Читать книгу They Dine in Darkness - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

Table of Contents

JUNE FORSYTHE'S hand flew to her throat as though to stifle the scream that rose in it—the scream that, if given utterance, would betray her to the unknown horror that lurked in that ancient corridor. She stood stock-still, horribly unable to move as she listened to the grisly, scraping sounds that came from out of the eerie shadows ahead—the shadows through which she must pass.

The sounds were tiny sounds, such as might have been made by the scrape of claws on wood, the rubbing of a furry form against the rotting, mildewed plaster. From each of the many doorways let into the walls of this high-ceilinged passageway the sounds had come at intervals. Each doorway was a pocket of ominous blackness, and in each pocket sly horror lurked.

June's white lips moved in a soundless prayer for light. If only she possessed even a candle, she might be able to drive back the things that waited out there, but in the sprawling expanse of this rotting, deserted old office building there was no light of any kind, or any means of obtaining one. There was nothing at all but reverberant emptiness, hollowly, faintly echoing the city's roar that seeped vaguely through the thick old walls. Nothing but the dank fetor of a dead structure that had once been overwhelmingly alive... Nothing but the whispering scamper of the vileness its death had spawned.

But she couldn't stay here forever like this, rigid in the numbing grip of fear. The things that awaited her must be met, eventually—and they would not wait indefinitely. They would creep upon her, if she delayed too long, emboldened by her stillness—they would leap at her...

The girl drew a long quivering breath and dashed forward. Small, loathsome creatures squealed and scattered before the reckless impetuosity of her flight. One sleek gray beast, larger than the rest, did not flee. It crouched, and bared white fangs that gleamed in the darkness. Before it could spring, June's slim shoe struck it. There was a crunch of a small, snapped spine, the feel of a crushed body. June whimpered as nausea swept over her, and fled on down the hall on trembling limbs.

The patter of her rushing footfalls echoed and reechoed through the brooding silence. She snatched at a verdigrised doorknob. Sheer momentum almost tore her grasp from it. She held, and it swung her around to face tall double-doors of time-darkened oak, deeply set back in an arched embrasure. She opened the door and went it.

"Good morning, Miss Gordon," a voice greeted her.

June stood with her back against the door and shuddered. Hand to heaving breast she fought for breath, for control of her nerves. But Jeffery van Gandt had not looked up from the chaotic litter on the table he used as a desk. "I hope your dreams were pleasant ones." It was his customary greeting, spoken in deep-throated, mellow tones.

The grime on the huge window behind him could not keep out the blaze of the morning sun, so that van Gandt's body was detailless, a black silhouette against the glare. A silhouette such as might have been cast by a beau of the last century. For he wore a broad-brimmed grey top-hat on his finely modelled head, and a high, wing collar and big-knotted cravat added their bits to his old-fashioned outline.

"I won't come here any more!" June sobbed. "I won't!... They'll drive me mad!"

Van Gandt's look was mildly questioning. "What have your dreams, mad or otherwise, to do with your working for me?"

Hysteria was plucking at the girl's nerves, pulsing in her throat. "Dreams? Not dreams! Rats! The place is alive with them. Crawling with them!"

"Rats?" The man seemed puzzled. "Of course there are rats." He rose, came forward. He was very tall, and where the hair showed from under his anachronistic headgear it was quite white. But his clean-shaven face was fresh-complexioned, unwrinkled; and his figure slender, lithe within his grey frock coat, double-breasted vest, and tight pantaloons.

He peered nearsightedly at the girl. "My child," he exclaimed, suddenly solicitous. "You are pale. You stare so. You—you are frightened." He laid a long, sensitive hand on her arm, gently.

"Frightened! I'm terrified!" But even as she said it her terror seemed to be oozing away, almost as if that hand on her arm were driving off the fear.

"Yes." His tone was musing, thoughtful. "Yes, I see that you are frightened... of rats." He hesitated, seemed to ponder. His hand fell away.

Mechanically June removed her hat, her trim suit-coat, got crisp paper from the drawer of her own small desk that she might fold and clip it for cuffs. The accustomed routine was bringing her back to normal, but within she was still trembling.

"Are others as afraid of rats as you?" There was an oddly eager light in the bleared grey of van Gandt's eyes.

"All women fear them. Terribly. They're so—so terribly cruel." She could not repress the long shudder that ran through her delicately molded body.

"And men?"

"And men too, I think. I made Dan admit that he did, once. Before—before..." She caught herself. That was a slip. Van Gandt mustn't know that she had been married. But she had to blink back the tears that the thought of her stalwart husband still brought to her eyes.

