Darker Than You Think (14 page)

Her
white shoulders shrugged with a mute and weary bitterness.

"Please,"
he said. "Perhaps I can help—I do want to."

"Now
that I've told you," she whispered faintly, "what does
anything matter?"

"There
are things that still might matter a good deal—to you and me."
Her white face seemed dull and sad, but this time she let him take
her hand across the tiny table. Earnestly he asked: "Have you
ever talked about this thing to anybody who might understand—a
psychiatrist, I mean, or a scientist like old Mondrick was?"

Her
bright head nodded apathetically.

"I
have a friend who knows about me—he knew my mother and I think
he used to help us, back when times were hard. Two years ago, he
persuaded me to go to Dr. Glenn. Young Dr. Archer Glenn, you know,
here at Clarendon."

Barbee
tried to smother an instant jealous desire to know more about that
friend. His fingers tightened on the girl's limp, cool hand, but he
managed to nod calmly.

"I
know Glenn," he said. "Interviewed him once, while his
father was still working with him—I was writing up Glennhaven
for a special medical edition of the
Star.
Glennhaven
is supposed to be about the best private mental hospital in the
country. What—?"

Anxiety
caught his voice, and he had to swallow.

"What
did Glenn tell you?"

Her
pale face reflected a faint, defiant amusement.

"Dr.
Glenn doesn't believe in witches," she purred gently. "He
tried to psychoanalyze me. I spent an hour a day for nearly a year,
lying on a couch in his office at Glennhaven and telling him all
about me. I tried to cooperate—you have to, at forty dollars an
hour. I told him everything—and still he doesn't believe in
witches."

She
chuckled softly.

"Glenn
thinks everything in the universe can be explained on the basis that
two and two make four. If you put any kind of spell on anything, he
always insisted, then wait long enough, some accident is sure to
happen to it. He used big words to tell me that I was unconsciously
kidding myself. He thought I was a little bit insane—a
paranoiac. He wouldn't believe that I was a witch."

A
faint malice curved her crimson lips.

"Not
even when I showed him!"

"Showed
him?" Barbee echoed. "How?"

"Dogs
don't like me," she said. "Glennhaven's out in the country,
you know, and the dogs off the farms across the road used to come and
bark at me when I got off the bus, and chase me into the building.
One day I got tired of that—and I wanted to show Glenn.

"So
I brought a little modeling clay. I mixed it with dust from around a
bench at the corner, where the dogs used to stop. When I got to
Glenn's office, I molded it into rough little figures of five of the
dogs. I whispered a little chant and spat on them and smashed them on
the floor. Then I told Glenn to look out the window."

Glee
danced in the girl's long eyes.

"We
waited ten minutes. I pointed out the dogs. They had followed me to
the building. They hung around a little while, barking at the window.
Then they all started away after a little terrier bitch—she
must have been in heat. They ran out into the highway, all together,
just as a speeding car came around the curve. The driver tried to
swerve but he didn't have time. The car hit them and turned over as
it skidded off the road. All the dogs were killed—I'm glad the
driver wasn't."

Barbee
shook himself uneasily, and caught his breath.

"What
did Glenn say?"

"He
seemed to be delighted." April Bell smiled enigmatically. "It
turned out the bitch belonged to a chiropractor who lives down the
road, and he said the dogs had been digging up the grounds. He
doesn't like either dogs or chiropractors—but still he wouldn't
believe in witches."

The
girl shook her burnished head.

"The
dogs had died because the chiropractor's bitch happened to slip her
leash, he said, and not because of any spell of mine. He went on to
say that I didn't really want to give up my psychosis and we couldn't
make any progress until I changed my attitude. He said my gift was
just a paranoid delusion. He charged me another forty dollars for
that hour, and we went ahead with the analysis."

Barbee
exhaled blue smoke into the thick blue air, and moved uncomfortably
in the angular seat. He saw the waiter watching imperatively, but he
didn't want another drink. He looked uncertainly back at April Bell.
Her brief amusement had vanished; her face seemed tired and sad.
Slowly she drew her cold hands out of his fingers.

"And
you think he was right, Barbee."

He
gripped the edges of the little table.

"My
God!" he whispered explosively. "It would be no great
wonder if you showed some tendencies of insanity, after all you've
lived through!"

A
warm surge of pity rose in him, and turned to burning anger against
all her old misfortunes, against the ignorance and the cruel
fanatacism of her stern father who had forced her to accept such
pitiful delusions. He felt an imperative urge to shelter her, to help
her back toward complete sanity. The hot, foul atmosphere of the
crowded bar began to choke him. He coughed to hide his feelings. Too
much show of pity would only offend her.

