Читать книгу Seven Out of Time - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 5

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Art lovers are not as a rule early risers, and so after I had purchased a catalogue from the drowsy Cerberus in the foyer and passed through the red plush portieres before which he sat, I had the high-ceiled exhibition room to myself.

Shaded, tubular lights washing the surfaces of the paintings on the walls accentuated the dimness that filled the reaches of the gallery. A decorous hush brooded here; the thick, soft carpeting muffling the sound of my feet, close-drawn window drapes smothering traffic noise from without. I passed a circular seat in the center of the floor and saw Evelyn Rand looking at me from the further wall.

Although I had never seen her pictured anywhere, as sure was I that this was the portrait I had come to see that I did not took at the gray catalogue I'd picked up at the door but went right to it.

I was aware only of her face at first, ethereal and some how luminous against the dark amorphous background the artist had chosen to give her. It seemed to me that there was a message for me in the gray, frank eyes that met mine, message somewhere beneath their surface. It almost seemed to me that the satin-soft red lips were on the point of speaking.

Those lips were touched with a wistful smile, and there was something sad about them. Somehow the portraitist had contrived to make very real the glow of youth in the damask cheeks, the lustre of girlhood in the honeyed texture of the hair, but there was, too, something ageless about that face, and a yearning that woke a responsive ache within me.

Yes, this girl could have written the poems that were locked now in a drawer of my own desk. Yes, she would be loved by everyone who had the good fortune to know her.

She must have been about sixteen at the time of the portrait. The body one sensed within the gossamer frock, a misty blue such as tinctures the sky when it is lightly brushed with cloud, was just burgeoning into womanhood. The hollows at the base of the neck were not quite yet filled.

A fine gold chain circled that neck and pendant from it was a black gem, replica of the one I'd found in the nursery. There had, then, been two of them. Odd! I looked closer. I was not mistaken. The edge of the painted amulet was marred by a wedge- shaped break. But the same accident could not have marred two artifacts in precisely the same way. Nor could the one in the portrait be the same as that I had found in the nursery. The Evelyn Rand painted here was at least sixteen as I've said and when she'd sat for the portrait the black stone I'd found had been lost and locked behind a door that had not been opened for almost ten years.

I was wrong, of course, in thinking the breaks were exactly matched. I must be wrong, yet it was with curious reluctance that I fished the gem I'd found out of my vest pocket.

It was the same. It was precisely the same as the one in the portrait.

The stroke of a tower clock came dully into the dim gallery. Bonn-n-ng. As if to escape from the thoughts that probed at my mind I counted the strokes. Bonn-n-ng. Two. Bo- nn-n-ng. Three. Automatically I glanced at my wrist watch. Ten o'clock. Bonn-n-ng...

"An interesting bit," a low voice murmured. "Well worth the study you are giving it."

The little man had come up so quietly beside me that he seemed almost to have materialized out of the air of the empty gallery, yet somehow I was not startled. "Yes," I responded, slipping the stone back into my pocket. "Yes, it is quite interesting."

The fellow was short, so short that the top of his head, completely bald, barely came to my shoulder. That head seemed out of proportion, seemed almost grotesquely too large for his small figure and his round face seemed to float almost disembodied in the light from Evelyn Rand's portrait, the rest of him in shadow.

His skin was yellowish and of an odd lustreless texture I should have thought of as 'parchment-like' except that parchment is wrinkled and this skin was so smooth that I had a disquieting impression it might be artificial. There was nothing artificial about the tiny eyes that peered unblinkingly at the picture, black eyes keener and more piercing than any I'd 'til then seen.

"You have noticed," the little man was saying, "how painstakingly the artist has depicted every physical detail. You feel that merely by reaching out you can touch the warmth of the girl's flesh, or straighten that fold in her frock the wind has disarranged, or take that black pendant in your hand and examine it more closely."

Did his glance flash to my face at this mention of the gem, as if to trap any change in my expression before I could mask it? I could not be sure. He was looking at the portrait again and his low, clear voice flowed on.

