Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

“Thank you, but I can manage.” Michael stirred and muttered; and Linda said quickly, “I’d better get him home to bed. You say there’s a detour?”

“Yes, ma’am. Two blocks back, you turn right, then left at the next corner, and you’re on Main Street…”

She didn’t need the directions, but she nodded her thanks and pretended to listen intently. She turned the car carefully under his benevolent but critical eyes, and started back; wondering, as she did so, why she had the urge to hide their tracks. She was acting as if they might be objects of an ordinary search, instead of a quest by something not limited by human senses. Was that her intelligence, struggling against superstition, or simply overcaution? She gave it up, with a shrug that was a little desperate. Rational or not, the purpose was achieved; that nice boy would not think of her and her drunken bum of a husband if anyone came looking for a crazy girl fleeing with her lover.

Her lover. She drove on, automatically, through the night. Once, at her worst, she had prayed that she would never love anyone again. Love had betrayed her too often. With her father, who had died and left her, and her mother, who had never given a damn about her because she was a girl, and had “all these funny ideas.” And, after she had gone to him for the security her childhood had lacked, with Gordon. He had not only failed, he had used love as a weapon against her, a blindfold to hide his true nature, a spy that betrayed her own weaknesses. Love? It was a chameleon word with a thousand meanings. There were as many kinds of love as there were human beings-a hundred times more, because every human being had that many different feelings which he called by the same name.

Beside her, Michael moaned and shifted. His head dropped onto her shoulder. She adjusted her weight and kept on driving, eyes steady on the road.

When she first saw him, she regarded him not as a man but as a ladder by means of which she might climb out of the pit where Gordon held her prisoner. She had meant to ensnare his senses so that his reasoning faculties would be blinded, and he would obey her demands with the uncritical partisanship which that kind of “love” induced in the victim. It was a blindness with which she was only too familiar.

Not that she had meant to tell him the truth. Some tale of conventional “mental cruelty” would have done the trick-or so she thought. She knew now that she would never have caught this man with anything so crude. She might more safely have appealed to his sense of compassion. But that was a double-edged weapon, too easily turned against her-“poor girl, she needs help but doesn’t know it; we must hurt her for her own good.” Gordon had already used that, and it had almost worked. But that was Michael’s strength; no appeal that was purely emotional could convince him completely. He had a critical brain, critical even of himself, and it functioned. Even now, though he “loved” her-whatever he might mean by that word-he was still asking questions. He had come to her defense not because of “love” but because the tireless critical brain had produced facts that cracked his first predilection in favor of Gordon and Gordon’s explanations.

With that kind of intelligence she had no quarrel; in fact, it might be the only solid thing in a shifting universe, and the one quality above all others that had made her turn to him. But love, whatever else it was, was not a sterile agreement of similar minds. And, after the last agonizing months, she was no longer sure of her capacity to give anything beyond that.

The inert mass beside her stirred again, and she started.

“Are you awake?”

“I’m not sure… Where are we?”

“About halfway to the city. I haven’t been planning; I’ve just been driving.”

“Pull over as soon as you can find a place.”

They were approaching a town, and she found the parking lot of an all-night diner. She left the engine idling, pushed down the parking brake, and turned to Michael.

He was upright and aware, but the dull look in his eyes alarmed her.

“You’ve got to have a doctor. I’ll ask, at the diner.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve got to think… What sort of story are we going to tell a doctor?”

“But it’s nothing the police need to…Oh, I see. He’ll know it was an animal, won’t he? He’ll start fussing about rabies. He’ll want us to report it, describe where it happened, so the police can check. If we said the dog belonged to a friend of ours-”

“He may wonder what kind of friends we have, that they didn’t call in their family doctor. Lying is complicated, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes telling the truth is more complicated. Michael, we’ll have to risk it. Maybe he’ll be sleepy and bored and won’t care.”

“Yes, we’ll have to risk it.”

“Does it hurt terribly?”

“Yes, damn it, it hurts. But that’s not what’s bothering me. I can’t risk being incapacitated. Don’t you understand? What happened tonight was the first round. And we lost. You don’t think he’ll give up now, do you?”

“No. But I wouldn’t say we lost. We got away.”

“Leaving one dead on the field of battle. She lost. She’s dead because she lost. Whatever she was doing, or thought she was doing, it failed.”

“That couldn’t have been part of his plan. He didn’t know she’d be there.”

“I don’t know what his plan is, that’s why I feel so helpless. But I’m beginning to suspect that my involvement isn’t coincidental. Why he’s got it in for me I don’t know, but he asked for me; he did everything he could to throw us together. He has something in mind. And until we figure out what, we’re fighting blind. Let’s locate that doctor. You go and ask while I try to think of some disarming lie.”

The doctor was suspicious and hard to soothe. Groggy and querulous at first, he woke up completely after a look at Michael’s injuries, and only the latter’s quick imagination kept him from calling the police. Michael managed to suggest a drunken party and considerable provocation; the smell of brandy on his breath went a long way toward convincing the doctor that the affair had been an ordinarily middle-class brawl, with possibilities of scandal, in which he was better not involved. They left as soon as they could get away.

“Well,” Linda said, when they were back in the car, “if the police make any inquiries, we won’t be hard to trace this far.”

Michael shook his head. The pills the doctor had given him were working. He looked much better.

“I don’t think we need to worry about the police. Not that we can go to them for help; our story is too wild. And if we’d been found there, with Andrea dead and the house blazing, we’d have had some embarrassing questions to answer. But a common garden-variety scandal can’t be Gordon’s aim. He won’t turn us in, and nobody else knows we were at Andrea’s.”

“I’ll bet the police would love to have some witnesses as to what happened there.”

“Not even that. Even if they find the-evidence intact, the logical conclusion will be that Andrea was carried away by her histrionics and had a heart attack. There wasn’t a mark on her. In fact-that may have been just what did happen.”

“You don’t believe-”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

“The dog. It was real enough.”

“Too real. I felt it, all hundred pounds of it. It felt like a dog; it even smelled like a dog.”

“But the others-the supernatural animals-”

“Werewolves,” Michael said roughly. “Say it. My God, are we going to cringe away from words?”

“Werewolves are real; they take material form.”

“I know, I’ve read all the horror stories. Everything works two ways, doesn’t it? Do you realize that nothing that has happened couldn’t be explained in rational terms?”