Читать книгу Thirst of the Damned - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

Table of Contents

"NEVER! You shall never wed him!"

Stasia Moyne's words were all the more virulent, all the more dreadful, because she whispered them and because—that whisper was taking all the strength left in her old body, so wasted and so horribly still under the white sheet of her deathbed.

"You won my son away from me while I lay dying, but before I am in my grave he shall look at you in horror and run from you, loathing your lips that have robbed mine of their last few kisses."

Ellen Faye shuddered, listening to the dying woman's breathed curse, and Garry Moyne's arm pulling her close to his stalwart side, was unable to still that shudder. He pressed her to him, trying to reassure her of his love. But his anguished gaze clung to his mother's seamed countenance, and Ellen felt the spasm of a soundless sob shaking him.

"Mother!" His voice was thick, choked with emotion, when he spoke at last. "You aren't going to die." The girl's throat ached at his pitiful denial of the inevitable. "You are going to get well, and when you learn how sweet and good Ellen is, you will be happy to have her as your daughter."

Stasia Moyne's skin was as yellowed and wrinkled as the parchments to whose study her life had been devoted—as sere and fleshless as a mummy's, and as utterly expressionless, except that the shrinking girl sensed a flood of hatred beating about her that came from beneath the drooped, almost transparent eyelids.

"Sharah is my daughter—not of my body but of my soul. Only Sharah, living or dead."

A stifled moan pulled Ellen's look across the bed to the girl haunched on the floor beyond. Her forehead was bent to her knees in the mourning pose of the immemorial East and she was shrouded and hooded in white so that she was a personification somehow spectral, of grief itself.

"Sharah has remained faithful to me while you abandoned me for this stranger. Go! Till you put her from you, you are not my son. Take her and go!"

"Mother!" Garry's exclamation was a groan. "You are unfair. I've sacrificed my own career to help you. Ever since you returned from Egypt I've lived in this lonely house with you, staying here because you asked it when I should have been making a place for myself in life. And now, just because I love Ellen—"

"Go!" His mother's injunction cut across his bitter protest and halted it, though the syllable was barely audible. Color drained from Garry's cheeks, and he winced as though from a physical blow. Without another word, he turned and went out of the room, and Ellen went with him, aware of the agony that racked him and of the inexplicable hate that followed her.

The door closed on the room where death hovered. Ellen twisted out of the circle of her lover's arm, stood facing him in the dim corridor. "Garry!" she cried. "You should not have brought me here. What she did not know would not have hurt her. Go in to her now, and tell her you have sent me away. Tell her you will never see me again. It will be only for a little while, and—"

"No!" He towered above her, a smoldering, dark fire in his eyes, his nostrils flaring and knotted muscles making a hard ridge along the edge of his jaw. "I shan't lie to her. I will not lie and I will not give you up. I love you, Ellen, and I shall never deny that love."

"Bravely spoken, Sidi Moyne." The sudden voice came from beyond Garry, and Ellen realized that a door had opened, far down the passage, and that a man stood in grey dusk that drifted through the opening.

"Bravely spoken." There was more than the hint of a sneer in the mock approval of his tone. He was a weazened, shrunken figure, and the dark olive of his thin, oddly ageless countenance made startlingly vivid the whiteness of his close cap of tightly curled hair. "But will you speak as bravely when she calls upon Isis to send down upon you and your beloved the curse of Nefer-ka-ptah?"

Garry whirled, his arms stiff at his sides, his hands fisting. "Damn you, Merab!" he grunted. "It is since you came that she has been so—queer. I ought to wring your neck."

Merab shrugged, and his thin lips moved with a secret smile. "You would have done better, sidi, to have burned the papyri from which she read the ancient knowledge of the Book of Thoth, and learned how to summon me from the Fields of Aalu."

Ellen did not understand his meaning, dared not understand. But a cold prickle scampered up her spine as she saw that at Merab's feet there was no shadow...

In that instant he moved out of the drab patch of dying light on the floor, and she could not be certain that she had seen rightly. There was something ominous in the way he glided toward them—in the absolute soundlessness of his walk. He was far shorter than Garry, thin and fragile-seeming in his black, high collared suit, yet Ellen was suddenly afraid for her sweetheart, inexplicably afraid?