"But I wonder if you appreciate how much of his subject's personality the artist has contrived to convey. She is not quite in tune with the world where she finds herself. All her life she has been lonely, because she does not quite belong. She has a sort of half-knowledge of matters hidden from others of her race and time, not altogether realized but sufficiently so that very dimly she is aware of the peril the full unveiling of that knowledge would bring upon her."

"What peril?" I demanded, twisting to him. "What do you know about her?"

He smiled blandly at me, answered, "I know what the artist put on that canvas for me to read. And for you. Look at it again."

I did. I saw the girl. I saw the dark, amorphous background and that was all.

"Look." I felt fingers brush lightly across my eyes but I did not resent the liberty, forgot it, forgot the little man who had taken it.

Behind the painted girl there was no longer formless shadow. There was, instead, a desolate landscape so informed with strangeness that I knew if it existed anywhere it was nowhere on Earth. And from that scene there reached out to me a sense of awe and a sense of overpowering dread.

No living thing was visible to explain that apprehension. It stemmed from the vista itself, from the grayish purple hue of its shadows, from the sky that was too low and of a color no sky should be. Most of all, however, it was aroused in me by the monstrous monument that loomed from the too-near horizon.

Black this tremendous shape was, the same strangely living black as the little stone in my vest pocket, and incredibly formed; and there spread from it an adumbration of menace of which Evelyn was as yet unaware.

"Where is it?" I squeezed through my locked larynx. "Tell me where that place is."

"Not yet." The little man peered at me with the detached interest of an entomologist observing an insect specimen. "Not yet," he repeated and it seemed to me that he was answering not my demand but the thought in my throbbing brain, the thought that Evelyn was in some nameless danger and I must go to her to save her from it. "When it is time you will come to me and learn what you want to know." He thrust a white oblong into my hand. Automatically, I glanced down at the card.

There was not enough light to read it. I lifted it to catch the reflection from the portrait—and realized that the man was no longer beside me.

He was nowhere in the room. He must have gone swiftly out, the carpeting making his footfalls soundless. Bon-n-ng. The tower clock was striking again. Muffled as it was, I was grateful for the familiar sound. Bon-n-ng...Bon-n-ng. It was not the half-hour that was striking, but the hour! Bon-n-ng. We had not seemed to have been talking nearly that long. Bon- n-ng. The dull sound welled into the hush of that painting- walled room. Bon-n-ng...The gong died to silence.

Six! There had been only six strokes of the clock! I had not heard the first five. That was only natural. My attention had been on the little man. The clock had struck five times before he was gone and I became aware of it.

It takes only a small distraction of one's attention to blot out awareness of a striking clock. I'd been counting those strokes an hour ago. I had counted four when the little man spoke to me, and yet I didn't recall hearing the rest of the ten at all.

Four and six are ten!

Nonsense! This I was thinking was arrant, impossible nonsense. Nevertheless my lifted hand trembled slightly as I turned it to look at the watch strapped to its wrist.

Its hands stood at ten. At ten o'clock precisely, just as they had when the little man first spoke to me.

For a long minute the shadows of that art gallery hid the Lord alone knows what shapes of dread. The painted faces leered at me from the walls—

All but one. The face of Evelyn Rand, its wistful smile unchanged, its gray eyes cool, and frank and friendly, brought me back to reason. Her face, and the fact that behind her I could see no strange, unearthly landscape but a formless swirl of dark pigment, warm in tone and texture and altogether without meaning except to set off her slim and graceful shape.

I was still uneasy, but not because of any supernatural occurrence. A fellow who's never known a sick day in his life can be forgiven for being upset when he finds out there are limits to his endurance.

For two weeks I had been plugging away at my hunt for Evelyn Rand, and I hadn't been getting much sleep, worrying about her. I hadn't had any at all last night, returning from Westchester in a smoke-filled day, coach on the nerve-racking Putnam Division. I was just plain fagged out, and I'd had a waking dream between two strokes of the tower clock.

