Collected Short Fiction, page 420
BARBEE DRAGGED himself out. He was shaken and breathless and bruised and sick and trembling. His clothing was muddy and torn. But he wasn’t bleeding anywhere, and no bones were broken.
He stumbled back to the edge of the pavement. The cold north wind whipped the drizzle into his scratched face, and he shivered in his wet clothing. Somewhere behind him the white wolf howled. It was a thin, eerie, quavering wail, and he thought it was the voice of April Bell.
He saw her green, luminous eyes silently approaching.
A trembling paralysis of fear seized him. Shuddering, he broke it. He snatched up a handful of gravel from the road shoulder and hurled it futilely toward her. Hoarsely he croaked: “Get away from me—damn you!”
Winking maliciously, the green eyes vanished. Down the wind, a dog yelped and began to howl fearfully. Barbee turned away from the wrecked car and started walking toward the north bridge.
That frantic flight, he realized, bad been taking him unconsciously back toward Nora. But the campus was still half a dozen miles away, and Glennhaven lay only a mile beyond the bridge. Suddenly he knew that he must stop there. Glennhaven was the one possible refuge left to him—even if it offered only the false peace of insanity.
He was aching with bruises and exhaustion, chilled and numb and reeling. Only one car passed him, and the driver refused to halt. With head down, he tramped on steadily—if he stopped to rest he knew he couldn’t go on again.
On the bridge he heard the soft patter of the white wolf’s feet and looked back to see that she was close behind. Almost he was too tired to care. In a weary, baffled voice he muttered:
“Damn you, April, why don’t you leave me be? You know I’m not asleep.”
She waited for him to go on, with one graceful forefoot lifted. Her sensitive ears were pricked up watchfully. She was grinning, with her red tongue out. A malicious but not unkind amusement shone in her green eyes.
Once he fell on his face in a muddy field. He felt too numb to mind the cold any longer, and it was good to rest. He wanted to sleep. But the white she-wolf was waiting eagerly, with ears lifted. He knew that she would change him if he slept. He spurred his leaden body to rise and staggered on.
At last he reeled between the massive stone pillars at the entrance to Glennhaven. Lights were still on in Glenn’s big dwelling. He stumbled up the walk and leaned on the bell. Glenn himself came to the door. His tanned handsome face showed only faint surprise.
“Well, Barbee, we’ve been expecting you back.”
“Doctor,” croaked Barbee, “I’ve got to talk to you!”
Glenn’s heavy-lidded eyes surveyed his drenched, tattered, swaying figure.
“You look all in,” he said. “Suppose you go back to your room. Take a hot bath and have them bring you something hot to drink. Sleep on it. And I’ll see you early in the morning.”
“Sleep?” Barbee echoed hoarsely. “I can’t sleep. I don’t dare. Because a white she-wolf is waiting for me there on the lawn. You can’t see her, but listen to the dogs howling down the wind! I’ll change, if I sleep, and go to her.”
Glenn merely waited in the doorway, his brown face bland and smooth.
“The wolf is April Bell,” Barbee croaked. “She murdered Mondrick. She made me kill Rex and Nick. Now she’s waiting for me again.” His teeth chattered. “She wants me to change and come with her to murder Sam Quain.”
Glenn shrugged a little, and his deep voice was soothing. “You’re tired and excited. Let me give you something so that you can sleep—”
“I won’t take it!” Barbee’s ragged protest rose almost to a scream. “I’m going to tell you right now—what Sam Quain told me.” Clutching the door facing to hold himself upright, dripping muddy pools on the mat, he launched desperately into the story: “Mondrick discovered that the human race is a hybrid mixture—”
GLENN LISTENED, his brown face sleepy-looking and inscrutable. Barbee was too far gone to trouble himself with Quain’s suspicion that Glenn might be a witch. The old, strange sense of confident liking ruled him. All he wanted was the reassuring aid of Glenn’s competent, skeptical, scientific mind.
“Now, doctor!” A kind of bleak triumph broke into his husky whisper as he finished. “What do you say?”
Deliberately, with the old gesture, Glenn fitted the capable brown fingers of his two hands together.