"Merab—she wants you." Sharah was suddenly in the door of Stasia's room, her white robe fluttering about her, her hood veiling her face. "Come."

"Keep back," Garry growled. "Keep back. If I can't be with her, neither shall you."

Merab came on, as if he had not heard. Ellen saw cords swell in Garry's neck, saw a small muscle twitch beneath his ear. "Keep back," he flung at the old man again, and the cold anger in his voice was edged by a strange rasp that might be—fear. His big fists lifted...

"Don't," Ellen managed. "Let him pass. What's the difference...?"

Merab was close to Garry. The girl saw his face clearly for a fleeting moment, saw its queerly angular features, straight-nosed and square-chinned as though drawn with a ruler. Then Garry struck at it.

Incredibly there was no thud of fist on flesh. There was no sound at all, and Merab was through the doorway—he was in the room and the door had closed on him and on Sharah. "God!" Garry groaned. "Oh my God!" He swung around to Ellen and stared at her out of an ashen-grey, writhing mask. "I didn't feel anything. Nothing at all."

"He dodged you," the girl cried. "He dodged your blow and got past you." That must be it! It couldn't be possible that...

"I hit him squarely," Garry mouthed. "He was right in front of me and I couldn't have missed. But my fist went through him as though he were thin air."

"That isn't so, darling." Gelid fingers probed Ellen's brain, but she contrived a brave smile, fighting for her sweetheart's sanity and her own. "It can't be so. You're excited, upset by what your mother said."

Garry gnawed at his lip and, confronted by the girl's courage, was a bit shamefaced at his terror. "You're right. I am—overwrought, and his talk about the Fields of Aalu got to me, I guess. He ducked me and got by."

"Of course—Garry! What did he mean by that? What are the Fields of Aalu?"

"The Fields—?" His face seemed to tighten, and his eyes were somber. "That is something from the mythology of the ancient Egyptians. It is what they called their afterworld—their purgatory. He meant that he is not—alive."

"Oh nonsense!" There was a faint scent in the heavy atmosphere of the old house, an odor of dust and of corruption so vague that Ellen was not certain it was real. "He was just trying to scare you."

But why had Merab cast no shadow? Why had there been no sound, no stir in the close air as he moved?

"Who is he, Garry? What is he doing here?"

"I don't—know. Ellen! I told you that we were a strange family. I warned you, even when I told you how I felt for you. I warned you to send me away and forget me."

The girl looked at him from level, grey eyes. "Send you away! I love you." She said it quite simply. "I love you more than life itself. Always remember that, my dear—no matter what happens."

"How can I forget it? You are so sweet, so dear and I need you so."

"I know—but tell me about Merab and Sharah. I have a queer feeling that it is terribly important for me to know."

Garry pulled a knotted fist across his high forehead. "I told you that my father was a famous Egyptologist, and that my mother was his assistant, before he married her and after. They spent most of their time in the desert, digging in the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere along the Nile. The big room downstairs, you haven't seen it yet, is a veritable museum of antiquities. The statue out on the lawn came from the Isle of Koptos where Isis was once worshiped; the scarabs—"

"Never mind that now. You were born here, I know, and—"

"And when I was old enough to leave, my parents put me in a boarding school and went back to their beloved Egypt. I saw very little of them for years. I was a lonely, friendless tyke batting around from pillar to post, until on the day after my graduation from college when Mother suddenly appeared to tell me Father had been killed by a falling column in some temple they had unearthed, and that she had returned to stay.

"I had my mother, someone to whom I belonged, at last. I had been offered a position in the saltpeter fields of Chili, but she asked me not to go. We had enough to live on, she said. All the years Father had kept her away from me, she had longed for her son, dreamed of the time we should be together, with none to come between us. I—well I had dreamed of that too, had yearned to know that I belonged to someone and that someone belonged to me. I agreed, stayed here with her and Sharah.

"She told me she had found the girl on one of the earlier expeditions, a child abandoned to die on the banks of the Nile by fellaheen parents too poor to support her. She had brought Sharah up to be her maid and companion, and I noticed at once that there was a strong bond of attachment between them. But that didn't disturb me, and for a time we were quite happy. Mother taught me to read hieroglyphics and Coptic writing, and we were busy classifying the relics that arrived shortly in a great many packing cases, translating inscription, preparing Father's monographs for publication.

