Читать книгу Seven Out of Time - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 7

Table of Contents

There was a card in my hand. By the evidence of every possible sense I held the card of Achronos Astaris in my hand. A man who seemed sane insisted that hand was empty, but I could feel the card in it, see it, read the name and address printed on it. It was there. I'd found it in the catalogue of the exhibit where Evelyn Rand's portrait hung.

I did not know that. I'd decided the card had been between the pages of that pamphlet because it was madness to permit myself to believe that it had been handed to me during a space of time that occupied no time at all, by a man who did not exist.

But if the card itself did not exist!

Here it was between my thumb and fingers, white, crisp, unquestionable. Even if the pharmacist hadn't seen it, others had. The gray bookseller. The policeman on Madison Ave.

Had they? I had dropped it in the bookstore, had bent to pick it up, but the near-sighted dealer in second-hand tomes had said nothing, done nothing, to indicate that he was aware of why I stooped, of what I reached for. Nor, I now recalled, had I shown the card to either officer.

What if I had not? The card was real, couldn't be anything else but real. I had been meant to hear the druggist's whisper, saying that it was not. It was his perverted idea of a joke. The best thing to do about the incident was to forget it. The card had to be real. The alternative was—

I dared not put that alternative into words, even in thought. I could test it however, very simply.

I could go to Furman Street and look for number four-nineteen. If it was there, if a man named Achronos Astaris lived there, I was sane.

My skull felt drained, empty, when I reached that decision. I stared about me. I saw a lamp post and a street sign stiffly projecting from it. The sign said, Plum Street. By continuing on the way I was going I would come to Furman Street, in the four hundred block.

I got moving. This street was as deserted as those through which I had come. Yet I had a queer feeling that I was not alone in it, that someone was keeping ahead of me, just ahead, although I could see no one. The sidewalk curved, climbed quite steeply to brightness about a hundred yards before me. I thought I caught a flutter of misty blue up ahead, but when I looked more closely it was gone.

The houses beside me ended and I halted, staring out into the brightness of sky over water, gazing raptly at the mountainous mass that seemed suspended in that brightness.

Stone and steel and glass, across the bustling water each gargantuan tower was separate and distinct, but all were merged in a jagged pyramid that climbed, colossal in beauty, 'til its topmost pinnacle challenged the sun. Manhattan's skyscrapers.

After awhile my gaze drifted downward to the swirling, cloudlike haze that obscured the bases of the skyscrapers and made it seem as though they hung unsupported in midair.

Strange, I was thinking, that so late in the day the mists still should be heavy on the Bay, and then I realized that the obscurity was neither cloud nor mist and that it lay not on the water but on the nearer shore.

What my unfocussed eyes had diagnosed as vapor I saw now was a low building that faced the end of Plum Street, a low gable- roofed wooden house, white-painted, with a little green lawn before it. A narrow gravel path went up through the lawn to an oaken door that made a dark, semicircle-topped rectangle in the clapboard facade.

One comes upon such relics of a more gracious past in the most unlikely parts of New York. Mostly, though, they are dilapidated, ramshackle, mouldering to ruin. This one seemed perfectly preserved. The pickets of the wrought iron fence around its pocket handkerchief of a lawn were unscarred by rust, its windows obviously were washed and gleaming even if darkened by the blinds pulled down behind their panes.

From the center of the roof a small domed cupola rose and around it ran a narrow, railed balcony.

Recalling something of my school history, I wondered if George Washington had not perhaps stood on that balcony, spyglass to eye, watching General Gates' redcoats filling the barges that would bring them across the river to the Battle of Brooklyn Heights. Perhaps this house had been his headquarters during that momentous encounter. That would explain its preservation.

On either side of it was a four-storied structure of gray stone, each the beginning of a row running off to right and left paralleling the shore. In front of the building to the left—my left—of the gabled wooden house was a tall brown lamp post and the sign on the lamp post read Furman Street.

The number painted on the third step of the high stoop of the house behind the lamp post was 415. The number painted on the third stoop of the stone house to the right—my right—of the low white house was 423.

The house between them, the house with the little lawn and the balconied cupola must be, then, Number 419 Furman Street.