“You’re ill, Barbee,” his deep voice said soberly. “Remember that. You’re too ill to see things clearly. Your story of Homo lycanthropus is a kind of warped, hysterical parallel to the truth. Men are really descended from savage animals. We’ve all inherited traits that are no longer useful in civilization. Interesting throwbacks do occur.”
Barbee straightened his reeling body grimly.
“But they’re hunting Sam right now,” he gasped. “Think of Nora, and little Pat.” He looked uneasily behind him, and the wolf’s green eyes winked out of the shadows. “Don’t let me sleep, doctor,” he begged, “or I’ll change and murder Sam!”
“Suavely, Glenn protested: “Won’t you try to understand? Your fear of sleep is merely your fear of those unconscious wishes that sleep sets free. It may well be that the witch of your dreams is merely your guilty love of Nora Ouain, and your thoughts of murder the consequence of an unconscious jealous hatred of Sam.” Barbee gasped, trembling with silent wrath. “You’ll just have to learn to accept those ideas,” Glenn told him. “There’s nothing unique about them. All people express them—”
“All people,” Barbee grated hoarsely, “are tainted with the witch folk’s blood!”
Glenn nodded calmly.
“Your expression of a fundamental truth.”
Barbee heard movement on the walk behind him and turned in a startled way. But it wasn’t the white wolf. It was horse-faced Nurse Graulitz and muscular Nurse Hellar. He looked accusingly back at Glenn.
“Go with them, Barbee,” the tall doctor urged him soothingly. “They’ll just help you get to sleep—”
“But I won’t!” Barbee sobbed. “I won’t—”
The two white-starched Amazons seized his arms. Struggle was useless. Surrendering to chilled exhaustion, he reeled between them back to his room. A hot shower stopped the chattering of his teeth. The clean bed was insidiously relaxing. Nurse Graulitz stood ominously by while Nurse Hellar made him gulp hot weak tea. It had a faint, strange taste, and Nurse Graulitz boomed softly: “Now you’ll go to sleep.”
They left him alone.
SLEEP TUGGED and beckoned. It was a silken web that meshed Barbee. A tireless yielding line that drew unceasingly. A ruthless pressure, a driving wind, a soothing perfume. It was a siren voice, singing. It was a screaming agony of need.
But he would not yield.
Something made him look at the closed door. It didn’t open. But the white wolf trotted through the panels. She sat down on her haunches in the middle of the room and looked at him with amused, expectant eyes. Her red tongue lolled beside her shining fangs.
“Go away,” he whispered faintly. “I’m not going to sleep.”
She replied in the soft, velvet voice of April Bell:
“Perhaps sleep isn’t necessary. I’ve just talked with your father. He says that you are strong enough to change without the aid of sleep.” Barbee sat up on the side of the bed.
“My father?” he echoed blankly.
The white wolf laughed silently at his surprise.
“Hasn’t he told you?”
“Luther Barbee was a bricklayer,” Barbee said. “He died three months before I was born.”
Her slender white head nodded.
“But your mother’s marriage to him was cruelly unhappy. She came to Dr. Glenn as a patient nearly a year before her husband was killed in a saloon brawl. You are Glenn’s son.”
Barbee blinked at her.
“I felt somehow kin to him,” he muttered. “It might be—” He half rose, trembling. “My God, this is insanity! Leave me alone, damn you—or I’ll scream!”
She laughed at him noiselessly, ears pricked up.
“Go ahead and scream. Nurse Hellar can’t see me.”
Barbee didn’t scream. For two minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, watching the bright-eyed, expectant wolf. If she were all hallucination, she was still a remarkably vivid and graceful and malicious one.
“You followed me from Troy’s,” he accused her suddenly. “I know you were there. I saw your white coat on a chair in his den.”
“So what?” Her green eyes danced. “I was waiting for you, Will.”
“I saw him go into your apartment with his own key.” Barbee’s voice was shaking. “What is he to you, April? Is he your master? Is he the Black Messiah?”
The white wolf laughed again. She trotted to him and put her graceful white paws on his trembling knees. Her green eyes were more than ever human—April’s. They looked eager and glad and yet faintly mocking, and they were wet with tears.
