Darker Than You Think (35 page)

The
snake followed the wolf up eight dark flights. That musty malodor was
thicker at the top of the stairs, a strange sweetness, sickeningly
vile. The white wolf shrank and cowered from it, but the great snake
rippled on. Another door turned misty as Barbee grasped it, and he
beckoned with his flat head for the quivering bitch to follow him
into the ninth-floor rooms.

One
of the rooms had been fitted with bench and sink and glass apparatus
for chemical analysis. The burning fumes of reagents in it were
drowned beneath the lethal reek that came from a pinch of gray powder
drying on a paper filter. That room was silent except for the slow
drip of water from a tap. The wolf and the snake recoiled from its
deadly fetor.

"See,
Barbee!" The white bitch grinned feebly from her swaying
illness. "Your dear old friends are trying to analyze that old
poison, so they can kill us all."

The
next room they entered was a museum of articulated skeletons, hung
smiling whitely from steel stands. Barbee peered about it uneasily
with the great snake's eyes. He recognized the neatly strung bones of
modern men and modern apes, and the white plastic reconstructions of
the apelike frames of Mousterian and Chellean and Prechellean types
of early man. Others puzzled him, however; the restored bones were
too slender, the sneering teeth too sharp, the staring skulls too
smooth and long. He crouched back from those strange skeletons, and
something sent a shudder flowing down his armored coils.

"See!"
the white wolf whispered. "They're looking for measurements—for
clues to find us—so they can use that poison."

The
room beyond was dark and silent. Colored wall maps showed the
continents of today and those of the past; the edges of the ice
fields in the glacial ages were drawn like battlelines. Locked glass
cases held the notebooks and journals Dr. Mondrick had always kept—
Barbee recognized his bold red lettering on the covers.

The
white bitch bristled suddenly, and Barbee saw that her greenish eyes
were fixed on a frayed scrap of medieval tapestry, framed in glass
and hung above the desk beside the window as if it were a special
treasure. The faded pattern showed a gray, gigantic wolf snapping
three chains that bound it to spring upon a bearded old man with one
eye.

Puzzled
at the she-wolf's snarl, Barbee lifted his flat head to study the
ancient fabric. The huge wolf was Fenris, he recognized, demon of the
Scandinavian mythology. Old Mondrick, he recalled, had once discussed
the myth, comparing the Norse demonology to that of the Greeks.
Offspring of the evil Loki and a giantess, the giant wolf Fenris had
grown until the fearful gods chained him; he broke two chains, but
the third magic bond held him until the dreadful day of Ragnarok when
he broke free to destroy Odin, king of the gods—represented as
an aged, one-eyed man. The white bitch had bared her fangs,
retreating from the frayed tapestry.

"Why?"
Barbee whispered. "Where is any danger?"

"There!"
she growled huskily. "In that weaving, and the history it
represents—and in all the myths of the wars and the marriages
of men and gods and frost giants, that most men think are only fairy
tales. Old Mondrick knew too much, and we let him live too long."

She
paused to sniff that lethal, fetid sweetness.

"We've
got to strike—now!" Her sleek body shivered. "Before
these other fools rediscover all Mondrick and his wife knew—and
turn this place into another trap to catch us." Her silky ears
lifted, listening. "Come along, Barbee. They're just across the
hall—those dear old friends of yours!"

They
crossed the dark hall. Still no silver barred their path, and the
long snake flowed ahead of the she-wolf through the locked door of a
small corner room. Barbee stopped, lifting his flat black head in
cold alarm at sight of Sam Quain and Nick Spivak.

"Why
so jumpy?" The sleek bitch laughed at his start, her long eyes
cold with a triumphant ferocity. "I think we're in time,"
she whispered. "These fools must have failed to guess the
identity of the Child of Night— and your black-widow friend
can't have got her warning to them yet—because they've put up
no silver foil or silver wire to keep us out. I think we can put an
end to these human monsters now and save the Child of Night!"

The
two men in that little room didn't look so very monstrous to Barbee.
Nick Spivak was wearily propped at a desk, writing. His stooped,
flat-chested body seemed drained of life. He lifted his head, as
Barbee peered at him, with a nervous start. Behind his thicklensed
glasses, his eyes were bloodshot and haggard and feverish. Black with
a stubble of neglected beard, his thin face was gray and haunted. It
would wrench Mama Spivak's heart, Barbee thought, to see him now.

Sam
Quain lay sleeping on a canvas cot against the wall. Drawn and grim
with an utter exhaustion, his tanned, red-stubbled face was bleakly
stubborn even in sleep. One of his strong arms was stretched from
under the blanket, and his hand grasped a leather handle of the
iron-bound coffer, even as he slept.

The
box was padlocked. Barbee made a groping mental effort toward its
contents and felt that heavy silver lining inside the iron and wood—a
barrier that struck a cold chill through him. He recoiled uneasily,
groggily aware of the sweetish lethal reek seeping from the box. The
white bitch crouched beside him, ill and frightened.

"Watch
your old friend Spivak!" she was gasping faintly. "He's our
meat tonight."

