Читать книгу The Hound of Hell - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 4

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The tip of Alice Bolt's nose twitched, rabbit-like, and her acidulous voice whipped stridently through the aseptic whiteness of Oaklake's Meat Market. "The idea!" she shrilled. "The idea of sending us chops like these when you know Miss Sandra's clean distracted, what with her father not yet cold in his grave, so to speak, and Scratch missing for two days!"

"Scratch?" Oscar Johnson's china-blue eyes blinked from the pink roundness of his face. "Scratch?"

Miss Bolt sniffed. That was his way of sliding from under an argument—to get people talking about something else. "You know very well who Scratch is—Miss Sandra's black collie that her father gave her just before he took to his deathbed. The dog's gone; no one knows where. I declare, the Prescotts' Mamie was right when she said Satan himself has got into this town!"

Johnson grunted, as though he had been dealt a body blow. Those little eyes of his were suddenly gone white. "Satan!" Then, pulling himself together by what was evidently a tremendous effort, he blurted: "Ach. I don't feel so very good. Excuse me please."

He gestured weakly to his clerk to finish the transaction with Miss Bolt, tottered away to vanish in the mysterious back precincts of his shop.

Carl shrugged. "I don't know what's the matter with him these couple of weeks. He comes in bleary-eyed in the morning, like as if he hadn't slept at all. An' he's kicked out all the dogs he used to keep in the backyard here. Just plain kicked 'em out in the street one morning. I heard him yellin' like he was crazy: 'Raus! 'Raus! I vill feed no beasts from der defil!' "

As Miss Bolt came out under the timber-and-stucco balcony with which the butcher store tried to disguise itself as a Tudor tavern, cold, feathery hands brushed her spine. She tried to shake herself free of the uneasiness that had clung to her since the night Scratch had acted so strangely and then vanished. It had been growing, more and more, as strange things kept happening in the little suburban community. Eerie things, like the big man the children insisted they kept seeing peering out of trees on the other side of the railroad tracks, where nobody except adventuresome children ever went. "The giant with a dead face," they called him.

Station Square didn't look as if there were anything wrong, though. The six-three train was due in a few minutes and all along the curbing were parked cars, waiting for the homing commuters. Ginghamed young wives in Fords and Chevvies, frilled and furbelowed matrons in Buicks and Reos, whip-corded chauffeurs in Caddies and Lincolns, all craned eyes and ears to the gleaming rails toward the south where, if it were not dusk, one might almost see the towers of Big City.

And the dogs! Oaklake was known up and down the Northchester Branch as a doggy town. No wonder, when, every evening, passing commuters looked out on a depot plaza alive like this with a motley, yapping congregation ranging from Roger Meadows' Great Dane to the sundry squealing mongrels whom nobody claimed. It was all a cheerful scene, somehow, quenching Miss Bolt's uneasiness. She...

The vibrant hoot of a locomotive, the thunder of its drivers, drowned out her thoughts. Hiss of escaping steam blended with a murmur sweeping the plaza. Feminine hands fluttered to compacts. Feminine complexions received a final deft dabbing of powder. Canine feet pattered. Hairy, canine bodies clotted around a high, iron-barred gate where a sign said: "Exit Only." The barks crescendoed to a fury of welcome.

A big-framed chap plunged out of the stone-lined underpass, thrust his shoulder against bars, swung open the gate, came through. And suddenly the dogs surged away from before the man Alice recognized as John Stark!

But they weren't making a path for him, nor were they running away. They were backing! They were retreating stiff—legged, and their necks were bristling. Their lips were curling to expose black gums and white, pointed teeth. Nor were they yapping any longer. Low, vibrant growls came from deep in their chests, half-hushed fierce growls that were yet, somehow—afraid!

Miss Bolt's throat was suddenly dry, and her spine cold. Light seemed to have drained out of the plaza, leaving a queer greyness. There was no sound except the dogs' low snarling; no motion except the two or three plunging steps John Stark took before he froze, just in the center of the circle the dogs had made.

In that baroque plaza, under the eyes of a half-hundred sleek, smug suburbanites, Stark appeared weirdly as a lonely, primeval figure, encircled by the slavering jowls of the wild dog pack; by their jowls and their lowering eyes that were lurid with a strange conflict of bestial hate and dreadful fear. Those long, shaggy heads dropped lower, lower...

"They don't see him as we do," Miss Bolt half-thought, half-whispered. "They see something we can't—something a dog always sees when the fire drops low and the wind howls outside." She was quivering inwardly, was taut with an almost unbearable expectation, as if it were a tense moment of suspense on some theater stage. It was as if some master playwright had piled emotion on emotion to an insupportable pitch and the instant of climax was at hand—as if something more must come!

And it did come! It crashed out into the taut silence with a thunder like the voice of Fate itself—a sourceless bellow, wordless at first, then instantly clear and distinct—and fearful! "The Curse of the Dogs is on you, John Stark. You cannot escape!" It roared the threat, sonorous, awesome, and cut off again. Vibrant silence clamped down...

A woman in the crowd screamed. Without looking Alice knew it was May Stark, John's wife. The shrill sound sliced across the quivering hush like a knife-edge. It cut the unnatural spell leashing the dogs. The circle of them moved apart; the dogs were spectral figures flitting into the dusk. Lights flashed on, street lamps, headlights. Home-comers gushed out through the iron-barred gate. The train thundered away.

The Square was a sudden pandemonium of sound; of screaming women, shouting men. May Stark's shriek had released the watchers from the paralysis of fear, but it had not released them from fear itself. White faces, staring eyes, appeared in the glare of headlights—in the fanned-down cones of light from tall light-poles—and disappeared. A knot of friends formed around Stark; another around the Reo toward which he moved. Men dashed aimlessly about, looking for the source of that blasting Voice, looking for—they themselves knew not what.

Miss Bolt stood stark still in front of Johnson's market. She saw a stealthy figure sliding out of a dark store-vestibule. She was about to call out, but checked herself. Her brow furrowed as she watched Wally Leeds lose himself in the milling mob.

Despite the glaring, new lamps of which the Town Council was so proud, a dark shadow seemed somehow to lie on the Square. It spread its veil of queasy dread over the twinkling lights of the trim community located on the gentle hills sloping up from the railroad. It was within Miss Bolt, within her very brain. She shuddered...

Somewhere in the darkness, far off, a dog bayed; his howl was hollow, melancholy, menacing...