“So that’s why you ran from me, Will?”
Hoarsely he muttered: “Maybe it is.”
“Then I’ll have to tell you, Will.” Her cold muzzle kissed him. “Troy’s my father. What I told you about the dairyman is true. But mother had been Troy’s secretary before she married, and when she found herself unhappy she began seeing him again. The dairyman suspected. That’s why he hated me so bitterly—why he was so anxious to believe that I was a witch. Preston was always generous. He sent money to us in California. He has done a lot for me since mother died.” Her green eyes mocked him. “So you were jealous, Will.”
His trembling hand touched her silky white fur.
“All right, I was.” He gulped. “April, I’m glad—”
The door swung open. Nurse Hellar peered into the room with an expression of mild reproof on her broad face.
“Really, Mr. Barbee,” she admonished. “You’ll catch cold if you sit up all night talking to yourself. Let me tuck you in bed.” She started resolutely across toward him, and the white wolf nipped at her muscular ankle. “Gracious—what did I stumble against?” She peered at the empty carpet beside the silent, red-grinning wolf, and then at Barbee. In a rather shaken voice, she threatened: “If you aren’t in bed when I come back—”
She went out, and the laughing wolf said: “Now it is time for us to go.” Uneasily, Barbee asked: “Where?”
“Your friend, Sam Quain, is about to get away from the sheriff,” said the silken voice of April Bell. “He’s climbing a trail they don’t know about—up the cliff instead of down—and carrying the green box with him. We’ve got to stop him.”
“I won’t—” he muttered grimly. “Not even if I am bewitched.”
“But you aren’t.” Gently, the white she-wolf rubbed a silken shoulder against his knees. “Don’t, you see, Will, that you are one of us?”
“You mean that Mondrick was right?” He gulped. “That I’m a throwback—to lycanthropus?”
“You are one of us.” Her green eyes danced. “I should tell you that the full development of our power is usually very slow. Our gifts tend to lie unused and even unsuspected. Your father has been very successful in awakening our latent racial consciousness.”
“My father—Glenn?” Barbee clutched at the head of the bed. “But he’s a scientist, a materialist—” His voice dried up as he remembered Sam Quain’s suspicion. Shivering, he whispered faintly: “Is Glenn the Black Messiah?”
“He is one of us,” she told him. “But he isn’t the leader we have been waiting for so long. Nor is Preston. Nor am I. None of us has a heritage that equals your own, Will. It may be that your awakening strength can lead us back to our lost dominion.”
“I?” Shocked to frozen rigidity, Barbee clung with sweaty hands to the bed. “I—the Black Messiah?”
“You’re our leader, Will,” she told him softly. “Until a stronger one can take your place. You and I are the most powerful in generations. But perhaps a child of ours will be stronger yet.” She dropped to all fours again and looked up at him with shining eyes. “Now we must go!”
Barbee released the iron rail with clammy fingers. He let his tired body flow. It was easier than it had ever been, for the first awkwardness and pain was gone. And a new, savage strength came into him with the change.
Beside him the white wolf altered also. She rose to her hind feet and grew taller. The flowing curves of her body filled, and the fur was gone, and she flung the shining red hair back of her bare shoulders. With a fierce eagerness, Barbee gathered the slim woman to him in his leathery wings and kissed her cool, tender lips with the giant saurian’s snout.
Laughing, she gave his hard scaled head a ringing slap. Sire slipped out of his infolding wings and sprang astride his leathery back. “We’ve your old friend to take care of. first.”
He looked at the reinforced window, and it melted out of its frame. He slithered through it, with April crouching low upon him. and perched with his mighty talons gripping the sill. It was good to be strong and free again, and he liked the warm, soft pressure of the girl astride him.
Behind. Nurse Hellar came back into the room. She straightened his stiff, sprawled body on the bed and drew the blankets over it. Snapping out the lights, she murmured triumphantly: “I thought you’d sleep!”
BARBEE SPREAD huge wings and launched himself from the wet window sill. The night was still clouded, and the steady wind still carried a thin, cold rain out of the north. But the shape of things was clear to his new senses, the damp chill was merely stimulating, and all his old fatigue was gone. He beat the rain-washed air with long, easy strokes, soaring westward.
