Читать книгу Girl of the Goat-God - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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OUT of the night a scream rose, high and thin and quivering. For a long minute it held, a scarlet thread of sound. Then it ended, and there was nothing but the rustle of breeze-stirred foliage and the shrill grating of the crickets, screeching an obbligato to terror.

Rose Loran was icily motionless, staring across vague lamplight at the black oblong of the window through which the shriek had come. In her cold hands the dishes she had just removed from the cluttered supper table rattled tinily, shivering with the uncontrollable tremble of her slight frame. A precariously balanced tumbler jittered against the edge of the tray, toppled, smashed to the floor. The kitchen door behind the girl crashed open.

"What was it?" Aunt Faith chattered. "Rose! Where—I thought you..."

Rose twisted, the older woman's gibbering fright paradoxically restoring control over muscles momentarily paralyzed by the horror of that scream. Faith Loran, tall and spare, her drawn, thin face ash-colored and twitching, clung to the door-jamb. Her grey, tired eyes were wide-pupilled, staring, and her gaunt neck was corded with fear.

"I—I don't know." The words rasped Rose's parched throat. "Someone in the garden. Someone—it—it didn't sound like anything human."

"The—the garden." The woman's pallid lips parted only slightly to let out the whispered syllables. "Elmer... I sent Elmer... to the well."

"Oh Aunt Faith!" The exclamation was sharply rebuking. "In the dark! When you know he can hardly see in bright sunlight!"

But there was relief in Rose's voice, too. Now she understood that scream. The decrepit old man who was their one servant had stumbled, fallen hard, and screamed. That was all it was. There was no reason for this fear that tore at her, that squeezed her pounding heart. Rose turned, snatched up the lamp from the table, started for the great arched opening at the other end of the high-ceilinged, huge dining hall.

"Rose!" Aunt Faith's bony fingers clutched her biceps, digging in with convulsive strength. "Rose! Where are you going?"

"Out to Elmer. He's hurt. I've got to..."

"No!" It was a tenuous, almost voiceless gust of sound. "Don't go out there! Don't go out there—in the dark."

"The dark!" Rose jerked away, exasperatedly. "I'm not a child. I'm not afraid of the dark."

She was, though. She was eerily terrified by the moonless murk out there. Aunt Faith had made her afraid of it, in the past few weeks. The way her aunt had insisted on locking all the doors and windows at nightfall; the way she would stand for hours staring out into the sightless gloom—these things had their effect on the girl's nerves. She began to believe that her aunt expected to see something—dreadful...

Only yesterday Rose had told Walter about Faith's queer behavior. Big shouldered, stalwart Walter Parton, the man who loved her and whom she loved. He had laughed, and then suddenly a tender fierceness had masked his broad-planed face. "Why don't you let me take you away from all this, Rose?" he had growled. "From this rotting house and this half-crazy aunt of yours."

"I can't, Walter," the girl had sobbed. "Why do you keep coming back and asking me? You know I can't marry you. You know I can't marry anyone. I daren't."

"I'll keep coming back, and I'll keep asking you till you say yes." How she had wanted to snuggle into those great arms of his, to feel his lips on hers! But she had pulled away and had told him to go, and he had climbed into his roadster and driven it away at reckless speed toward his home in Loranton. And she had gone slowly back to the shadows of Loran Hall and to the dread that had settled down upon it...

The dim gleam of her lamp could not fill the vast expanse of the entrance foyer. It slid over the lower steps of a baronial staircase, along papered walls whose intricate patterns were faded and drab, stopped at the patinaed, dark oak of a towering door. Rose went to the portal, tugged at its heavy bolt.

Aunt Faith was alongside her, was plucking fearfully at her sleeve. "Don't open it. For God's sake don't open it."

The girl thrust her shoulder against the aged spinstress, shoved her away. "Please, Aunt Faith. You're hysterical. Elmer..." The bolt came out of its socket, and the heavy door creaked slowly inward to her pull. The lamp-flame flickered, sent a filament of black smoke curling upward, then burned steadily in the lifeless air. A rotted board in the floor of the broad porch sagged under Rose's slight weight. The roof-high pilasters fronting the house were a row of pallid, gigantic spectres marching away on either side into obscurity. A peculiar, hushed oppression closed in on her, and the pungent aroma of lush greenery was in her nostrils, tainted with the miasmic breath of Gorham's Swamp that held the Loran Estate within the crescent sweep of its putrescent bog.

Rose hesitated, listening tautly. The night walled in the sphere of her feeble light, and reptilian tendrils of uncared for vegetation crawled over the verandah edge. A sound bubbled up through the sibilant sea of rural silence, a burbling, liquid moan. The girl's head jerked to it and it came again.

"Elmer! Where are you, Elmer?" Thick-clustered, rank foliage took her cry, swallowed it. Brambles tore at her dress as she ran down the thudding path, rosebush thorns sliced the skin of her bare arms. Rose stopped suddenly, her heart pounding.

Ahead something entered the rim of light, something that was moving. Something that writhed, agonizingly, and then was still.

"Elmer!" Rose could only whisper the name as dread clutched at her larynx. She drove herself a hesitant step forward—and then her feet went out from under her, sliding in the slippery mud. She rolled, got to her knees.

