Darker Than You Think Read online

  DARKER THAN YOU THINK

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  Fantasy Masterworks Volume 37

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One - The Girl in White Fur

  Chapter Two - The Kitten Killing

  Chapter Three - The White Jade Wolf

  Chapter Four - The Witch Child

  Chapter Five - The Thing Behind the Veil

  Chapter Six - As a Wolf Runs—

  Chapter Seven - The Trap in the Study

  Chapter Eight - The Huntress in the Dark

  Chapter Nine - Nightmare's Aftermath

  Chapter Ten - A Friend of April Bell

  Chapter Eleven - As a Saber-Tooth Slays—

  Chapter Twelve - Hair of the Tiger

  Chapter Thirteen - Private Hell

  Chapter Fourteen - As a Serpent Strikes—

  Chapter Fifteen - The Human Side

  Chapter Sixteen - The Most Frightful Shape

  Chapter Seventeen - Not All Human

  Chapter Eighteen - Rebirth of the Witch Folk

  Chapter Nineteen - On Sardis Hill

  Chapter Twenty - The Child of Night

  Chapter Twenty One - Into the Shadows

  About the Author

  eGod

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Girl in White Fur

  The girl came up to Will Barbee while he stood outside of the glass-and-stucco terminal building at Trojan Field, Clarendon's new municipal airport, hopefully watching the leaden sky for a glimpse of the incoming planes. There was no reason for the sudden shiver that grated his teeth together—unless it was a fresh blast of the damp east wind. She looked as trimly cool and beautiful as a streamlined electric icebox.

  She had a million dollars' worth of flame-red hair. White, soft, sweetly serious, her face confirmed his first dazzled impression—that she was something very wonderful and rare. She met his eyes, and her rather large mouth drew into a quick pleasant quirk.

  Barbee turned to face her, breathless. He looked again into her gravely smiling eyes—they were really green. He searched her for the cause of that cold shudder of intuitive alarm, and became aware of an equally illogical attraction—life had turned Barbee a little cynical toward women, and he liked to consider himself totally immune.

  Her green gabardine business suit was modishly severe, plainly expensive, and cunningly chosen to accent the color of her eyes. Against the windy chill of this overcast October afternoon, she wore a short coat of some heavy white fur that he decided must be Arctic wolf—bleached, perhaps, or albino.

  But the kitten was unusual.

  She carried a snakeskin novelty bag, with the double handle over her arm, like two thick coils of a diamondback. The bag was open, like a flattened basket, and the kitten peered contentedly out of it. It was a perfectly darling little black kitten, less than half grown. It wore a wide red silk ribbon, neatly tied in a double bow.

  They made a striking picture, but the kitten, blinking peacefully at the lights coming on in the cloudy dusk, just didn't seem to fit. The girl didn't look quite the type to shriek with delight over such a clever pet. And the slick chick she appeared to be, the chic young businesswoman, simply wouldn't include even the very cutest black kitten in her street ensemble.

  He tried to forget that odd little shiver of alarm, and wondered how she knew him. Clarendon was not a large city, and reporters get around. That red hair was something you wouldn't forget. He looked again, to be sure her disturbing eyes were really fixed on him. They were.

  "Barbee?"

  Her voice was crisp and vigorous. The soft, throaty vitality of it was as exciting, somehow, as her hair and her eyes. Her manner remained casually impersonal.

  "Will Barbee," he admitted. "Leg man for the Clarendon Star."

  More than ever interested, he enlarged upon that modest fact. Perhaps he hoped to discover the cause of his brief shiver. He didn't want her to go away.

  "My editor wants two birds with one stone tonight," he told her. "The first is Colonel Walraven—twenty years since he wore the uniform, but still he likes the title. He has just quit a cushy berth in the Washington bureaucracy and come home to run for the senate. But he won't have much to say for the papers. Not till he sees Preston Troy."