Nick
Spivak had turned apprehensively at the desk. His terrible red eyes
looked straight at Barbee, yet he didn't seem to see the snake or the
snarling wolf. Shuddering a little, his narrow shoulders hunched as
if with cold, he turned back to his work.

Barbee
let himself flow nearer, lifting his long, flat head to look over
that thin, bent shoulder. He saw Spivak's quivering fingers absently
turning a queer-shaped fragment of age-yellowed bone. He saw the
frightened man pick up another object on the desk, and an unpleasant
numbness stiffened his coils.

The
object was white plaster. It looked like the cast of a disk-shaped,
deep-graven stone. A part of the curved rim of the original must have
been worn flat; it must have been cracked, he saw, and a little
segment lost. That sweet fetor clung to it in an evil cloud, so
powerful that Barbee had to draw his flat head stiffly back.

The
white bitch peered fearfully at it, swaying where she stood.

"A
cast of the Stone, that must be," her dry whisper rasped. "The
Stone itself must be in that box—the secret that destroyed our
people engraved on it and protected with that stinking emanation. We
can't get at the Stone tonight." Her long tongue licked her
fangs uneasily. "But I think we can stop your scholarly friend
from reading that inscription."

Barbee
rose in a black-patterned column to look again. Nick Spivak, he saw,
had copied all the inscriptions from the plaster disk with pencil
rubbings on soft yellow paper. Now he was trying to decipher them, no
doubt, for the queer characters were spilled across his pages in rows
and columns, mingled with his notes and guesses and tabulations in
ordinary script.

"You're
very strong tonight, Barbee," the she-wolf was gasping. "And
I can see a certain probability of Spivak's death—a linkage
close enough for you to grasp." Her red lips curled wickedly.
"Kill him!" she urged. "While the link exists."

Barbee
swayed uncertainly toward the stooped figure at the desk, and caught
that evil sweetness again. It turned him giddy with illness, and he
recoiled into a compact heap of defiance. His flat eyes shifted
toward the narrow cot as Sam Quain turned a little in his sleep. A
faint sympathy stirred in his cold body. He could sense the desperate
purpose that armed these two lonely men in their strange citadel
against the Child of Night, and a sudden pity welled up in him for
Nora Quain and pink-faced little Pat.

"I
won't hurt them," he whispered. "I won't touch Sam."

"This
might be a good chance to get Sam out of your way with Nora."
The white bitch leered at him. "But he's too near the thing in
the box, and I can't find any linkage that might bring about his
death tonight. Spivak is the one—and you must stop him before
he unriddles that inscription."

Stiffly,
painfully, Barbee thrust himself back into the lethal sweetness that
hung in a paralyzing cloud around the white plaster cast on the desk.
He pressed his scaled coils heavily toward the small man writing. For
the man was an enemy of the Child of Night, and things were different
now.

He
could see the wailing desolation of Papa and Mama Spivak when they
should hear the news. But the fat little tailor and his fatter wife,
with their shop on Flatbush Avenue, were creatures of a remote dead
dream. They weren't important any longer, any more than old Ben
Chittum in his shabby newsstand. The real things, the things that
mattered now, were his own savage power and the awaited arrival of
the Child of Night and the fierce love of the green-eyed wolf.

Nervously,
Nick Spivak was shuffling through his sheaves of yellow sheets. He
flung them down impatiently and bent to frown through a pocket lens
at the plaster cast, as if searching for some error in his copy. He
shook his head, lighted a cigarette and crushed it out again, and
frowned apprehensively toward the cot where Sam Quain slept.

"God,"
he muttered, "I'm jittery tonight!" He pushed the cast away
and hunched grimly over his papers again. "If I could only
determine that one damn character." He chewed his pencil, his
pale forehead wrinkled. "The disk makers licked those devils
once, and their discovery can do it again!" His narrow shoulders
lifted resolutely. "Let's see again—if the alpha character
really stands for unity—"

That
was all he said. For Barbee had thrust his flat head between the
man's wan face and the cluttered desk. Three times his long body
whipped around. Then, constricting, he grasped with all his power for
the linkage of probability to make himself manifest.

Nick
Spivak's thin, hollowed face stiffened with horror. Behind the
glasses, his red eyes popped. He opened his mouth to scream, but a
savage blow from the side of Barbee's long head paralyzed his throat.
The breath hissed out of his collapsing chest. He clawed with his
hands and tried to stand up. The coils drew tighter and his chest
caved in. His groping fingers, in a final frantic effort, caught the
plaster disk and dashed it feebly against Barbee's ribs. The cold
shock of its touch numbed and sickened Barbee, and the fearful
sweetness clinging to it turned him groggy. His shuddering coils
relaxed a little—and this, he thought, was only the cast;
slipping inertly toward the floor, he wondered dully what the
original Stone itself could do.

"Tighter,
Barbee!" the white bitch was whispering. "Kill him while
you can."

But
Nick Spivak must have been already dead. The brittle plaster disk
dropped out of his fingers and shattered into dusty fragments on the
floor. Barbee recovered a little from its shocking touch and its
clinging malodor and squeezed again. Bones snapped. Blood spurted
across the papers on the desk.