass. Barbee lay on the bed for a while, thinking about what Glenn had told him. Maybe it was all hallucination—
But he couldn’t forget the peculiar vividness of his sensations as he padded through the chill, fragrant damp of the night in the saber-tooth’s mighty guise. He couldn’t forget the strong; warm feel of the girl clinging to his back, and the deadly power of his leap, and the hot, sweet-smelling spurt of Rex Chittum’s blood. Nothing quite so real had ever happened to him awake.
The drink had relaxed him, and he began to feel a little drowsy. He began to think that it would be very easy for a snake to slide out under the steel-framed window. If he went to sleep, he could easily change into a snake and go back to April. If he found Preston Troy in her room—well, a thirty-foot constrictor could take care of Troy.
The radiator snapped, and he flung himself off the bed with a muttered curse. This wouldn’t do at all. He was dull and heavy with fatigue, and the sudden movement made him giddy. But he decided to go downstairs.
He had always wondered about asylums. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure. That long afternoon, however, Glennhaven began to seem remarkable for the lack of noteworthy incident. It began to appear as a sort of fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and one another within.
In the music room, when Barbee got a war bulletin on the radio, a thin, pretty girl dropped a tiny sock she had been knitting and hurried out, sobbing. He played checkers with a pink-faced, white-bearded Major French, who managed to upset the board every time Barbee crowned a king and then apologized profusely. At dinner, Dr. Camp and Dr. Mehrens made a painfiul and not very successful effort to keep a light conversation going. Barbee went back to bis room, rang for Nurse Etting, and ordered his two permissible drinks at once.
Suddenly be was very sleepy.
He heard a thin eldritch howl that sent an eerie little chill along his spine. Dogs on the farms above Glennhaven began barking savagely. But he knew that it wasn’t a dog that had howled. It was the white wolf hitch. She was waiting for him down by the river.
BARBEE looked again at the narrow slit under the window. It would be so easy to change into a snake and crawl out through it. The wolf’s howl quavered again, and he went breathless with a tingling eagerness.
But he was afraid—
By the rational scientific logic of Dr. Glenn, he cherished an unconscious jealous hatred of Sam and Nick. In the mad logic of his dreams, April Bell was still resolved that they must be destroyed because of the deadly secret in the green box.
He felt sick with a shuddering fear of what the snake might do.
He delayed going to bed. He scrubbed his teeth with a new brush until his gums bled. He took a deliberate hath and carefully trimmed his toenails and put on white, too-large pajamas. He sat up in bed, trying to read a novel that Nurse Etting had brought from the library. But he couldn’t keep his mind on the intricate story of spies against the Nazis—he couldn’t help wondering if Hitler were” the Black Messiah.
The she-wolf howled again.
She was calling to him. He closed the book, shuddering with a horror of that bestial change. Then his horror merged into the gray frustration of the world. He thrust it back behind him and let himself go with the flood of desire. He woke in the real world of his dreams.
The book fell out of his hands—
Only he didn’t have hands. He glided across the rug and thrust bis flat head under the window and let his long body flow silently over the sill. He dropped, in a mound of powerful coils, and straightened himself and went twisting down toward the river.
The white bitch came trotting to meet him out of a clump of willows with her green eyes shining eagerly. He flicked out his long black tongue to touch her cold muzzle, and his thick, scaled body rippled to the ecstasy of that strange kiss.
“So you were tight,” he jibed, “when you said you were a witch?”
She laughed at him silently, with her red tongue hanging.
“Please, April,” he protested. “You’re driving me insane!”
Her dancing green eyes turned sober.
“It’s always painful and bewildering at first.” Her warm tongue licked bis flat snout affectionately. “We’ll have fun, Will,” she promised. “But we still have work to do. Two of our enemies live. They are learning. They have a weapon in that wooden box. We must destroy them before they master it.”
In her eyes blazed a sudden feral fury.
“We must finish them tonight—for the Black Messiah!”
Barbee shook his broad black head.
“Sam?” he whispered faintly. “And Nick? Think of Pat and Nora—”
“So it’s Nora again?” The wolf’s eyes sparkled maliciously. Her white fangs hipped his neck half playfully and yet with a savage force. “It is their lives,” she said, “or ours.”
Barbee objected no farther. In this glorious awakening from the nightmare of life, all values were changed. He whipped two turns of his tail about the white wolf’s body, squeezed until she gasped.
“It’s all right about Nora,” he told her. “But if a dinosaur happened to catch Preston Troy in bed with you, it might be—too bad.”
He released her and she shook her white fur angrily.
“Don’t you touch me, snake in the grass!” Pier voice was honey and vitriol.
“Who’s Preston Troy?”
Her white fangs grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” She sprang away from him. “But now we’ve got a job to do.”
