Читать книгу Revels for the Lusting Dead - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3
ОглавлениеI. — DELEGATION FROM THE TOMB
LINDA LORAY tried not to show her disappointment and growing uneasiness as she asked the hotel clerk whether he knew Holt Carst—the man she had come to Torburg to wed.
"Yes," he replied, eyes narrowing in his young but strangely grey-hued, brooding countenance. "Everybody in Torburg knows Holt Carst." His glance flickered over Linda's face with a curious intentness, dropped to the brass-framed card, flat on the counter, that bore the words:
ON DUTY: Dan Thilton
"Mr. Carst wired me to come by the late train," Linda explained, "but he wasn't at the station and there was no message for me." She was poignantly conscious of the dusty hush of the lobby, of its somehow desolate emptiness. "How can I reach him?"
"Hard to say." The girl had a queer impression that Thilton was holding something back deliberately, perhaps maliciously. "There are no more trains till morning. Best thing for you is take a room here and wait for Carst to get in touch with you." He shoved the register at her; thrust a pen into her hesitant fingers.
The ancient, musty inn was vaguely repulsive to her, but there was nothing else for her to do but sign: Linda Loray, Boston.
Thilton turned and took a key from a rack whose hooks were completely filled. He came out from behind the counter, moving slowly, not from weariness but as though trammeled by some odd reluctance. His tall frame was a little stooped, a little awkward with the earthbound clumsiness peculiar to men born in the hills.
"This way," he murmured, picking up Linda's bag and motioning across rutted floor tiles toward a staircase at the other end of the dim foyer. Linda reached the worn steps, started to mount them. "Lije," Thilton called, behind her. "Oh, Lije!"
A big door slid open in the lobby wall at right angles to the staircase, and the cloying, sick-sweet odor of funeral flowers was all about the girl. She turned, startled, and looked through the doorway.
The flowers were piled around a makeshift bier in what must be the dining room of the old hotel. They formed a bank of blood-red roses, of lilies wax-white as death itself, and on that bank a dull ebony coffin rested. Two huge candles were burning on either side of it.
There was no lid to the coffin, so that from her slight eminence Linda looked right down into it. She saw a black frock coat clothing a man's body—a coat unnaturally stiff as are only the garments of the dead.
The dead man's hands were decorously folded on the rigid chest, but even lifeless they were pallid, rapacious claws; their bony fingers half-curled as if still eager to tear some helpless, quivering flesh.
The head was completely bald. The face was lashless, wax-white as the lilies. It resembled the visage of an albino vulture. Beneath the closed, blue eyelids the skin sagged in the pendulous dark pouches of dissipation, and the way the livid lips were thinly puckered branded those moribund features with lascivious cruelty.
"I'm going upstairs, Lije," Thilton said, "to show this lady to her room. Watch things, will you?"
"Sure," a toneless, heavy voice responded. "Sure, Dan."
Linda looked at the man who had opened the door from within. The watcher of the dead was as tall as Thilton, as spare-framed and gangling, but much older. His hair was iron-grey, his cheeks deeply seamed, weather-beaten. And in his hands there was—a shotgun! Its black barrel slanted across his torso and one calloused forefinger rested on the trigger. Watcher of the dead indeed! The man called Lije was a guard of the dead. An armed guard!
Against what impossible menace was he armed? Against what ghouls who would violate a coffined corpse?
Thilton, in motion again, forced Linda to recommence her climb, lest he collide with her. He unlocked the door of a room at the head of the stairs, shifted the key to the inside, put her bag down and departed without a word.
Despite the questions hammering within Linda's skull, questions she oddly dared not voice. Despite her perturbation over Holt Carst's failure to meet her, the exhaustion of her long journey welled up drug-like in her, numbed her. She was already half-asleep as she undressed, and when she crept into the creaking bed, it was as though she crept into immediate, tangible oblivion...
* * * * *
THOUGH she had slept long enough to warm the harsh cotton sheets, Linda Loray's slim body seemed molded within ice when she awoke—as frigid and as utterly incapable of motion! Fear, naked and terrible, was a presence in the room, a livid crawl in her veins.
The sound that had startled her to the quick came again—a thin cry shrilling out of the night. This time the incredible words were clear and terrifying.
"They're coming! The dead are coming!"
Running footfalls thudded toward the hotel. "The dead—they're alive again!" The shout was right under Linda's window, and the pound of frightened feet was first dull on the hard-dirt path from Torburg's single street, then hollow on the inn's porch planks. "They're com—" A door slammed, cutting off the cry.
"Lije!" a muffled voice shouted from below. Now the sounds of trampling feet were within the house, the sounds of voices husky with apprehension but too low for Linda to distinguish the words...
