Читать книгу One of us is a Murderer - Alan Le May - Страница 3

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Up on one elbow, listening in the dark, I slowly achieved relaxation once more; and as my brain cleared a little from the fogs of sleep I silently swore at myself for the restlessness which, a dozen times lately, had jerked me broad awake, and set me listening to the tropic night.

Never have I heard South America more still. Almost you could hear the slow river flowing under the heat. But though not a leaf stirred, nor a breath of air, I felt that all the night jungle was awake and listening as I listened, tense in the dark. Presently, a long way up the black Rio Estrago, a jaguar voiced a deep coughing snarl, once, and then no more. Doggedly I lowered my cheek to the hot sheet.

Instantly a galvanizing snap of nerves brought me up again. Stealthily, but very definitely, the screen of my window had lowered against its sill—a faint sound, but unmistakable. I struck up my mosquito net.

Being under a mosquito net in the dark is like being inside a cloud. Then as you lift the net the room outside appears unexpectedly dark, but unexpectedly distinct too, like reality after a dream. I could see clearly the dim square of the window, and the gray shape of the net-shrouded bed where Buckner Loftus slept, against the other wall of our narrow room. At first, however, that was all. I was about to drop my net about me in disgust.

Then, against the dim ghostly blur of Loftus’s net a dark shape moved.

In height that dark mass could hardly have been waist high to a man: a shapeless form, except for an arched curve of back, distinct against the half-seen background of the net. It could have been a tapir, if a tapir could appear suddenly within a man’s room on soundless feet; or it could have been a crouching man.

Swiftly the silhouetted shape moved across the cone of my vision, seeming to sway irregularly as it ran. It was very close—Loftus’s bed was no more than five feet from my own, and what I saw was between—yet I heard no sound, not even the creak of a board in a house in which all boards creaked at the least excuse, or with none.

As the shadow passed out of my sight I shot out an arm and made a grab at it; but my hand closed on air, and my fingernails bit so hard into my palm that I thought for an instant I had caught something. In the main room off which the narrow bedroom opened, a board squeaked once, reassuring me that my eyes had not lied.

Immediately I jerked on the white duck trousers that I kept at my side—you don’t sleep in pajamas in the heat of the equator—and swung out of bed, whipping free of the net. A loose board under my feet sent a dismal squall through that poorly built, climate-racked house. My flashlight was on a chair beside me, and I snatched it up as I stepped to the door of the room.

Someone was moving toward me down the length of the main room, his soft footfalls plainly audible upon the complaining floor. I snapped the flash in the direction of the unseen approach, and was disappointed to catch nothing more mysterious than the huge figure of Buckner Loftus, naked to the waist as was I. Instantly I swept the flash around the whole of the main room, over the musty reed furniture, the decaying grass matting, the netted cot where Phil Heneshaw was sleeping. Except for Buckner Loftus, I found nothing but the surging shadows of the forlorn still furniture, and empty doors.

“What you doing?” Loftus grumbled sleepily. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

“Have you been out doors?” I asked him sharply.

Buckner Loftus was another geologist, a youngster at the game, like myself. But though chance had made us temporary roommates here, no particular warmth had marked our acquaintance. Loftus had an overbearing swagger about him, apparently derived from his enormous physical strength. And I think it annoyed him that I had three years’ experience in the tropics, having come there immediately after my discharge in 1919, whereas he had behind him only a single survey somewhere in Yucatan.

“No, I haven’t been out doors,” he growled. “I’ve been to the water cooler to get a drink, and what the hell is it to you?”

“Heneshaw! Are you awake?” I switched my light to the net-shrouded cot on the other side of the room.

The light failed to penetrate the blank white wall of the mosquito net, so that at first I thought the man was gone. In a moment, however, the spring of the cot squawked, the net billowed erratically, and he got to his feet long enough to flounder drowsily out of the net.

Phil Heneshaw was our host, being manager of the Estrago station of Far Rivers Mahogany, Inc. Except for his wife, whom he should never have brought there, he was also the sole white resident of this useless and inaccessible post; for to all practical purposes Far Rivers Mahogany seemed to be defunct. An old-maidish, disappointed man, looking much older than his fifty-odd years.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded irritably, sitting down again on the cot’s edge. The spring of his cot popped like a little pistol.

