Darker Than You Think (22 page)

Barbee
felt a brief impulse of pity. The unexpected fall, he knew, must have
bruised her painfully. In another moment she was up, however, limping
after him desperately. He saw the glint of starlight on her bright
blade and ran again, turning right down the highway on the hot
mingled scent of the wolf and the dog.

The
next time he paused to look back, under the blinking traffic signal
where Center Street crossed the highway, the blind woman was far
behind. A lone car was drumming down the road toward them. Barbee ran
hard from the glare of its headlights until they became too painful,
and then crouched in an alley until it roared past. When he rose to
look back again, he couldn't see Rowena.

The
doleful baying of the dog had drawn far ahead of him, and presently
he lost it under the rumble of the mills and the steam-hiss and
steel-clatter of the railroad yards. Still he could follow the
trailing scents of the pursuit, and they led east through a maze of
poor cross streets, until he came into the yards.

The
odors of dog and wolf were thinned there with the hot stink of engine
grease and the dry bite of cinders and the reek of creosoted ties,
diluted with the sharp sulphurous acid of coal smoke. Yet he kept the
trail until a switch engine came chuffing down the tracks to meet
him, a brakeman standing on the step.

Barbee
sprang aside, but an accidental blast of steam roared around him,
sweeping away every scent except its own hot, wet reek of oil and
metal. Blind to him, the brakeman spat accidentally near him, but
even that sharp tobacco pungence was carried away by the steam. The
trail was broken.

He
trotted in a weary little circle on the parallel tracks, sniffing
hopefully. His nostrils found nothing except steam and steel and
creosote and the bitterness of half-burned diesel fuel, all overladen
with the settling chemical stenches from the industrial district.

He
cocked his shaggy ears, listening desperately. The clangor of the
switch engine was diminishing down the tracks. Steam hissed and
machines clattered in the roundhouse. The rumbling of the mills made
a dull background of sound. Far in the east, beyond the river, he
heard the whistle of a train coming in. But he couldn't find the
voice of the dog.

Sharp
pain struck his eyes as he looked at the east; warning pangs throbbed
through his head. The tall mill stacks were long black fingers,
spread against the first greenish glow of dawn. The white bitch was
lost from him, and deadly day was near; it suddenly occurred to him
that he didn't know how to go home to his body.

He
was trotting aimlessly on across the bright cold rails when the
baying came again, slow and hopeless now, from toward the mills. He
ran down the yards toward the sound, keeping between two lines of
standing boxcars that shut out part of the increasing, painful light.

He
could see the white bitch at last, loping back toward him with a
lithe and lazy-seeming grace. She had led the chase in a clever
circle, but she must be exhausted now, or weakening before the lethal
light, because the dog was gaining swiftly. The baying turned
sharper, quicker in tempo. It became an eager yelping, triumphantly
excited.

Barbee
ran out from the standing cars to meet the bitch.

"You
rest," he gasped. "I'll lead the dog."

He
wasn't sure he could lead it far, because the dawn stung through him
with its cruel, increasing radiation, and his weary body still felt
stiff from that shock of silver. But the sleek she-wolf was his own
kind, and he dropped back to draw the chase away from her.

"No,
Barbee!" she called quickly. "It's late—we must stay
together now."

He
ran on beside her, too weary to ask what she meant to do. The glare
of the east was mounting, and Barbee turned aside toward the river
lowlands, when they came out of the yards, thinking to gain a little
shelter from the light in the tangled thickets there.

"This
way, Barbee!" The she-wolf stayed on the tall embankment. "Keep
with me."

Frantically
he scrambled back up the weed-grown slope, and raced to overtake her.
The tawny dog was close behind, yipping breathlessly with each leap,
the gray light glinting on its deadly collar. Barbee fled from it,
straining to keep up with the white wolf's lazy fleetness.

The
dark river was close ahead. The stale reek of its muddy banks caught
his nostrils, and the sharpness of rotting leaves. The wind brought
him a rank whiff of the city disposal plant, and he could smell the
acrid unpleasantness of chemical wastes from the mills in the flat,
black water.

Beyond
the river, the white flame of dawn became terrible in the sky. His
eyes dimmed and burned, and his body shrank from the driving light
Grimly, he raced to overtake the lean white bitch. Somewhere far
ahead, the train wailed again.

They
came to the narrow bridge, and the white wolf trotted out across the
ties with delicate, sure feet. Barbee hung back, filled with an old,
vague terror of running water. The great yelping dog, however, was
almost upon him. Shuddering, careful not to look down upon the black
sleekness of the far water, he picked his way out across the bridge.
The dog followed recklessly.