She was dreaming, she tried to tell herself, and then her fear-frozen brain was demanding, can one dream noises alone, seeing nothing, feeling nothing except the pressure of one's lids against aching eyeballs, the pressure of lids one fights un-availingly to open?
It must be a dream. In no waking moment did one hear a voice crying that the dead were alive. Only in a nightmare did one's muscles refuse the bidding of a brain squeezed between the jaws of terror's dreadful vise. Only in a nightmare were one's nostrils so stuffed with the odor of funeral flowers that one could hardly breathe.
Of course! The smell of the flowers from that improvised morgue below, seeping up through the moldering walls and warped floors of the crumbling structure, had inspired a dream of horror. If she could only get her eyes open, if she could only come fully awake...
It was no dream! Linda was staring at the cold, hueless glow of moonlight that crept into the musty chamber. She was awake now, without possibility of question, and she still heard those ominous sounds.
Hushed voices quivered with some dreadful urgency. Something scraped ponderously, as though a heavy piece of furniture was being moved across the lobby floor to barricade the entrance.
On the faded quilt that weighed Linda down, the lunar luminance lay, shaped in a sharp-edged rectangle by the frame of the window through which it seeped. The oblong was deeply notched by a triangular black shadow. The girl focused her attention on that strange silhouette, trying by pondering the puzzle its odd shape presented to take her mind from the more fearful puzzle of the weird warning she had overheard, of the threat against which the preparations below were being made.
The sky had been dark when she had toiled up the deserted street from the railroad station. The moon must be now just rising. It was the shadow of a building, then, that lay on the coverlet. Linda recalled seeing a church, across the wide Main Street from the inn. Inevitable landmark of a New England village, its steeple had pointed a slender finger to the heavens. The moon was behind it now and this somber triangle was the shadow of the steeple's tip.
There had been an iron-fenced graveyard beside the church...
Thud! That dull sound was outside the inn. It was the thump of stone on soft earth. Thud! Ridiculous to think—that they were made by tombstones falling, one by one, on the soft loam of the graves they marked, that the sounds came from the graveyard...
Rusty hinges screamed protest against being disturbed! There had been an iron gate in that iron fence. It was opening! Who, what, was opening it?
Casting the quilt and sheets off her body, Linda sat there for a moment in a daze. Then suddenly her bare feet struck the floor, and she came erect.
The sheer silk of her nightgown was no armor against the sharp chill of the upland night. Gooseflesh prickled her nubile breasts. Muscles tautened across her flat abdomen, shrinking from the frigid sting. The cold struck through to the very marrow of her bones, but the girl did not hesitate. The imperative need to know what was going on was impelling her to the open window through which the moonlight—and the scrape of dragging feet on flagstones—came.
She reached it, peered through it. The tiny burial place was plain in a pale weird light that lay on it like a transparent shroud.
Linda saw the black oblong of an open grave. It was for the dead man, of course, who was laid out in the dining room below. But there was another, and another; and on the grass behind them their headstones lay, askew as if just now they'd toppled to the ground.
The earth from those empty graves was not neatly piled but had erupted from the black holes, as though it had been thrust up from beneath.
The shadow of the church was black along the front of the graveyard, along the tall fence that a century ago had been wrought by patient sledges to wall the graveyard in, so that Linda's staring gaze could not make out what it was that moved there. But something moved there, many things, in fact, and from within the shadow came the faint scrapings that had seemed to her the sound of bony feet on the flagstones that paved the churchyard paths...
Whatever was there moved toward the curb, moved across the curb and out into the street. The darkness not so intense there, Linda made out the form of a man; other forms followed him. The leader came nearer still, came into a patch of pale moonlight.
A scream formed in Linda Loray's throat, was held there by the swelling of her larynx that cut off all her breath but a wheezing gasp.
Moldering garments fluttered about that scrawny shape, and through the rents in them grey-whiteness flashed that could be only skeleton ribs. Its head was grotesquely askew on twisted shoulders, and its face...
It had no face!
It had only a serrated, grinning gap where its mouth ought to be, two great stygian pits for eyes. That macabre countenance was earth-smeared, and something flapped against a grey-white cheek-hollow, like an ear that had rotted loose.
An ear that flapped with the grisly, limping gait of the thing as it crept along. The thing passed into shadow again. But the shape that followed it was no less gruesome, nor was the one that followed next...
They went across that patch of revealing luminance, and darkness hid them from Linda once more. But the shadow could not shut from her ears the scrape, scrape which told her that the spectral procession paraded straight up the path to the inn, that it mounted the steps to the hotel porch.
It could not keep her from hearing the rat-a-tat of bony knuckles on the door below her window, and the sepulchral voice that boomed a summons.
"Open!" it called. "Open for the League of Lazarus."