  The girl was still listening. The black kitten yawned at the lights flashing on, and the little crowd of waiting relatives and friends clustered along the steel-mesh barrier that kept the public off the field, and the white-clad attendants beyond, busy preparing to service the planes. But the girl's intense green eyes still watched his face, and her magical voice murmured softly: "Who is your other bird?"

  "A big one," Barbee said. "Dr. Lamarck Mondrick. Kingpin of the Humane Research Foundation, out by the university. He's due here tonight, on a chartered plane from the West Coast, with his little expedition. They've been to the Gobi—but probably you know all about them?"

  "No." Something in her voice stirred his pulse. "What about them?"

  "Archeologists," he said. "They had dug in Mongolia before the war. When the Japs surrendered, in '45, they cut all sorts of diplomatic red tape to get back again. Sam Quain, who is Mondrick's right hand man, had served on some war mission to China, and he knew the ropes. I don't know exactly what they went to look for, but it must be something special."

  She looked interested, and he went on: "They're our home-town boys, coming back tonight, after two years of perilous tangles with armies and bandits and sandstorms and scorpions, in darkest Mongolia. They're supposed to be bringing home something that will rock the world of archeology."

  "And what would that be?"

  "My job tonight is to find that out." Barbee still studied her with gray puzzled eyes. The black kitten blinked at him happily. Nothing about her explained that brief tingle of intuitive alarm. Her green-eyed smile seemed still aloofly impersonal, and he was afraid she would go away. Gulping, he asked desperately: "Do I know you?"

  "I'm a rival." She was suddenly less remote; her voice held a purring chuckle of friendliness. "April Bell, of the Clarendon Call." She showed him a tiny black notebook, palmed in her left hand. "I was warned to beware of you, Will Barbee."

  "Oh." He grinned and nodded toward the little groups of passengers inside the glass front of the terminal building, waiting for the airliner. "I was afraid you had just stopped off, on your way back to Hollywood or Broadway. But you aren't really on the Call?"

  He looked at that flame-colored hair, and shook his head in admiration. "I'd have seen you."

  "I'm new," she admitted. "In fact, I took my journalism degree just last summer. I only began Monday on the Call, and this is my first real assignment." Her voice was childishly confidential. "I'm afraid I'm pretty much a stranger in Clarendon, now—I was born here, but we went to California when I was still a little girl."

  Her white teeth gleamed, in a smile innocently hopeful.

  "I'm so new," she confided softly, "and I want so much to make good on the Call. I do want to turn in a good story on this Mondrick expedition. It all sounds so strange and thrilling, but I'm afraid I didn't learn many ologies in college. Would you mind, Barbee, if I ask you a few silly questions?"

  Barbee was looking at her teeth. They were even and strong and very white—the sort of teeth with which beautiful women in dentifrice advertisements gnawed bones. It occurred to him that the spectacle of April Bell gnawing a red bone would be infinitely fascinating.

  "Would you really mind?"

  Barbee gulped and called back his thoughts. He grinned at her, beginning to understand. She was a fresh cub, new to the newspaper game—but clever as Lilith. The kitten was doubtless intended to complete a touching picture of helpless femininity, and annihilate any male resistance that her appealing eye
s and devastating hair had failed to conquer.

  "We're rivals, lady," he reminded her, as sternly as possible. Her look of hurt reproach tugged at him, but he kept the gruff abruptness in his voice. "And your name couldn't really be April Bell."

  "It was Susan." Her greenish eyes turned dark, pleading hopefully. "But I think April will look so much nicer on my first by-line." Her voice was small and husky. "Please—about the expedition—Dr. Mondrick must be pretty important, if all the papers want a story on him?"

  "He'll make good copy," Barbee agreed. "His whole expedition is only four men, and I'm sure they had quite an adventure, just getting to those sites in the desert and back again, in times like these. Sam Quain has Chinese friends, and they must have helped."