It had been two years since that single, despairing radio call had come out of the sea's grey mystery: "Help! Help! Oh God, help us!"—but these two years had not availed to heal the hurt of her great loss. She had had him for so short a time, and then he had sailed away on the Marietta, and the secret of the ship's vanishing had never been solved. There had been no hint as to her fate except a tramp steamer's report of a red flare on the horizon, just about where the doomed vessel might have been.

Van Gandt went back to his table. Somehow his footfalls made no sound on the splintered, bare floor. "Rats," he murmured musingly as he collected a number of white papers covered with minuscule writing and tapped them into a neat pile. "I must make a note of that."

June Forsythe bustled busily at her own place, but from the corners of her eyes she watched her employer open a small and battered safe that stood under the broad sill of the window, watched him place the mass of papers within. Her pulse pounded sharply as she glimpsed the safe's shadowed interior. The grey back of an account book, inside, was splotched with red ink.

Van Gandt swung the iron door closed, twirled the combination dial. He did that every morning, right after she came in, and always there were more white sheets in the mass than there had been the morning before. He must write all night, June thought, by the light of his green-shaded oil lamp. What was it that he wrote, that he must guard it so carefully?

She inserted paper into her shiny typewriter. For the three days since she had answered van Gandt's ad she had copied long columns of names and figures from dusty, time-yellowed ledgers. The pages of the ancient books crumbled as she turned them, sent little spurts of dust up into her face. June shivered a little—not with the cold and dampness that pervaded this place with the atmosphere of a tomb—with dread. With the creeping, almost tangible dread that seemed the only really live thing in this place. But stronger than that was the hate burning like a cold flame within her to temper the steel-hard determination with which she faced the grisly menace of the rat-infested passageways.

Suddenly van Gandt's voice came from beside her. "I will return shortly," he said. He moved like a wraith, this man, like an immaterial phantom! "Continue with your work."

He was going out! He was leaving her here alone! June fought to keep her elation from showing in her face. Her chance had come so soon! She watched the great door shut behind his tall, out-of-date figure. And then she leaped to her feet, panic surging through her brain, as a metallic click came sharply from that door!

She was at the door, was tugging at its knob. It refused to move. Appallingly it refused to move! He had locked her in! Good Lord! He had locked her in with...

With what?

The girl twisted about to face the room. Her apprehensive glance swept its expanse, probed its every inch. There were her desk, his, the safe behind it, the window, darkening already with the shadow of the skyscraper whose towering, windowless wall it faced. There was the other long table to the right, with its row of cane-bottomed chairs. There was the closet door in the wall on the left, the door that she had never seen opened. And there was nothing else. No one else. Whence, then, came the feeling of another presence, the spine-chilling sensation of eyes, of inimical, hostile eyes, glaring at her?

June flattened herself against the door, as if she were trying to force herself through the very wood and thus escape from this dreadful chamber. She was afraid, with a fear the more hideous for its being seemingly baseless. It clutched her throat with icy fingers, shook her quivering body in a palsy of terror.

There was nothing of which to be afraid. Nothing. She said it over and over to a tight brain that would not listen. There was no one in the office with her. Van Gandt did not suspect her—could not possibly suspect her. He had locked the door unthinkingly, through habit. It was only three days after all, that she had been with him; before that he had always had to lock the door when he went out.

Even through that door's thick wood the rat noises came in from the corridor, their scamperings, their little squeals. They seemed to be gathering around the threshold, to be waiting for her. Even if she could she would not dare go out there!

She was alone in the rambling, ten-story structure. Utterly alone. The building, long ago, had been scheduled to be torn down to make way for just such a skyscraper as the two between which it cowered. The other tenants had been evacuated, electricity, telephones, had been cut off. Van Gandt had delayed, loath to quit the second-floor office where his whole working life had been spent. The prospective builders had humored him. And then the fateful October ninth of 'Twenty-nine had swooped down upon them and the project had been abandoned. He had stayed on ever since, rent free, undisturbed, and alone.

June shook herself angrily. She must get her nerves under control. She was not in danger. Nothing threatened her, nothing could possibly harm her. If she could not get out of the office, neither could anyone get in.

The pounding of her heart eased. She pushed herself away from the door. She was wasting time. Van Gandt might be back before...

Wood scraped on wood, loudly! Right here! Right in the office with her—

June froze.

Oh God! The heavy window was moving slowly upward. Through the coating of dirt that made its glass translucent the terrified girl could see a huge, shapeless bulk, and fingers jogged the lower edge of the dirt-drab sash. Mother in Heaven! Those fingers were black, were shaggy with coarse hair! And the way they grasped the wood was weirdly, blood-chillingly unhuman.