As I went across to it some errant breeze lifted a whirl of dust from the asphalt. It accompanied me across the opposite sidewalk and through the gate in the tall fence of wrought iron. It whispered about me as I went up the path and although I felt the gravel crunch under my feet there was no other sound in the hush than the whisper of that tiny whorl of dust.

The high portal, oak darkened by the years to the tone of old leather and to its secret glow, opened smoothly, silently before me. Without hesitation, almost as though I were no longer master of my own movement, I stepped through the aperture into cool dimness.

The door thudded dully behind me. It shut out the city's low murmur, so omnipresent that I had not been aware of it 'til now it was gone. It was as if a barrier had come between me and the world I knew.

Passing from the bright winter sunshine to this semidarkness, I was temporarily blinded. I halted, a bit bemused, waiting for sight to be restored.

I could make out no detail of the place where I was. I could see only a gray, featureless blur. But I had an impression of spaciousness—of space really. Of a vast, limitless space that by no imaginable means could be confined within the four walls of a house. Of a space that could not be confined within the four points of the compass!

Abruptly my thigh muscles were quivering and the nausea of vertigo was twisting within me! I seemed to be on the brink of a bottomless chasm. If I took another step I would hurtle down, forever down. The impulse seized me to take that step, to hurl myself, plummeting, into that illimitable abyss—

Hold it, Johnny March! I told myself, voicelessly. Hold everything! This is only the hall of an old house. In a moment your pupils will adjust themselves and you will see it—walls papered with the weeping-willow design you've always liked, hooked rugs on a floor of axe-hewn planks, perhaps a graceful balustraded staircase—

Subconsciously I must already have been aware of all this, for the very foyer I described took shape out of the formless blur. The design I remembered from the Early American Exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum patterned the faded walls. Wide planks made the floor, rutted with decades of treading feet and keyed together by tiny double wedges of wood, and their dull sheen was brightened by oval rugs whose colors were still glowing despite the years since patient hands had fashioned them. Directly ahead of me the wide staircase I had imaged rose, gently curving, to obscurity above, its dark rails tenuous and graceful.

"Well," I said, turning to the person who had admitted me. "This is—" I never finished the sentence.

No one was there. No one at all!

Someone had opened the door for me, and no one had passed me, going away from it. But of course whoever it was had slipped out the door, as I entered.

Was Brooklyn inhabited exclusively by practical jokers? This one wasn't going to get away with it. He couldn't have gotten far. I grabbed the doorknob, determined to go after him.

The door didn't open. It was locked! I was locked in!

That was going too far, much too far. I—

A silken rustle behind me twisted me around. I started to say just what I thought of the proceedings—My mouth remained open, the angry words dying unspoken.

Down the stairs from above were coming tiny feet, a froth of lace, a circular billow of foaming lace that could only be the hems of the multitudinous petticoats women wore in the days when this house was built. Then the filmy blue of a wide hoopskirt descended into view, a pointed bodice tight on a waist my hand could span.

I shook my head, trying to shake the cobwebs out of it. What the devil was this?

The crinolined maiden paused on the stairs, a slim white hand to her startled bosom. For a moment the shadow of the ceiling was across her face, and then I saw it, whitely luminous against the dark background of the stairs.

It was the face of Evelyn Rand! The soft red mouth was tight with pain, the gray eyes peering down at me were haunted with a strange dread; but this was the face that had looked out from the portrait on Madison Avenue...

"Evelyn!" I cried, leaping forward. My feet struck the bottom step, pounding upward—

And suddenly were motionless.

She wasn't there any longer. She wasn't above me on the stairs. She hadn't retreated, startled by my cry. She had blinked out, in the instant it had taken me to get across the floor and three steps up.

Something was left of her. A faint sweetness on the air. The scent of spring. The scent of dreams.

Of dreams. Was I at it again? Had I only dreamed that I saw her?

"Not quite," a low, toneless voice said behind me. "She was not there, but neither did you dream that she was."

I wheeled, my breath caught in my throat.

Just below me at the stairs' foot, vagrant light from somewhere gleaming on the polished scalp of his too-large head, his lashless and disquieting eyes pinpoints of flame in the gloom, was the little man of the art gallery!