Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

Author:Jack Williamson [Williamson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Masterwork, Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780575075467
Google: Bd9QPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0575075465
Publisher: GOLLANCZ
Published: 1948-01-01T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

As a Saber-Tooth Slays—

Barbee went back to the noisy city room—there was nothing else to do. He didn't want to think any more about April Bell, and he sought relief from all the cruel perplexities that leered from the shadows of his mind in his old anodynes: hard work and raw whisky.

He got out the Walraven file again and hammered out a feature article on the boyhood hardships of "Clarendon's First Citizen," numb to the sordid facts that had to be omitted. He went out to cover a stop-Walraven meeting of indignant citizens, and put tongue in cheek to write it up the way Grady said Troy wanted it written, as a sinister gathering of the evil henchmen of unspecified interests.

He was afraid to go home.

He tried not to let his thoughts dwell upon the reasons, but he loitered about the newsroom until the third edition went to press, and then stopped to have a few drinks with some of the gang in the bar across the street.

Somehow, he was afraid to go to sleep. It was long past midnight, and he was reeling with whisky and fatigue, when he tiptoed down the creaking hall and let himself into his little apartment in the gloomy old house on Bread Street.

He hated the place suddenly, with all its vague musty smells and the faded, dingy wall paper and the cheap, ugly furniture. He hated his job on the Star and the cynical dishonesties of his article on Walraven. He hated Preston Troy. He hated April Bell, and he hated himself.

He felt tired and lonely and bitter, and suddenly very sorry for himself. He couldn't do the lying stuff that Troy demanded of him, and yet he knew he lacked the fortitude to quit. It was Dr. Mondrick who had killed his pride and confidence, he thought bitterly, years ago when that gruff old scientist abruptly shattered his planned career in anthropology and refused to state a reason. Or was that idle blame-laying, and the fatal fault a part of himself? Anyhow, his life was wrecked and squandered. He could see no future—and he was afraid to sleep.

He dawdled in the bathroom, and tilted up the bottle on the chiffonier to drain the last gulp of whisky. With the vague hope that it might somehow explain his dream, he took one of his old textbooks from the shelves and tried to read the chapter on lycanthropy.

The book cataloged the queerly universal primitive beliefs that human beings could change into dangerous carnivorous animals. He skimmed the list of human wolves and bears and jaguars, human tigers and alligators and sharks, human cats and human leopards and human hyenas. The were-tigers of Malaysia, he read, were believed invulnerable in the transformed state—but the careful, objective language of the academic authority seemed very dull and dry beside the remembered reality of his dream. His eyes began to blur and ache. He laid the book aside and crawled reluctantly into bed.

A were-tiger, it occurred to him, would make a peculiarly satisfactory transformation.

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