A frightened dog howled beneath them, and Barbee silenced it with a hissing scream. A joyous strength beat in his wings. This was life. The old conflicts and frustrations were all left behind. Now at last he was free.
They mounted into the west. Lights of cars moved on the flanks of the dark hills below, lanterns swung, and flashlights made furtive gleams. But all the streams were raging high from heavy rainfall in the hills. Bridges were out, fords perilous with white water and grinding boulders. The sheriff’s men were halted.
Barbee soared far over them. He glided down, above the dull, angry roar of swollen Laurel Creek. April’s slim, bare arm pointed and he saw Sam Quain. With the green box on his shoulder, he was high on the narrow, unguessed trail that twisted breathtakingly above the mad white water.
“Wait!” April Bell’s voice held a chuckle of wild, free joy in living. “Perhaps he’ll fall.”
Barbee deliberately soared above the canyon. Still he felt admiration for a brave and dangerous enemy. Defying long exhaustion, Sam was making a splendid effort. Against lesser odds, he might have had a chance.
For at last, using half obliterated steps that the Indians must have cut, he reached the top of the cliff. He rested for only a moment, panting. Then, with a stubborn, weary strength he. lifted the battered wooden box to his shoulders again.
“Now!” cried April Bell.
With black, silent wings half folded, Barbee dived.
Sam Quain seemed suddenly aware of the danger. He stumbled back from the sheer precipice. His haggard face looked up, slowly twisting into a grimy, red-stubbled mask of horror. His mouth opened, and Barbee thought he heard his own name, shouted in a tone of utmost anguish:
“You—Will—”
The talons of the pterosaur caught the iron-bound box. The Stone within it numbed them with its queer deadly chill. His wings were paralyzed. But Barbee hung on grimly. The box was torn out of Sam Quain’s clutching hands, flung over the cliff.
Barbee fell with it for a space. With a last spasmodic effort he contrived to unfasten his frozen talons, thrust it from him. Far below, it struck a ledge, burst into a shower of splinters.
Barbee saw scraps of paper, dissolving bits of yellow bones, the fragments of the shattered Stone. They all went down into the grinding chaos of foam and mud and rocks in the swollen creek.
Life came back to Barbee’s wings. He spread them again and checked his fall. Stunned and shaken, he came down on the rocky slope beyond the roaring stream. April Bell slipped off his back.
“You were splendid, Will!” Her voice was heady champagne. “The Stone in the box was our only real danger, and now it is destroyed forever. But none of us save you alone could approach that thing; its power paralyzed us all before we could do anything.” The caress of her warm, white fingers was electric against his heaving, scaly flank. “Now we have only to kill Sam Quain.”
CLINGING with trembling talons to the rock where he had landed, Barbee shook his long armored head.
“What harm can Sam do?” he demanded. “The box held his only weapon and all his proof. He’s a fugitive from the law, suspected of three murders. Now that the box is gone his story is pure insanity.”
He reached for the red-haired girl with a leathery wing.
“Suppose he does get away? Suppose he even manages to tell his story? I don’t think the newspapers, or the radio, or the scientific magazines would touch it, but he might somehow get it printed by some unwary publisher—perhaps under some pretense that it was only fiction. But even if he did, who would believe?
“Who would dare believe?”
The pterosaur shrugged, with black, folded wings.
“Let him go—for Nora’s sake.”
“So it’s Nora Quain again!”
April Bell’s smooth white body shrank beneath his caressing pinion. She dropped to all fours, and silky fur covered her. Her red head grew long and pointed, with alert ears lifted. Only the green, malicious eyes of the white she-wolf were the same, alight with a gay, mocking challenge.
“Wait for me, April!”
With a red, silent laugh she ran from him up the dark wooded slope where his broad wings could not follow. But the change was easy now. Barbee let the saurian’s body flow into the shape of a huge gray wolf. He picked up her exciting scent and followed her into the shadows.
THE END.
1941
The Star of Dreams
A Mystery of the Spacelanes—the Hellstones—Fabulous—Unbelievable—A Story You Won’t Forget