THE UNDULATIONS of Barbee’s long, powerful body thrust him forward in flowing waves of motion. The friction of his scales made a soft burring sound on the fallen leaves. He kept pace with the running wolf, his lifted head level with her own.
The night world was oddly different to him now. His scent was not so keen as the wolf’s had been, nor his vision so sharp as the saber-tooth’s. But he could hear the gentle sigh of the river, and the rustle of mice in the fields, and all the tiny sounds of sleeping animals and people in the dark farm buildings they passed. Clarendon, as they approached it, became a terrific din of drumming motors and screaming tires and raucous horns and jangling telephones and howling radios and barking dogs and droning, wailing, bellowing human voices.
Once more they crossed the dark campus.
Even the gray tower of Anthropology Hall was dark, except for lights in the top-floor windows, where Sam and Nick defied the Black Messiah. Two husky lettermen were on guard at the entrance, with revolvers and special police badges. As the wolf and the great snake approached, one of them started uneasily.
“Listen, Jug!” His voice was hoarse and anxious. “Every dog in town has gone to howling. I tell you, this job’s got me nuts. You can see that Quain and Spivak know they’re next on the list. Whatever they’ve got in that box from Asia—I wouldn’t look at it for forty million smackers!”
Jug peered into the shadows and loosened his gun.
“Hell, Charlie—don’t let it get you down.” He shrugged. “We’re here to earn ten bucks a night. Me, I don’t take stock in this curse stuff. Mondrick and the rest of them just stayed off in those deserts too long. They’re crazy—the whole damned gang. Me, I’d like to know what they’ve got in the box. Maybe it’s worth forty millions!” His voice dropped. “Maybe it was worth a couple of murders, to Spivak and Quain!”
Jug didn’t see the sleek white wolf that trotted across the walk in front of him, or the huge gray-and-black-patterned snake that writhed after her. She made an opening in the locked door in the way she knew. The snake followed her across the dark hall, and through another door, and up ten flights of stairs.
Two more athletes with guns and badges were playing penny ante at a desk in the top-floor hall. They also were blind to the passing of the wolf and the snake, and one more door dissolved before the green eyes of April Bell.
Sam Quain and Nick Spivak had locked themselves into a small corner room. Nick was wearily propped at a desk, writing. His stooped, flatchested body looked emaciated. He started nervously as the wolf and the snake came in and peered around the room. Behind his thick-lensed glasses, his eyes were bloodshot and haggard and “feverish. Black with a stubble of beard, his thin face was gray and tense with a haunting fear.
Sam lay sleeping on a cot in the corner. Hollowed and drawn with an utter exhaustion, his tanned, red-stubbled face was grimly stubborn even in sleep. One tense hand reached out from under the blanket to clutch a leather handle of the iron-bound box.
Nick’s terrible red eyes looked straight at Barbee. But he didn’t see the snake or the wolf. Shuddering, his thin shoulders hunched as if from cold, he turned back to the desk. His trembling fingers turned a fragment of age-yellowed bone. He picked up something that looked like an old paper weight, and Barbee glided silently near to see it.
It was white plaster. It looked like the cast of a dirk-shaped, deep-graven stone. A part of the rim was worn smooth. It was cracked, and a little segment was broken out and gone. He saw that Nick had been copying the strange inscriptions. Trying to decipher them, probably, for the queer characters spilled across his yellow pages in rows and columns, mingled with numbers and English script.
Something drove Barbee back from the thing. It was the same numbing, deadly chill that he had felt the night he touched the green box in Sam Quain’s study. He recoiled into a compact heap of defiance.
His flat eyes peered at Sam again. He could sense the terror and the desperate purpose that commanded this strange citadel, where two weary men battled the unknown menace of the Black Messiah. A faint sympathy stirred in his cold body, and pity for Nora and Pat.
“I won’t do it,” he whispered. “I won’t hurt Sam.”
“Nora’ll be grateful.” The wolf’s red mouth grinned. “We can’t touch him—the weapon in the box protects him. But that isn’t necessary. Spivak is the one. He’d studying the weapon. But I don’t think he can use it—yet. Just take care of him.”
BARBEE THRUST himself back into the cold, paralyzing aura that surrounded the plaster disk. He pressed his stiff coils toward the small, tired man writing. For the man was an enemy. Things were different now. Papa and Mama Spivak, in the little tailor shop on Flatbush Avenue, were creatures of a remote dead dream. The real things, the things that mattered, were his own savage strength, and the will of the Black Messiah, and the love of the green-eyed wolf.
Nervously, Nick studied the plaster disk again. He lighted a cigarette and crushed it out, and looked apprehensively again toward where Sam slept.