“Did you hear anyone come into this room?” I asked.

“When?”

“Right now!”

“Who?”

Exasperated, I turned to Buckner Loftus. “And you? You were at the water cooler, you say. Did you hear anyone come in here just before I flashed my light?”

“Heck no! What’s the matter with you?”

“You didn’t hear a door open and close, or a board squeak?”

“Sure, boards squeaked! Probably you squeaked them yourself, you damn fool. Get out of the way—I’m going to bed.”

“Somebody—or something,” I said, “has come into this house that doesn’t belong in here. I’m going to know who and why.” I told them what I had seen.

“This is queer—very queer,” said Heneshaw. “Are you sure you didn’t imagine this?” He had the dazed, haggard look peculiar to aging men who have been startled out of their sleep. The lank gray hair that he brushed over his bald spot was dangling in his eyes, giving him a look of dishevelment very unusual to him, who was always so neat and so precise.

“You birds have been in the tropics too long,” grunted Loftus. He went hulking back to his bed, and we heard his wooden cot groan under his great frame.

Of the seven doors leading from that room, three were open, besides my own. The bungalow’s one main room ran clear through the house, opening on both front and rear galleries, and since the galleries were screened, the doors to them were never shut. The other open door ventilated the room shared by Doc Harmon and Charley Walker. Quickly I went first to the front gallery, and then to the rear, exploring them with my light. Both of the outside screen doors were unhooked; but though the hinges were well oiled I thought that I would have heard them open and close, had anyone gone out by these ways.

When I came back into the main room old Heneshaw was rubbing his eyes with thumb and finger.

“I think this is all nonsense,” he said testily.

“Someone has come prowling into this house—and is in it yet,” I insisted.

“Harry Blackburn is the only one of us who hasn’t been in the house all the time,” he grumbled. “There’s no one else within sixty miles—except a few timorous Indian servants. I’m going back to sleep.”

Deliberately I laid my flashlight on the table and lit one of the kerosene lamps. I heard Doc Harmon roll his obese bulk, and simultaneously begin a gentle snoring. From the same room Charley Walker’s voice sung out gruffly:

“What’s going on out there?”

“That’s exactly what I want to know.”

“How about less noise?”

It looked as if I was going to make my investigations alone. At this point, however, Jane Corliss quietly joined me, and at the first sound of her voice Loftus was up again and among us. She was wearing a flimsy blue dressing gown, or whatever you call it, that brought out the blue of her eyes, which was like Caribbean waters; and she looked freshly awake and cool, in contrast to our own bleary sleepiness. Only, the brief smile which she flashed at Buck Loftus, and then impartially at me, seemed somehow wan and strained.

“If this isn’t the most awful night!” she said. “Has anything happened?”

“Macgregor saw a spook,” Loftus boomed in his big patronizing voice. “What’s the matter, kid? Can’t you sleep?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jane apologized. “But I keep imagining I hear the most ghastly noise ...”

“What kind of a noise?”

“Oh—an awful, strangling sort of noise, out in the clearing. I suppose it’s only peccaries, or something. Only, I keep thinking I can almost distinguish words.”

“Do you hear it now? Listen a minute.”

We stood silent. Even Doc Harmon’s snoring had ceased, and nothing moved anywhere in that Godforsaken house under the tropic heat. Besides the three of us that stood there in the lamplight, there were four people sleeping in the house that night; and now I had a curious feeling that everyone in that house was lying rigidly awake, listening.

“No,” said Jane at last, “I think—I think it’s stopped.” The faintest suggestion of a quiver had come into her voice, and instantly anger swept me that anything had been permitted, even for a moment, to worry this girl.

“I’m going out and talk to Harry Blackburn,” I said, picking up my flash. Harry Blackburn, who had just completed six weeks’ geologic exploration in the jungle, had declined to sleep in the rather crowded house, preferring to swing his net and hammock in the open.

“Me too,” Loftus decided abruptly.