Dreams I knew from the psychology course I once took to earn an easy three credits, can take virtually no time to go through one's mind. From what I'd learned in that same course, that I should have imagined Evelyn in some strange land, with some obscure menace overhanging her, was a symbolization of the mystery of her whereabouts and of my fears for her. The little man represented my own personality, voicing my inchoate dreads and tantalizing me with a promise of a solution to the riddle deferred to some indefinite future. 'Not yet', he had said...

It was all simple and explicable enough, but it was disturbing that I should have undergone the experience. Maybe I ought to see a doctor. I had a card somewhere—

A card in my hand was the one I dreamed the little man had given me. It was real! Objects in dreams do not remain real when one wakes...

Hold everything! There was a rational explanation for this too. The card hadn't come out of the dream. It had been in the dream because I already had it in my hand. It must have been in the catalogue. Leafing the pamphlet as I was absorbed in contemplation of Evelyn's portrait, I had abstractedly taken it out unaware that I was doing so.

I looked at it, expecting it to be the ad of some other gallery connected with this one, or of some art school or teacher. It might be the latter but it didn't say so.

All there was on the card was a name and address:

ACHRONOS ASTARIS

419 Furman Street, Brooklyn

Brooklyn.

There is something solid and utterly matter-of-fact about that Borough of Homes and Churches, something stodgy and unimaginative and comfortable about its very name. I stuffed the card among a number of others in my wallet (lawyers accumulate such things as a blue serge suit accumulates flecks of air-floated thread) and forgot it.

I took a last, long look at the portrait of Evelyn Rand. My reconstruction of her personality was complete. All that was left was to find her.

All that was left! I laughed shortly and a little bitterly as I turned to leave the exhibition room. I had hoped somehow, somewhere among the things she had touched, the people she had known, the scenes through which she had moved, to come upon a hint of where and how to look for her. I had found nothing. Worse, every new fact about her that had come to light denied any rational explanation of her disappearance.

There was no youth in whom she was enough interested to make the idea of an elopement even remotely possible. She had manifested every evidence of contentment with her way of life; quiet, luxurious, interfered with not at all by the trustees of the Estate. To conceive the sensitive, shy girl as stagestruck would be the height of absurdity.

No reason for voluntary disappearance that I had been able to think of would fit into Evelyn's makeup as I knew it now.

Foul play was as thoroughly eliminated. Kidnappers would have made their demand for ransom by this time. Seventy-third Street had been crowded with churchgoers that Sunday morning; no hit- and-run accident, with the driver carrying off his victim, could have occurred unobserved. The police and hospital records had offered no suggestion of any more ordinary casualty that might have involved her. The charitable organizations to whom the income of the Estate of Darius Rand would go were to be chosen by the trustees only after the event of a lapse of her right to it. Evelyn Rand was the last person on earth to have an enemy, secret or otherwise.

The more I had learned about her—the less explicable her absence had become. I was licked. I ought to go back to the office and tell old Sturdevant to call in the police—I stopped stockstill in the brittle winter sunshine of Madison Avenue. Tentatively, almost fearfully, I tested the air with flaring nostrils.

I had not been mistaken. Faint but unmistakable I smelled what I'd thought I had; the mingled scent of arbutus and crocuses and hyacinths and the nameless fragrance of dreams. The perfume that was used by Evelyn Rand, and Evelyn Rand alone.

She was near. She was very near. She had passed this way minutes before. Seconds, for the delicate aroma could not have lived longer in the gasoline fumes and the reek of this city street.

I looked for her. Eagerly I looked for the girl of the portrait, and saw a messenger boy slouching down the pavement, a rotund beldame swathed in mink entering her sleek limousine, business men bustling past, someone's chic secretary on her way to the bank on the corner with a deposit book held tightly in her gloved small hand. A shabbily dressed old man pored over a tome at the sidewalk stall of a used bookstore beside me. I was in the middle of the block and nowhere on it was anyone who possibly could be Evelyn Rand.