“God,” he muttered, “Fin jittery tonight!” He pushed the cast away from him and hunched grimly over his papers again. “If I could read that one damn character.” He chewed his pencil, and his pale forehead wrinkled. “That might do it—the Stone licked them once, and it can again!” He gulped a long, determined breath. “Let’s see again—if the alpha sign really stands for unity—”
But Barbee had thrust himself between the man and the curious disk. Three times his thick body whipped around. Then, constricting, he made himself manifest.
Nick’s pale face stiffened with horror. Behind the glasses, his red eyes popped. He opened his mouth to scream, but a heavy blow from the side of Barbee’s flat head paralyzed his throat. The breath hissed out of his collapsing chest. With a spasmodic effort he tried to rise. The coils drew tighter and his chest caved in. In a last flailing effort, his hand touched the disk. Barbee shuddered to the numbing shock of it. Desperately he constricted again. Bones snapped. Blood spurted across the papers on the desk.
“Quick!” urged the wolf, “The other one’s waking up.”
She ran to a window, unlocked it with her deft paws, thrust it open.
Barbee began to roll awkwardly to it, with his crushed but still pulsating burden. He heard Sam stir heavily on the cot, heard a sleep-drugged, apprehensive cry: “Nick—what the devil!”
It wasn’t easy to move even so slight a form as Nick’s when you were coiled around and around it. But Barbee hooked his flat head outside the window, and the bleeding body dragged slowly across the floor.
April ran back to the desk and snatched up Nick’s pencil in her supple paw.
“I don’t think he’ll wake,” she cried softly. “Not for a while. And I’ve some writing to do.”
Awkwardly, Barbee toppled the crushed body over the sill. His coils slipped on a smear of blood and he fell with it.
He must have cried out in apprehension, for April’s anxious voice rang after him: “Back, Will—you can go back!”
Hurtling downward through those ten stories of darkness, he uncoiled from the mass of dripping pulp that had been Nick Spivak. He flung it beneath him. Desperately, he made the effort to return to his own body in the room at Glennhaven. Slowly the flowing change began.
Beneath, the body crunched and flattened with a dull, heavy sound upon the pavement. He had time to see that the guards were gone. His sensitive ears caught Jug’s protesting voice from College Street.
“What the hell, Charlie! Nothing’s gonna happen while we drink a malt.”
Then Barbee came crashing down—
But not upon the concrete walk in front of Anthropology Hall. He struck the floor beside his bed in the room at Glennhaven. Dr. Glenn, no doubt, would tell him that he had merely rolled off the pillows on which he had propped himself to read. That all his dream had come merely from the unconscious effort to explain his fall.
VIII.
THE RUTHLESS elation of the dream ebbed swiftly, and a dull sickness of horror flooded Barbee in its stead. He knew, with a stunning and terrible certainty, that Nick Spivak was now lying dead and broken on the walk in front of Anthropology Hall.
He stood up, swaying and weak and ill, rubbing at his stiff, bruised back. His neck smarted where the she-wolf’s fangs had nipped him. He looked at his watch. It was one fifteen. Trembling, clammy with sweat, he pulled on shirt and trousers. Impatiently he pressed the call button. He had his shoes on by the time the night nurse appeared—Miss Hellar had gorgeous, fluffy, platinum hair, and the physique of a lady wrestler.
“I’ve got to see Glenn,” he said. “Right now.”
Her broad, alarming face broke into a gentle smile.
“Of course, Mr. Barbee,” she said soothingly. “Just wait and we’ll see—”
“Lady,” Barbee interrupted grimly, “this is no time to show off your maniac-buttering technique. I may be crazy and I may not be—I hope I am. Crazy or not, I’m going to talk to Glenn. Where does he sleep?”
Nurse Hellar stepped warily back and crouched a little.
“Don’t get fresh,” Barbee advised her grimly. “Maybe you can handle common lunatics. But you’ll run if I turn into a big black rat.”
She retreated farther and turned a little pale.
“All I want is to talk to Glenn for five minutes,” Barbee said. “If he doesn’t like it, let him put it on my bill.”
“It might come pretty high,” warned Nurse Hellar. Grinning, Barbee dropped to all fours. “But you win,” she said shakily. “I’ll show you his house.”
“Smart girl!”
He stood up again. Nurse Hellar waited for him to walk ahead of her clown the stairs—he couldn’t put aside an uneasy idea that she thought he really could turn into a rat. From the door she pointed out Glenn’s dark mansion, and she seemed relieved when he left her.
Lights sprang on in the upper windows before Barbee reached the house, and he knew that the nurse had telephoned. The tall, suave psychiatrist himself, in a rather barbaric dressing gown, opened the door. He looked sleepier than ever.
“Well, Mr. Barbee?”
“It’s happened again,” Barbee blurted. “This time it was a snake. I killed Nick Spivak. I want you to call the police. They’ll find him lying dead under the windows of Anthropology Hall—and I’m his murderer!” He mopped his wet forehead.
