Darker Than You Think (42 page)

"Take
the pack," Barbee urged. "Read Nora's note—and please
let me help."

At
last, reluctantly, Sam Quain gestured with the gun.

"Come
on out of the rain," he muttered harshly. "I don't know how
much of this black deviltry you've done—consciously or not. I
don't know how far to trust you. But I suppose it can't make things
much worse to tell you what I know."

The
cave itself was invisible from below, although that thin stain of
ancient smoke betrayed it. Sam Quain pointed the way with his gun,
and waited for Barbee to stumble ahead with the pack. They climbed
half-obliterated steps in a water-cut chimney, where one armed man
might hold off a hundred.

A
long horizontal fissure above that narrow stair, the cave had been
gouged by the chisel of time between two strata of hard sandstone.
The roof was black with smoke of ancient fires. Hidden in the deepest
corner, where the roof sloped down to the floor, Barbee saw the
battered wooden box from Asia. He dropped the pack, hopefully eyeing
that crude coffer.

"Not
yet," Quain rapped harshly. "I've got to eat."

As
soon as he had got his breath back from the climb, Barbee unrolled
the pack. He made coffee on a tiny primus stove, fried bacon, and
opened a can of beans. Using a flat stone for a table, Quain ate and
drank avidly. Stationed warily between Barbee and the box, he kept
the gun near his hand. His narrowed, bloodshot eyes roved restlessly
between Barbee and a bend of the Laurel Canyon trail that lay visible
beneath the rock chimney.

Barbee
waited impatiently while he ate, uneasily aware of the thickening
storm. The dark ceiling of ragged clouds crept lower about the peaks.
Thunder crashed above and boomed and rumbled in the gorge below.
Gusts of wind blew icy rain into the cave. Heavy rain, he knew, would
flood the trails and trap them here. Quain cleaned his tin plate at
last, and Barbee prompted anxiously: "Okay, Sam—tell me."

"Do
you really want to know?" Sam Quain's feverish eyes scanned him.
"The knowledge will haunt you, Barbee. It will turn the world
into a menagerie of horrors. It will point unspeakable suspicions at
every friend you have—if you're actually as innocent as you
pretend. It may kill you."

"I
want to know," Barbee said.

"It's
your funeral." Quain tightened his grip on the gun. "Do you
remember what Dr. Mondrick was saying Monday evening at the airport,
when he was murdered?"

"So
Mondrick was murdered?" Barbee murmured softly. "And the
means was a little black kitten— garroted?"

Quain's
unshaven face went pale and slack. His mouth hung open. His
glittering, bloodshot eyes dilated, fixed on Barbee in a vacant stare
of horror. The heavy gun jerked up in his hand, and he rasped
hoarsely: "How did you know that?"

"I
saw the kitten," Barbee said. "Several ugly things have
happened that I can't understand—that's why I thought I had
lost my mind." He peered uneasily at the carved wooden box
beyond Quain—the combination padlock looked bright as if
actually plated with silver. "I remember the last words Mondrick
said: "It was a hundred thousand years ago—"

The
cruel blue flicker of lightning made the dull gloom of the storm seem
darker. Rain drummed on the ledge above the rock chimney, and a fresh
gust of wind blew cold mist into the cave. Barbee hunched his
shoulders, shivering in the old wool sweater of Sam's that Nora had
given him. Thunder crashed and echoed and subsided, and Sam Quain's
worn voice resumed.

"It
was a time when men lived in such settings as this." His cragged
head nodded into the smoke-blackened cavern. "A time when all
men lived in a nightmare terror that is still reflected in the myth
and superstition of every land and the secret dreams of every man.
For those early ancestors of ours were hunted and haunted by another,
older, semihuman race that Dr. Mondrick called Homo Lycanthropus."

Barbee
started, muttering: "Werewolf-man?"

"Wolf-man,"
said Sam Quain. "Dr. Mondrick named them that for certain
distinguishing characteristics of bone and skull and
teeth—characteristics you see every day."

Barbee
shuddered on the damp stone where he squatted, thinking of the long
skulls and queerly sharp teeth and oddly slender bones of those
articulated skeletons the giant snake and the she-wolf had found in
that strange room in the Foundation tower. But he didn't speak of
that—Sam Quain, he thought, would surely kill him if he did.

"A
better name," Sam Quain added slowly, "might have been
witch man."

Barbee
felt a prickling numbness along his spine, like the feel of the
wolf's hair rising. He couldn't help shivering and he was glad for
the excuse of the wet, gusty wind. Water gushed in a foaming yellow
fall down the rock chimney outside and began dripping from the roof
of the cave. Quain paused to drag his precious box to a drier spot
"That rival race wasn't ape-like," his hoarse voice
resumed, dull as the continual rumble of far thunder. "The path
of evolution isn't always upward, you know—the Cro-Magnons were
finer specimens than you can easily find today. Our human family tree
has put out some pretty funny branches—and those witch-folk
must have been our strangest cousins."

Barbee
peered out into the roaring rain, trying not to show the breathless
desperation of his interest.

"To
find the real beginning of that racial tragedy, you have to look
still farther back," Quain's dead voice was rasping on. "Half
a million years and more —to the first of the two major glacial
ages of the Pleistocene epoch. The first ice age with its less frigid
intermission lasted nearly a hundred thousand years, and it created
the witch people."