“Then,” said Jane, “I’m going with you. I can’t stand this house another minute!”

“We’ll fix it, kid,” said Loftus. He dropped a casual heavy arm across her shoulders, and chuckled when she moved away from him.

Pale moonlight lay with an almost palpable weight upon that forlorn house in the jungle. A banana plantation had been attempted here by a German firm, and the jungle had been pushed back a few hundred yards; but the war had stopped the project, and the jungle was returning fast. Seventy paces from the house now rose an impenetrable front of cecropia and bamboo, above which you could still see the ragged heads of the choked bananas. A hundred yards to our right as we crossed the clearing toward Blackburn’s hammock ran the Rio Estrago, its silent ebony waters untouched by mist. And all around us beyond the bamboo rose the older jungle, a black wall a hundred feet tall, solid as a cliff in that little light.

To me it was incredible that Jane Corliss was walking beside me in that jungle clearing. Dan Corliss had chosen to leave his daughter here with the Heneshaws while he went on some undefined errand into the jungle. He had known Phil and Lucretia Heneshaw for a long time, and since Dan Corliss was all the family Jane had, I suppose he wanted to keep her as near him as he could. Since I had first met Jane in Colón, a year before, I had thought of her many and many a time while pacing alone under that same tropic moon; but now that she was here, well within the borders of that dark jungle, I found it hard to believe in her actuality.

“This is all foolishness, of course,” said Buckner Loftus. He grinned down at Jane possessively.

As for me, I did not smile yet. Ahead of us, where Harry Blackburn’s net hung between two gaunt trees at the edge of the bamboo, I had already seen something I did not like. That mosquito net was open; and the black vertical gap in its side was no normal opening, for those nets open only at the bottom.

“Jane,” said I, “you’d better go back.” Later I wondered if she remembered a strain in my voice, before it was noticed that anything was wrong.

“I’d rather stay with you.”

“What the——” growled Buck Loftus. He suddenly strode ahead, and thrust head and shoulders through the gap in Harry Blackburn’s net. I studied him as he turned and hooked his thumbs in his belt.

“He ain’t in it,” said Buck. “Funny. This net’s been cut wide open, with a knife.”

He stood up, and ran a quick eye around the whole moonlit circumference of the clearing. Seventy paces beyond us the cottage lay small and dingy under the moon, looking unspeakably ancient and deserted. A little distance farther stood the decaying grass huts where once had lived the native laborers who had planted bananas; a handful of Indians—house boys and their families—lived there now. The rest of the clearing within the bamboo lay open, its flat floor clogged only by a short ragged grass.

My flashlight, as I snapped it on, made a bright disc on the ground, turning the moonlight dull. At our feet the grass showed the trampled trail we had followed from the house; it was the same trail that Blackburn had already tramped down, while making the innumerable trips back and forth that are required by a fussy man who is establishing himself for the night. No other trail showed, leading to or from the hammock, until I lowered the flashlight to the level of the grass. You get a cross-shadow that way, that shows up little things; and we instantly made out another trail—a light twisting mark perhaps only once or twice traversed, for the bent grasses were rising again.

I let the bright circle of light follow the twisting mark slowly, foot by foot. The trail was easy enough to see, once you knew it was there, and which way it went.

How that deceptive moonlight can hide things from you, even when you are very close! Twenty feet from the hammock Harry Blackburn lay, crumpled in the grass.

I struck out a hand to restrain Loftus. Even then I knew that we should approach that quiet figure some other way than by the mark in the grass that led to it.

That trail was going to need to be read. But before I could catch his arm he had leaped ahead, and was crouching by the still form; and Jane, following him, was at his side.

Loftus stood up slowly, the swagger gone out of his immense shoulders. As he looked from one to the other of us, all the naturalness went out of that still moonlit clearing and I think more than one of us suddenly felt that the encircling jungle was pressing us close against the black river, as if we stood exposed to all evil in a trap that had closed.

There was no need for Loftus’s booming voice, for we knew what he was going to say before he spoke: “He—he’s dead.”

I looked at my watch: it was two-fourteen.