Darker Than You Think (50 page)

"They'll
never catch him," murmured April Bell. "We'll have to use
that linkage, to help him slip on the rocks and kill himself."

"No,"
Barbee muttered reluctantly. "I won't do that—"

"I
think you will," the white witch told him, "when you see
what happened on Sardis Hill."

A
queer dread burdened his pinions as he flapped reluctantly westward
again, following the black thread of the highway twisting up over the
folds of the higher hills. He soared over the narrow saddle of the
pass and wheeled low above the steep, sharp curve beyond, his strange
eyes searching.

Three
cars were stopped beside the pavement above the hairpin, and a black
ambulance. A little knot of curious late motorists stood on the edge
of the road, peering down the slope at the flattened ruin of the
Foundation sedan. Two men in white beside it were expertly lifting
something to a stretcher.

Barbee
saw what they lifted and shuddered in the air.

"Your
body," the white girl told him softly. "Your powers were
grown, and you didn't need it any longer. I caught the linkage of
probability, while you were driving down the hill, to help set you
free."

The
men were spreading a blanket over the unpleasant object on the
stretcher.

"Free?"
Barbee whispered hoarsely. "You mean— dead?"

"No,"
purred April Bell. "Now you'll never die— not if we kill
Sam Quain before he learns how to use his weapon. You're the first of
us in modern times to be strong enough to survive, but even so your
human taint still made you weak and unhappy. It was time for you to
be separated."

He
staggered dazedly, on stiffened wings.

"Sorry,
darling." He heard the throb of a sudden tenderness beneath the
friendly mischief in her voice. "I suppose it's hard to lose
your body, even though you don't need it now. But you really should
be happy."

"Happy?"
he rasped bitterly. "To be dead?"

"No—free!"
Eagerness trembled in her husky whisper. "You'll soon feel
differently, Will. For all your great ancestral powers will be
awakening, now that the human barriers are gone. And now you own all
the heirlooms and the precious secrets our clans and covens have kept
through those dark ages when men thought they had won."

His
long wings faltered, shuddering in the air.

"Darling—you
mustn't be afraid!" Warmly, her fingers stroked his scales. "I
guess you do feel strange and lonely—the way I felt when they
first told me. But you won't be alone very long." A quiet
elation lifted her voice. "You see, Archer Glenn says I am also
strong enough to survive."

He
wheeled slowly, on weary wings.

"Of
course I must wait until our heir is born—a son pure enough to
father our race again." He felt her body tighten to that
indomitable purpose. "But then I can be separated, too,"
she added softly. "To be with you forever!"

"Huh!"
He snorted dully. "Fellow revenants!"

"Don't
feel too sorry for yourself, Will Barbee!" She laughed at him
lightly, tossing her burnished hair back and digging her bare heels
into his scaly hide. "You're a vampire now, and you might as
well learn to like it. Your old friend Quain is the one in need of
sympathy."

"No!"
he gasped, unconvinced. "I won't believe you."

He
drifted lower on leaden wings, wheeling slowly above the two men
carrying the human part of him up from that smashed car to the
waiting ambulance. One of them slipped on the wet rocks, and they
almost spilled the thing under the blanket. He knew that didn't
matter now.

"It
used to give me the creepiest feeling, when Archer was first teaching
me the old arts," April Bell was murmuring joyously. "To
think of hiding in the dark, maybe even in your own grave, and going
out at night to feed! That used to seem so gruesome, but now I think
it's going to be fun."

Silently,
shivering in the air, Barbee watched the two men slide their burden
into the ambulance. He was wondering dully about the separate energy
complexes of the mind, and he wished Sam Quain had told him
a
little
more about what the Mondrick expedition found under those old burial
mounds in the Ala-shan.

"That's
the way our people used to live," the white witch chattered
cheerfully, "before men learned how to fight us. It's the
natural way, because our free mind webs have such wonderful powers.
They can survive almost forever, unless they're destroyed by light or
silver or those horrible stones men used to bury with us."

She
seemed to listen, peering northeastward.

"It's
time to find Quain," she said. "I can feel the linkage
forming."

Heavily
he flew northeast. He flapped low above the sheriff's men, waiting
above the white water at the Bear Creek ford.

"Don't
mind them," April Bell called scornfully. "They don't have
silver bullets and they don't know how to see us. Men have forgotten
how to fight us since the terrible times of the Inquisition—they
don't even understand their dogs. Sam Quain is our only danger now."

He
flew over the ford and up the foaming torrent that came down Laurel
Canyon. April Bell's slim arm pointed, and he saw Sam Quain.
Staggering to the weight of the green-painted box on his shoulder,
Quain was high on that narrow, unguessed trail which twisted
breathtakingly above the mad white water.

"Wait!"
cooed April Bell. "Wait until we can seize the chance that he
will slip and fall—that's the linkage I feel."