  With a tiny fountain pen, she made flowing marks in the little black notebook. The deft smooth grace of her white hands, oddly, made him think of some wild creature, unfettered and shy.

  Chinese friends," she murmured as she wrote, and looked up beseechingly. "Really, haven't you any idea what it is they're bringing back?"

  "Not even a hint," he told her. "Somebody at the Foundation just called the Star this afternoon, and tipped us off that they'd be here in a chartered plane, by seven. The Foundation man said they'd have a hot story—some big scientific announcement. He wanted photographers, and scientific staff writers, but the Star doesn't go in for heavy science. I'm supposed to cover Walraven and the expedition, too."

  He was trying to remember the name of a certain mythological lady. She had been fascinating—as lovely, no doubt, as April Bell. But, in the legend, she had a disturbing way of changing the men she fascinated into unpleasant beasts. What was her name— Circe?

  Barbee hadn't spoken that name aloud—he was certain of it. But a quick, humorous quirk of the girl's red mouth, and a gleam of slightly malicious amusement in her eyes, gave him a brief, rattled impression that he had—though he didn't even know what had made him think of that mythical sorceress.

  For an uncomfortable instant, he tried to unravel the association. He had read a little of Menninger and Freud, and sampled Frazer's Golden Bough. The symbolism of such folktales, he knew, expressed the fears and hopes of early man, and the notion popping into his own head must betray something about his own unconscious. Exactly what, he didn't want to know.

  He laughed abruptly, and said: "I'll tell you anything I can—though I'll probably get it in the neck when Preston Troy reads my story in the Call, too. Or shall I write it out for you?"

  "My shorthand is very good, thank you."

  "Well, Dr. Mondrick was a big-shot anthropologist at Clarendon University, before he resigned, ten years ago, to establish his Foundation. He's not one of your narrow specialists, and he doesn't blow his own horn. But any of his associates will tell you that he's about the greatest all-around student of mankind in the world today. Biologist, psychologist, archeologist, sociologist, ethnologist—he seems to know everything that matters about his pet subject, mankind.

  "Mondrick is the big shot of the Foundation. He raises the jack and spends it—without much publicity about the exact projects he's at work on. He led three expeditions to the Gobi, before the war interrupted, and then he rushed right back. The digs are in the Ala-shan section of the southwestern Gobi—just about the driest, meanest, hottest desert going."

  "Go on," the girl prompted eagerly, pen poised above her tiny notebook. "Haven't you any idea what they're after?"

  "We start even there—and the best man wins!" Barbee grinned. "But, whatever it is, Mondrick has been after it for twenty years. He organized the Foundation, just to find it. It's his life work, and the life work of such a man is apt to be important."

  The little groups of spectators stirred expectantly outside the steel fence, and a small boy pointed excitedly into the gray overcast. The damp wind shuddered to the drum of mighty motors. Barbee looked at his watch.

  "Five forty," he told the girl. "The airliner isn't due till six, the dispatcher says. So this must be Mondrick's plane coming in early."

  "Already?" Greenish eyes shining, she seemed almost as breathless as the pointing boy. But she watched him, not the sky. "You know the others?" she asked. "The men with Mondrick?"

  A flood of memories slowed Barbee's reply. His mind saw three once-familiar faces, and the murmur of the waiting crowd became the haunting echo of once-known voices, ringing down the years. He nodded, a little sadly.

  "Yes, I know them."

  "Then tell me."

  April Bell's crisp voice broke his brief reverie. She waited, with her quick pen ready. He knew he shouldn't spill all his background material to a rival from the Call, but her hair was sullen flame, and the dark warmth of her oddly long eyes thawed his reluctance.

  "The three men who went back to Mongolia with Mondrick in '45 are Sam Quain and Nick Spivak and Rex Chittum. They're the oldest friends I have. We were all freshmen together at the university, while Mondrick still was teaching there. Sam and I boarded two years at Mondrick's house, and afterwards the four of us were all suitemates in Trojan Hall on the campus. We all took Mondrick's courses, and—well— you see—"

  Barbee stammered, and halted awkwardly. An old pain awakened, throbbing at his throat.