"You
found the evidence of that," Barbee whispered uncomfortably, "in
the Ala-shan?"

"Part
of it." Sam Quain nodded. "Although the Gobi plateau itself
was never glaciated—its deserts turned humid and fruitful
during the ice ages, and our own eolithic ancestors were busy
evolving there. The witch folk sprang from another kindred type of
Hominidae who were trapped by the glaciers in the higher country
southwest, toward Tibet.

"Dr.
Mondrick had found remains of them in a cave he excavated before the
war, beyond the Nan-shan range. What we found under those burial
mounds in the desert on this last trip, pieces out the story—
and it makes a pretty shocking chapter."

Barbee
watched the gray veils of rain.

"A
neat example of challenge-and-response, as Toynbee might phrase it."
Quain plowed grimly on. "Those trapped bands faced the challenge
of the ice. Century by century the glaciers flowed higher and the
game was less plentiful and the winters turned more cruel. They had
to adapt, or die. They responded, over the slow millenia, by evolving
new powers of the mind."

"Hub?"
Barbee gasped to a shock of cold alarm, but he didn't say anything
about free mind webs or Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle or the
linkage of mind to matter through control of probability. He didn't
want Sam Quain to kill him with that ready gun.

"Really?"
he muttered uneasily. "What kind of powers?"

"It's
hard to be precise about that." Quain frowned at him. "Dead
minds don't leave fossils in the ground, you know. Dr. Mondrick
thought they did, however, in language and myth and superstition. He
studied such race memories, and he got more evidence from such
experiments in parapsychology as Duke University researchers have
begun."

Barbee
couldn't help staring, jaw sagging.

"Those
ice-bound nomads survived," Quain went on, "by evolving
powers that enabled them to prey on their more fortunate cousins in
the Gobi country. Telepathy, clairvoyance, prophecy—certainly
those. Dr. Mondrick was convinced they had a more sinister gift."

Barbee
had trouble breathing.

"The
evidence is nearly universal," Quain was saying. "Almost
every primitive people is still obsessed with the fear of the
loup-garou,
in
one guise or another—of a human-seeming being who can take the
shape of the most ferocious animal of the locality to prey upon men.
Those witch people, in Dr. Mondrick's opinion, learned to leave their
bodies hibernating in their caves while they went out across the ice
fields— as wolves or bears or tigers—to hunt human game."

Barbee
shuddered uncontrollably, glad he hadn't told about his dreams.

"So,
in their own diabolical way, those trapped Hominidae met their
challenge and conquered the ice," Quain went on. "About the
end of the Mindel glaciation—some four hundred thousand years
ago as the evidence shows—they overran nearly all the world.

In
a few thousand years, their dreadful powers had overcome every other
species of the genus Homo."

Barbee
uneasily recalled those huge maps of the vanished past he had seen at
the Foundation, but he dared not ask about them.

"Homo
lycanthropus didn't exterminate the conquered races, however—not
except in the Americas, and that was their own undoing here. Usually
they let the defeated breeds survive—for their slaves and their
food. They had learned to like the taste of human blood, and they
couldn't exist without it."

Shivering
on his rock, Barbee remembered the fragrant hot sweetness of Rex
Chittum's blood foaming against the fangs of the great saber-tooth.
He couldn't help shaking his head in mute protest, hoping Sam Quain
wouldn't see his clammy horror.

"For
hundreds of thousands of years, all through the main interglacial
period," Quain's harsh voice continued, "those witch-people
were the hunters and the enemies and the cruel masters of mankind.
They were the cunning priests and the evil gods. They were the
merciless originals of every ogre and demon and man-eating dragon of
every folk tale. It was an incredible, degrading, cannibalistic
oppression. If you've ever wondered why the birth of any real human
civilization took so long, there's the ugly answer.

"Their
monstrous power lasted until after the cold came back in the Riss and
Wurm glaciations of the second main ice age. But they had never been
very numerous—no predators can be as numerous as the animals
they feed on. Perhaps the ages had finally sapped their racial vigor.

"Anyhow,
nearly a hundred thousand years ago, the ancestral types of Homo
sapiens revolted. The dog had been domesticated—probably by
hardy tribes that followed the retreating ice to escape the rule of
the witch-folk. The dog was a staunch ally."

Recalling
Rowena Mondrick's dog Turk, that he and the white wolf-bitch had
lured to death on the railroad bridge, Barbee couldn't stop himself
from shivering again. Uneasy before Sam Quain's fevered, hollow eyes,
he moved farther back from the cold driving rain.

"We
found the evidences of that strange war under those burial mounds in
the Ala-shan," Quain continued. "The true men seem to have
learned to carry nuggets of alluvial silver as charms against attack
by the witch-folk, and later wore silver jewelry. Dr. Mondrick
believed there must be some scientific basis for the belief that only
a silver weapon can kill a werewolf, but he could never establish
that."

Silver
atoms, Barbee recalled, had no linkage that the energy complex of a
free mind web could grasp to control the incidence of probability;
but he didn't mention that. He tried not to think of the quaint old
silver rings and beads and brooches that had failed to save Rowena
Mondrick's life.