Barbee
wheeled deliberately above the ragged ledges. Even now he couldn't
help admiring Sam Quain as a brave and dangerous enemy. Defying
desperate odds and long exhaustion, the man was making a splendid
effort. Against any lesser antagonist, he might have had
a
chance.

For
at last, climbing half-obliterated steps the Indians must have cut,
he pushed the precious box ahead of him and dragged himself to the
top of the cliff. He rested for only a moment, panting, calmly
watching the lights of the sheriff's men beyond the ford. Then, with
a stubborn weary strength, he lifted the heavy wooden box to his
shoulder again. "Now!" cried April Bell.

With
silent black wings half folded, Barbee dived.

Sam
Quain seemed suddenly aware of the danger. He tried to get back from
the precipice, and swayed as he began to lose his balance. His
haggard face stared up, slowly twisting into a grim, red-stubbled
grin of horror. He must have known how to see free mind webs, for his
mouth opened and Barbee thought he heard his own name shouted in a
tone of utmost anguish: "So it's
you—
Will
Barbee—"

The
talons of the pterosaur caught the iron-bound box. The seeping reek
of that ancient, deadly thing in it filled Barbee's nostrils with a
lethal sweetness. The very touch of the box numbed him with a strange
chill. His wings were paralyzed, but he clung desperately to the box.

Torn
out of Sam Quain's clutching fingers, the box fell over the cliffs.
Barbee dropped with it, lifeless with that seeping emanation, until
the box slipped out of his frozen talons. He spread stiffly painful
wings to check his fall, great eyes fixed on the plunging box.

It
struck a ledge far below and shattered into wooden splinters and
twisted scraps of white sheet silver. Barbee saw blackened silver
weapons, and dissolving bits of yellow bone, and a disk-shaped object
that glowed with a terrible dull violet luminescence, to the eyes of
the saurian, radiation more damaging than daylight.

That
dreadful glow reminded him of the descriptions of an atomic accident,
in which an experimenter was killed at Los Alamos. Was radioactive
uranium, he wondered, the metal more deadly than silver? If it were,
the witches in charge of atomic security would see to it that none
was available to such men as Quain for use in killing other witches.

That
glowing disk shattered on the ledge and went down with the specimen
skeleton of lycanthropus and the old silver weapons and all the rest
into the grinding chaos of foam and mud and rocks and wild water in
the swollen creek.

Life
returned to Barbee's wings. He flapped heavily away from the
spreading cloud of evil malodor that came up from the broken disk.
Still weak and shaken, he alighted clumsily on the rocks above the
roaring stream. April Bell slipped off his back.

"You
were splendid, Barbee!" Her voice was a velvet caress. "That
Stone was our only real danger— you are the only one of the
clan strong enough to grasp that box; the deadly emanations of the
Stone would paralyze any of the rest of us before we could get near
enough to touch it." He shivered with pleasure as her electric
fingers scratched his heaving, scaly flank. "Now let's finish
the job, and kill Sam Quain."

Clinging
with trembling talons to the wet boulder where he perched, Barbee
shook his long armored head.

"What
harm can Sam do?" he hissed reluctantly. "That box held his
only weapon, and all the proof he could use to get any support. Now
he's just an ordinary fugitive from the law, suspected of three
murders. Without that box, his story is pure insanity—such
witches as Dr. Glenn can take care of him."

He
reached for the red-haired girl with a long leather wing.

"Suppose
he does get away from the sheriff's men? Suppose he's fool enough to
try to tell somebody his story? Or, more likely, write it? Suppose
some unwary publisher should dare to print it—disguised,
perhaps, to look like fiction?

"Would
the witches worry?

"I
think
not. The witches who review books would doubtless dismiss it as a
trivial bit of escapist fantasy. Suppose it came into the hands of
such a distinguished psychiatrist as Dr. Glenn? I can see his sleepy
smile. An interesting case history, he might say—and I can see
his lazy shrug.

"An
illuminating picture of reality, such a respected witch might add, as
seen through the twisted vision of a disintegrating schizoid
personality. The autobiography of a mental breakdown. The vampire
legend, he might conclude, has served very conveniently for many
thousand years as a conventional folk expression of unconscious
feelings of aggression and guilt. In the face of such suavely
sophisticated skepticism, who would believe?

"Who
would dare believe?"

The
pterosaur hunched his folded wings in a scaly shrug.

"Let's
forget Sam Quain—for Nora's sake." "So it's Nora
Quain again?"

Archly
indignant, April Bell twisted coyly out of his black caressing
pinions. Her white body shrank, and her head grew long and pointed.
Her red hair changed to silky fur. Only the greenish malicious eyes
of the slim she-wolf were still the same, alight with
a
provocative
challenge.

"Wait
for me, April!"