The scent was gone and I felt empty inside. Weak. People were turning to stare at me. A man in a gray Homburg hat and a double breasted dark overcoat started toward me; if he spoke to me I'd probably pop him on that clipped little triangle of beard that waggled from his chin. I wheeled to the bookstall, plucked a ragged volume out of it—anything to hide my face, to give me a chance to pull myself together.

If this sort of thing kept up I was destined for an asylum. First I'd seen, talked to, someone who didn't exist. Now I was taking to smelling things. I tried to recall if I'd ever heard of anyone having olfactory hallucinations...

The bookworm next to me was watching me curiously. That was because I hadn't opened the book I'd picked up, wasn't even looking at it. If I didn't do so right away he'd be sure something was wrong.

The cloth binding was blistered and water-soaked, but the lettering on it still was distinct. The title of the book was—THE VANISHED!

It was, of course, pure coincidence. Nevertheless the short hairs at the nape of my neck bristled. It was too damned pat a coincidence for comfort.

The cover almost came away from the rest of the volume as I opened it. The paper was mildewed, powdery. I found the title page. The words, 'The Vanished', were repeated. Beneath the Old English type was a short paragraph in italics:

"Here are tales of a scant few of those who from the earliest dawn of history have vanished quietly from among the living yet are not numbered among the dead. Like so many whispering whorls of dust they went out of space and out of time, to what Otherwhere no one still among us knows, and none will ever know."

'Like so many whispering whorls of dust.' Could it be pure coincidence that those words wavered on this stained page? My fingers were cold and numb as I turned it and stared at the headings; Elijah, Prophet in Israel. The Tsar Alexander the First. King Arthur of Camelot. John Orth, Archduke of Tuscany. Francois Villon, Thief, Lover and Poet. The Lost Dauphin. They Who Sailed on the Marie Celeste. Judge Crater of New York.

And, How Many Unrecorded Others?

Was Evelyn Rand one of the 'unrecorded others' who have vanished 'out of space and out of time?' Perhaps, the thought came to me, perhaps somewhere in this book I may find that hint, that suggestion of what has happened to her for which I've hunted so long in vain.

Not rational, of course. But remember I was not rational at that moment. Distinctly not rational, so far from it in fact that once the idea occurred to me it seemed to me that Evelyn approved, that she was urging me to act upon it.

I went into the store, shadowed, musty with the peculiar aroma of old paper and rotted leather and dried glue found only in such establishments. A gray man in a long gray smock shuffled out of the gray dusk between high shelfstacks.

"How much is this?" I inquired, holding the volume up.

"Hey?" He peered at me with bleared, half-blind eyes. "Hey?"

"I want to buy this book," I repeated. "How much do you ask for it?"

"This?" He took it in his clawlike hands, brought it so close to his face I thought he would bruise his nose. "The Vanished? Hm-m—" He pondered a matter of life and death. Finally he came out with the price. "Thirty-five cents."

"Little enough." I shoved my hand in my pocket, discovered I had no small change. "But you'll have to break a five for me," I said, taking my wallet from my breastpocket. "That's the smallest I have."

"You're a lucky man," the bookseller squeaked. "To have five dollars these days. Heh, heh, heh." I suppose the shrill twitter was meant for a laugh, but it irritated me. I jerked the bill from the fold so hard that it brought out with it a card that fluttered to the floor.

The gray man took the greenback and shuffled off into some misty recesses beyond the shelving. I bent to retrieve the white oblong.

I didn't pick it up. I remained stooped, my fingers just touching it, my nostrils flaring once more to the scent of spring, to the perfume of Evelyn Rand.

The sense of her presence was overpowering but now I knew it did not mean she was anywhere near. The perfume came from the card I was picking up and the printed name on that card was Achronos Astaris.

At last I knew where to look for her.