  "Go on," whispered April Bell, and the quick flash of her sympathetic smile made him resume.

  "Mondrick was already gathering his disciples, you see. He must already have planned this Research Foundation, though he didn't organize it until after I graduated. I believe he was picking men, then, to train for this search in the Gobi, for whatever it is."

  Something made him gulp.

  "Anyway, we all took his courses—in what he called the 'humane sciences.' We worshipped him. He got scholarships for us, and gave us all the special help he could, and took us with him on his summer field trips to Central America and Peru."

  The girl's eyes were uncomfortably penetrating.

  "What happened to you, Barbee?"

  "I was somehow left out," he admitted awkwardly. "I never quite knew why—because the same bug had bitten me. I loved all the work, and my grades were higher than Sam's. I'd have given my right arm to be with them on the first dig in the Gobi."

  "What happened?" the girl insisted, without mercy.

  "I never knew." He swallowed hard. "Something turned Mondrick against me—I never knew what. At the end of our senior year, Mondrick was giving us all inoculations and blood-group tests, to get us ready for another field trip. He called me into the lab, one day, and told me not to plan on going."

  "But why?" the girl whispered.

  "He wouldn't say why." Barbee spoke huskily, wincing from that old injury. "Of course he saw how hurt I was, but he wouldn't explain. He just turned gruff—as if the thing hurt him too—and promised to help me get any other job I wanted. That was when I went to work on the Star."

  "And your friends went on to Mongolia?"

  "That same summer," Barbee said. "With the first Foundation expedition."

  Her green eyes searched him.

  "But still," she said, "the four of you are friends?"

  He nodded, faintly puzzled.

  "Yes, we're friends. I felt a little bitter toward old Mondrick because he wouldn't tell me why he didn't want me. But I never had any quarrel at all with Sam and Nick and Rex. They're okay. Just the same, every time I run across them. The Four Muleteers, Sam used to call us, when we made those muleback summer jaunts into Mexico and Guatemala and Peru. If Mondrick ever told them why he kicked me out, they never spoke about it."

  Barbee looked uncomfortably past the girl's bright hair into the cold leaden dusk that now was throbbing to the engines of the unseen plane.

  "They didn't change," he said. "But of course we drifted apart. Mondrick was training them into a team of specialists in different departments of his 'humane sciences'—grooming them to look for that something in the Ala-shan. They didn't have much time for me."

  Barbee caught his breath.

  "Miss Bell," he deman
ded abruptly, to end that aching memory of old defeat, "how did you know my name?"

  Her eyes lit with a teasing mockery.

  "Perhaps that was just a hunch."

  Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news"—an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed—even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it.

  That dim sense had been useful to him—on those summer field trips, before Mondrick turned him out, it had fed him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp or to dig a comrade's grave.

  Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed, was half the reason.

  That some formless intuition, perhaps, could account for his brief shudder at the first glimpse of April Bell—though nothing about her long, warm eyes and flame-colored hair seemed at all alarming now. And her own hunch about his name wasn't completely surprising—except that it went too far.

  A good deal too far. Barbee grinned at her and tried to relax that instinctive alarm. Doubtless her own editor had briefed her on the story he expected her to get and told her how to get it. Probably she was tantalizing men with her own irresistible mixture of wide-eyed innocence and guile. The strangest incongruity always had a sane explanation, if only you could find it.

  "Now—please, Barbee—who are they?"

  Her red head nodded eagerly toward a little group filing out of the terminal building, beyond the steel barrier. A thin little wisp of a man gestured excitedly toward the dull, thrumming sky. A tiny child cried to see, and her mother took her up. A tall blind woman came behind, guided by the leash of a huge tawny German shepherd.