"There was one set of papyri, though, that Mother would not let me even look at. It is in a curiously chased gold chest below, and she kept the key to it hung around her neck. But at night, when she thought Sharah and I were safely asleep, she would steal downstairs and open that box. I would hear her pad stealthily along the corridor, and once I stole after her and saw her at it.

"She was reading the old scroll by the light of a primitive oil lamp, and although I could not see her face I knew that she was afire with a hot flame of eagerness. Every line of her shrunken frame, the quivering of her hand, as she turned a page, told me that. Then, quite suddenly, she sprang up.

"Darting away before she could see me, I heard her cry: 'I have it. At last I know the secret of Thoth!' There was triumph in that cry, and there was also a strange awe. I got to my room, but I could not sleep. Long hours passed and still I did not hear her come up to bed, but, just before dawn, I heard voices. I could not make them out, though I knew that she was one speaker and that the other was a man.

"The next morning Merab was here. I had not heard anyone come up the path, nor had I heard the door open. Neither mother nor he gave me any explanation of his presence. He was here, and he stayed, and that was all.

"He did not eat with us. Sharah said that he prepared his meals in his own room; that his religion forbade him to eat with those not of his faith. I don't know—maybe it is so. I never smelled any cooking though, never saw any dishes from which he might have eaten. At any rate, from the night of his arrival, Mother seemed to fail. The tremendous vitality that had been hers despite her age, left her. Her avid interest in her work was gone. She grew older visibly.

"A month ago Professor Petroff of Columbia University wrote asking for a loan of a certain tablet from the tomb of Cheops. We were afraid it would be lost or broken. It was decided that I should take it to him. I went and, coming out of his office, I saw you..."

"I saw you and we each knew that the other was his mate and that there never would be anyone else," interposed Ellen, her eyes shining as she recalled the tall, somewhat gawky young man who had stopped stark still outside Professor Petroff's door and stared at her, as if he were drinking her in. "I came to you and it seemed quite natural that without a word you took me in your arms and kissed me."

"I didn't come back here. You were sweet, so very sweet, and I couldn't bear to leave you. But I didn't tell you, Ellen, that Mother knew why I did not return. How could she know? She sent me frantic telegram after telegram demanding that I leave 'the stranger,' demanding that I return. The last one said that she was very ill?"

"You told me that you had to go and you tried to tell me that you could never see me again. But I wouldn't hear of it, I insisted on coming with you..."

"I should not have permitted it." His voice was suddenly bleak again, in the darkness, and hushed with apprehension. "Her curse—"

A long, low wail from inside the room cut him off. The two turned to the door, the chill of death's presence clotting their blood. After a moment Sharah opened the portal. Her hood had fallen back. Ellen, glimpsing the girl's face for the first time, saw that it was oval, dark, framed by a cascade of lustrous, blue-black hair. Tears beaded Sharah's long, black lashes, rolled down her dusky, down-soft cheeks.

"It is over." Full lips, darkly red, framed the words. "She has passed beyond the veil."

A flickering light came from weirdly blue flames dancing within a golden bowl set atop a silver tripod at the center of the bed. Merab stood stiffly beyond it, his arms crossed on his breast, palms flat, extended fingertips just touching the points of either shoulder. Except for queerly black shadows moving over it, his countenance was utterly immobile, matching with its rigidity and lifelessness Stasia Moyne's withered and skull-like visage, which was somehow vulturine against her white pillow.

Garry started to enter. Sharah's arm stopped him, stretched across the opening. "No," she husked. "The effendi would not wish it. You may not go into this room from which she banished you. Afterwards, when her body has been prepared as she directed, you may come to her below."

The door closed, barring the two lovers from the death- chamber. Somehow Ellen was not surprised that Garry made no protest. The dead woman seemed to belong to the strange being who had been with her at the end, rather than to the son she had driven from her.

He too, it seemed, thought of those last, dreadful phrases. He swept her within his arms. "Ellen," he gulped brokenly. "My own. Nothing will ever separate us—nothing in this world, or in any other." There was desperate defiance in the way he said it, a fierceness somehow very fearful?