Barbee
was midway of the span when the rails began to sing. The train's
whistle screamed again, and its cruel headlamp burst around a curve,
not a mile ahead. An impulse of panic checked him, but the plunging
dog was close behind. Frantically, he raced on to beat the train.

All
the seeming weariness of the white bitch had vanished, now. She drew
far ahead, a fleet white shadow. He ran desperately after her, beside
the purring, shivering steel. The air trembled, and the bridge
shuddered. He saw her waiting for him, sitting on her haunches beside
the pounding track, laughing at the dog.

He
flung himself down beside her in the dusty wind of the thundering
train. Faintly, he heard the dog's last howl of fear. The bitch
smiled redly at the small splash of its tawny body in the black
water, and shook the cinders out of her snowy fur.

"That
will do for Mr. Turk," she murmured happily. "And
I
think
we can take care of his wicked mistress just as neatly, when the time
comes—in spite of all her silver weapons and her mongrel
blood!"

Barbee
shuddered, cowering down beside the embankment, away from the burning
east. The steamy dust was thinning, and the humming of the rails
began to fade. He thought of Rowena Mondrick falling on the drive and
limping on again; and pity struck him, sharp for an instant as his
fear of her silver dagger.

"We
can't!" He shivered. "Poor Rowena—we've already hurt
her enough."

"This
is war, Will," the white bitch whispered. "A war of races,
old as mankind and our own. We lost it once; we won't again. Nothing
is too cruel for such mongrel traitors to our blood as that black
widow. We've no more time tonight, but I imagine we've already upset
her plan to warn Sam Quain."

She
stood up gracefully.

"Now
it's time to go home." She trotted away from him, along the
tracks. " 'Night, Barbee!"

Barbee
was left alone. The flame of the east was searing through him now,
and a cold dread possessed him, for he didn't know how to go back.
Uncertainly, he groped for his body.

He
didn't know the way. Yet he was dimly aware of his body, somehow,
lying stiff and a little chilled across the bed in his little place
on Bread Street. He tried awkwardly to possess and move it, a little
as if he sought to awake from a dream.

That
first effort was feeble and fumbling as a child's first step. Somehow
it was intolerably painful, as if he overtaxed some faculty never
used before. But the very pain spurred him. He tried again, frantic
to escape the greater pain of day. Once more he felt that curious
change and flow—and he sat up painfully on the edge of his own
bed.

The
narrow little bedroom had grown cold, and he felt chilled and stiff.
A queer, heavy numbness possessed him, and all his senses were
strangely dulled.

He
sniffed eagerly for all those odors that had been so richly revealing
to the gray wolf, but his human nostrils, choked with cold, caught
nothing at all. Even the whisky scent was gone from the empty glass
on the chiffonier.

Aching
with fatigue, he limped to the window and put up the blind. Gray
daylight had dimmed the street lamps—he shrank back from the
bright sky, as if it had been the dreadful face of death.

What
a dream!

He
mopped uncertainly at the cold film of terror-sweat on his forehead.
A nagging ache throbbed in his right canine tooth—that was the
fang, he recalled uncomfortably, that he had struck against the
silver studs of Turk's collar. If a rum hangover did such things to
him, he had better stick to whisky—and maybe less of that.

His
throat felt raw and dry. He limped into the bathroom for a drink of
water and found himself reaching awkwardly for the glass with his
left hand. He opened his tight-closed right with a nervous start, and
found himself still clutching Aunt Agatha's white jade pin.

Jaw
sagging, he stood peering incredulously at his numbed hand and that
odd trinket. Across the back of his lean fist was a long red
scratch—precisely where Jiminy Cricket's sharp little tooth had
grazed the gray wolf's forepaw in his dream. He tried to shake off an
uncomfortable prickling sensation.

Nothing
really strange about it, he tried to tell himself. He recalled some
of old Mondrick's classroom discussions on the psychology of dreams;
such phenomena of the unconscious, he recalled Mondrick saying, were
always less extraordinary and instantaneous than they appeared to the
dreamer.

His
own troubled doubts about April Bell and her curious confession had
caused him to get up in his sleep, the sane solution came to him, to
fumble in that cigar box on the chiffonier for that odd pin. He must
have scratched his hand on one of the used razor blades there, or
perhaps on the pin itself. And all the rest could be nothing else
than his own unconscious effort to explain that trifling accident
with the material of his own buried desires and fears.

That
must be! With a wan little grin of relief, he rinsed his dry mouth,
and then reached eagerly for the whisky bottle to help himself to a
hair of the dog—He grimaced at the phrase, remembering the
disgusting taste of dog hair in the dream, and firmly set the bottle
back.

CHAPTER
NINE

Nightmare's
Aftermath