Quietly
she said: "I know I'm not insane."

So,
Barbee understood, did all lunatics. He didn't know what to say next.
He wanted time to think—to analyze her curious confession and
check all these evasive uncertainties against the ruthless fact of
Mondrick's death. He looked at his watch, and nodded toward the
dining room. "Shall we eat?"

She
nodded eagerly. "I'm hungry as a wolf!"

That
word checked Barbee—reminding him of Aunt Agatha's odd jade
pin. She was already reaching, with her swift feline felicity of
action, for the white fur beside her, but Barbee sat heavily back in
the angular chair.

"Let's
have another drink." He signalled the waiter and ordered two
more daiquiris before he turned to face her slight frown of
puzzlement. "It's late," he said, "but there's one
more thing I've got to ask about." He hesitated and saw that
wary, dangerous alertness come back to her white, taut face.
Reluctantly,
he
de
manded:
"You did kill that kitten?"

"I
did."

His
hands gripped the table until the knuckles snapped.

"And
you
did it to cause the death of Dr. Mondrick?"

In
the haze of smoke, her bright head nodded slightly. "And he
died."

The
calm matter-of-factness of her tone sent a shiver down Barbee's
spine. Darkly greenish, her watchful eyes seemed flatly opaque. Her
oval face was a lifeless, waxen mask. He couldn't guess what she
thought or what she felt. The bridge of confidence was swept away,
and it left a chasm of peril between them.

"Please,
April—"

Quick
sympathy quivered in his voice. He wanted urgently to reach and
comfort the defiant loneliness he knew she felt, but his impulsive
effort failed to penetrate her hostile citadel. Barbee dropped to a
note as cool and gravely impersonal 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
called from within a far-off fortress tower.

"Because
I was afraid."

Barbee's
brows went up.

"Afraid
of what?" he demanded. "You said you didn't even know him.
And how could he have harmed you? I did have an old grudge against
him, of course— for dropping me from his little circle of
disciples when he organized the Foundation. But he was harmless—
just a scientist, digging for knowledge."

"I
know what he was doing." The girl's voice was hard and cold and
still remote. "You see, Barbee, I always wanted to know about
myself—and the power born in me. I didn't study psychology in
college, because all the professors seemed stupidly wrong. But I've
read nearly everything that has been published on such unusual cases
as mine."

Her
eyes were hard as polished malachite.

"Did
you know Mondrick was an outstanding authority on witchcraft? Well,
he was. He knew all the history of the witch persecutions, and a
great deal more besides. He had studied the beliefs of every
primitive race—and those beliefs were something more to him
than strange fairy stories.

"You
know the myths of Greece, for instance—full of illicit love
affairs between the gods and human girls. Nearly all the Greek
heroes—Hercules and Perseus and the rest—were supposed to
have illegitimate immortal blood. They all had remarkable powers and
gifts. Well, years ago Mondrick wrote a monograph analyzing those
legends as racial memories of conflict and occasional interbreeding
between two prehistoric races—the tall Cro-Magnons, perhaps, he
suggested in that first paper, and the brutish Neanderthalers.

"But
you worked under him, Barbee—you must know the range of his
interests. He dug up graves and measured skulls and fitted broken
pots together and deciphered old inscriptions. He looked for
differences in the people of today—tested their blood and
measured their reactions and analyzed their dreams. He had an open
mind for everything that most scientists throw out because it doesn't
fit their own preconceptions. He was an authority on extrasensory
perception and psychokinesis before anybody else thought of the
words. He tried every avenue to find what he wanted."

"That's
true," Barbee said. "So what?"

"Mondrick
was always cautious in what he wrote," the girl's far, cold
voice went on. "He covered up his real meaning with harmless
scientific words-—to keep from exciting too many people, I
suppose, before his proofs were ready. Finally, a dozen years ago, he
quit publishing anything at all—he even bought up and burned
the copies of his early monographs. But he had already written too
much. I knew what he was doing."

April
Bell paused while the slow waiter brought the change out of Barbee's
lone twenty, automatically sipping at her drink. That made three, he
thought—no, it must be four. She held them well enough. When
the waiter was gone, she resumed in the same flat voice: "Mondrick
believed in witches."

"Nonsense!"
Barbee started. "He was a scientist."

"And
he still believed in witches," she insisted. "That's what
frightened me today. Most scientists, so-called, reject the evidence
without a look, but Mondrick had spent his whole life trying to put
witchcraft on a scientific basis. He went to the Ala-shan to find new
evidence. And I knew today—from the way everything happened,
from the fear on those men's faces and Mondrick's cautious first
remarks—that he had found what he wanted."

"But—not
that!"