The lamp, jarred from her hand, had miraculously landed upright in the muck. Its light painted Elmer Stone's wrinkled face, twisted and almost unrecognizable. His face was drawn into lines of agony. His chest was a weltering horror of ripped overall cloth purplish with viscid, glutinous blood that spilled out of a deep and horrible gash torn raggedly through his breast. The memory of a bull-gored farmer she had seen once, years ago, came to Rose's fainting mind. This jagged wound was like that. But there was no bull inside the high iron fence Faith had insisted on erecting around the place, and whose tall gate she made a ceremonial of locking at dusk. There was no animal of any kind... What then, could have done this?

A bubbling moan pulled her staring gaze back to the tortured countenance. Elmer's eyelids were blue, ghastly membranes drawn tight over the bulging round of his old eyes. His seamed skin was wax-pale with the filming of death. But his blue lips twisted and words came bubbling out.

Rose bent closer, shuddering. Meaningless sounds came out of writhing agony. "Goat goatem..." Meaningless sounds that suddenly were drowned by a spew of blood. The racked body arced with a spasm of uttermost anguish, flung over in its final, terrible convulsion. A lax arm flopped down in the mud and lay still. Elmer Stone didn't move any more. Rose knew that he would never move again.

"The goat—the goat man," a wire-edged voice screamed over Rose's head and splintered into high-pitched laughter, into a cacchination utterly mad. "The piper has come for his pay."

The girl surged to her feet, swung about to face her aunt. Faith Loran's head was thrown back. The crazed laugh shrieked from her wide-open, contorted mouth. One thin, satin-sleeved arm was thrust stiffly out in front of her and a bony forefinger pointed rigidly—not at the shattered corpse but at something beyond. Rose whirled and saw a pallid, grotesque specter the lamplight just reached.

Panic struck at Rose for a frantic, ghastly moment, and then she knew what it was at which the spinstress pointed. A statue of Pan the wood-god, haunched on shaggy goat legs, reed pipes at his saturninely grinning mouth. Curving horns jutted out of the touselled disorder of the carved hair. Horns. Good God! Was the stain darkening one of them only moss or...

"The night—," Faith screeched between peals of crazed laughter—"The night of the Lorans... only us left to pay the piper. We who did not dance must pay him... The sins of the fathers—"

Rose couldn't see the stone pedestal on which Pan squatted, but she knew what Aunt Faith meant. There was a rhyme graven into it, a lilting rhyme from over whose deep, angular letters a boyish Walter Parton had once scraped green slime so that they could read:

Dance ye mornyng, dance ye noon,

Dance ye sunlit hours away.

Length'nyng shadowes tell that soone

I will come to ask my paye.

The old woman's screaming laugh tore at Rose's nerves. It was harder to bear than even the sight of the mutilated corpse at her feet.

The Lorans had danced. God knew they had danced! Roy Loran the second had brought to the paradise the first Roy had carved out of wilderness, carousing young bloods and complaisant ladies from the distant city. Roy the third, Faith's father and Rose's grandsire, had added new and terrible vices to the orgies of Loran Hall. He had died raving, calling down curses on the fourth Roy, who had killed Rose's parents in a drunken, wild auto ride and disappeared into the unknown.

"The bill is overdue and we must pay—" Pan seemed to be listening to Faith Loran's wild cries with his cocked head. He seemed amused, with cruel lines around his mouth belying his grin, with evil puckering his tiny eyes... Suddenly Rose felt that she was going as mad as Faith.

"Stop it," she screamed. "Stop it." Her hand struck out and its palm slapped stingingly across her aunt's sere cheek. "Stop it."

The shrill laugh cut off, something like reason returned to the woman's staring eyes. She touched the red blotch left on her cheek by the girl's blow. "What happened to him?" she said haltingly. "Oh, Rose. What could have done it?"

The girl shuddered. "Gored," she whispered. "A bull..."

Faith shook her head. "No bulls anywhere near. And the gate is locked. Look." She clawed at her breast, pulled out a black ribbon through the seam of her blouse. A twisted, archaic key hung at its end. "I locked it and the only key has been with me all the time."

"But—what then...?" Rose shuddered, made herself look down again at Elmer. At the ground around the tragic heap drenched by water spilled from the bucket he had been carrying, by water and by...

She was staring, staring unbelieving at the trampled mire. At black mud trampled and churned by feet whose imprints were glaringly, starkly plain in the light of the lamp set down among them. At sharply defined indentations that were filling with a slow seep of red-tinted moisture.

They were unmistakable. They were prints of cloven hooves. Of hooves too small to be a bull's or a cow's. They might have been made by goat feet....

A liquid ripple of shrill melody skirled out of the darkness, clotting the girl's thoughts. It changed to laughter—a sound of shrill, mocking glee. Such weird laughter as Pan's pipes might make if Pan were laughing into them.

Something darted across the light—a small stone smashing into the lamp. Its chimney crashed and darkness blotted out the scene.

"The goat man," Faith screamed. "Oh God..."

A vast, formless bulk surged out of the darkness! Rose whirled, leaped into a frantic, desperate run. She sped up the path on the wings of fear. She ran endlessly through dank blackness filled with the stinging whiplash of unpruned branches, with the tripping tangle of untended vines. A hoarse breath panted behind her, and the thud, thud of ponderous, pursuing feet. Always behind her, and closer, closer...

The house loomed ahead, its facade vaguely luminous. Across its porch Faith's vague form flitted, wild arms flailing above her head. She vanished into the gaping black maw of the open portal, and suddenly the dark oblong was narrowing, narrowing...

"Don't," Rose screamed. "Don't close it. Don't close the door on me!" Her frantic feet pounded on wood, the single shallow step to the verandah, and something twitched at her dress from behind. A savage, bestial howl roared in her ears. A chattering howl of triumph.