Читать книгу Priestess of Murder - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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THE house was full of whispers. Leila Monroy, pathetically small in the huge, wing-sided easy chair, fumbled at her throat. A sob was trying to rise there, knotting her muscles with a sort of physical pain.

The house was full of whispers. The ancient farmhouse that always had been her home was an abode of brooding dread, a place of dark despair. The groaning of the old timbers' drying fibers seemed terribly loud in the oppressive silence. They came from the very walls about Leila; from the age-darkened rafters overhead; from the ominous gloom of the entrance hallway that somehow repelled the living-room light; from the broad staircase twisting upward out of that foyer to appallingly empty obscurity above.

The house was full of whispers, shredding Leila's frayed nerves with terrible reminders of her day's long agony. Just such a place of muted, ominous sounds had the courtroom been. Unshed tears, through the anguished hours, had blurred its crowded benches; and the only reality had been the gaunt, suffering figure of her grey-faced father in the prisoner's dock. But the whispers had been inescapable. All day they had hissed at her, as they were hissing now: mutterings of horror as witness after witness had damned Justin Monroy with hushed tales of brutal, unutterably savage killing; gasps of outrage when Leila herself gave halting testimony that she had been with her father, here in this room, all the fatal hour between the time when Shean Rourke had last been seen alive and the time when Foster Corbett had found his hacked and mangled corpse beneath the poplars dividing the two farms.

Whispers had met the exhausted girl—whispers of tight- lipped condemnation—when at last she had stumbled down from the witness chair; and the farmer-women's Sunday silks had rustled, self-righteously, drawing away from the defiling touch of the girl who, hostile eyes said, had lied desperately to save a blood-guilty slayer.

Whispers, whispers, whispers—seething out of the pulsating silence as the stony-faced jury marched back into their box.

And then the whispers had become a soundless scream searing Leila's breast as the dreadful verdict soughed from the foreman's tight throat.

"Murder! While insane!"

Insane! The recollection flung Leila Monroy up out of her chair, held her rigid in distress. Insane! The word hissed within her skull, hissed from the stark vacancy in which she was so utterly alone with terror and despair. Slithering foliage, stirred by a swiftly rising wind, hissed it at her from the terrible outer night. Insane!

Insane! The kindly, tender old man to whose gnarled hand she had clung as the brown clods thudded on the drab wood of her mother's coffin; the hard-working, weather-beaten oldster who had been father and mother to her through so many years—a madman! Her father! From whose veins came the blood surging now so darkly in her veins.

Leila quivered. Tremors ran through the long, delicate curves of her slim form. The tiny oval of her small-featured countenance blanched with a new dismay. His blood in her veins! What if that blood were tainted with a foul lust to kill, with an atavistic urge to tear with fang and claw, to rend human flesh and taste the warm, salt-sweet tang of human life-fluid on smacking, gory lips? What if she had not really drowsed that half-hour whose lapse fatally had invalidated her testimony? Had she run, instead, ravening by his side while a fearful heritage of homicidal madness blotted memory from her soul as the alienists said it had blotted recollection from Justin Monroy's?

Abruptly the light within was paled by a blue blaze glaring in through the window on which her unseeing stare was fixed, by lightning that split the sky's black vault with a jagged and blazing fracture. Thunder blast became to the shocked girl the devastating roar of an enormous beast that leaped on the house, that battered it, that shook it in huge jaws whose slaver was driving rain. Storm tumult howled about the old walls, crashed through the empty rooms, drowned out the whispers that had tortured Leila, drowned out the whispers in her harried brain. Almost, after the first terrific onslaught, she was grateful for the fury that would no longer let her hear those whispers.

But it could not drown her dreadful thoughts.

"No," she moaned. "Merciful Lord, no!" as she had moaned when Justin Monroy's suave attorney had elicited from the bald-pated alienist glib testimony that had saved his client from the death- chair—and condemned him to a living hell. "No! It can't be true."

"I could have done nothing else," the lawyer had answered her reproaches afterward. "It was your father's axe Foster Corbett found buried in the dead man's chest. Your father's footprints were traced out of the trampled mess around the corpse and across the meadow to your back porch. There was the old boundary line feud between your father and his neighbor, his threats that if Foster Corbett or his son Stanley or his farm hand, Shean Rourke, stepped on Monroy land they would regret it. Against that we had only your word that he was seated in the room with you all evening. And on cross-examination you admitted that you had fallen asleep."

The wind pounded against the door as their fists had pounded, coming to accuse Dad of the awful deed. Foster Corbett, triumphant at last over his ancient adversary. Stan Corbett—

Leila's pale lips writhed. Stan! In his arms she had known happiness, against her lips his lips had thrilled. Defiant of the enmity between their fathers they had loved. If State Trooper Stanley Corbett had fired his gun into her heart, he could no more cruelly have slain that love than he had by saying to her father, "You're under arrest, Mr. Monroy."

Rain lashed against the window in a spasm of new fury. The world was ablaze with a flickering electric flare that spilled bluely on the tossing poplars marching along the tree-marked boundary between the two farms. It was just there that Shean Rourke's corpse—Something moved stealthily—vague and black—among the wind-bent trunks!

Darkness smashed down again! Who was it? Who prowled the storm-drenched night. The demoniac slayer who had made a ghastly horror of what once had been a man? The real killer, stalking a new prey? Stalking her? Icy fingers clutched Leila Monroy's throat, chill prickles tickled her spine. His blood-thirst still unslaked, inflamed by his terrible crime for which Dad unjustly had been condemned to terrible expiation, the murderer was creeping up on her. On her!

An ancient legend of whispered terror trailed a slimy speculation across her fear. A name breathed with shudders of apprehension by the gaffers clustering around the cherry-bellied stove in the village. The Monster of West Cliff! The traditional phantom that was reputed to haunt the stony precipice whose sheer rampart rose behind the fertile plain along which, from north to south, lay the three neighboring farms of the Corbetts, the Monroys and the Stars! Often of late he had been seen stalking the dark belt of primeval forest cloaking the base of that cliff, the elusive, appalling wraith, it was said, of an Indian chief whose tribe had been massacred by the plain's first settlers. Stalking the ages, waiting for a chance at gruesome revenge. Every accident, every unexplained disaster of the countryside was ascribed to him. Was it he who—

Storm-blaze arched the heavens once more, exploding into momentary existence the tempest-tormented trees, the downpour- beaten pasture between. They were deserted, vacant as the house itself. Nothing—no one was anywhere in sight. The prowling shadow had been an illusion, a figment of her anguished brain.

Wait! Wait! The imagined sight had recalled something to Leila. An incident of the fateful night that she had utterly forgotten till now, till it was too late. The girl groaned, beat her breast in bitter self-condemnation.

Stepping to this very window, that evening, to pull down its shade, she had seen, or thought she had seen, Foster Corbert dodging behind the tool shed just visible left of the house. She had said nothing to her father, fearing to excite him, fearing to jeopardize the reconciliation for which she and Stan plotted. The terrible events following had obliterated the matter from her memory. Utterly, till now. How could she have forgotten it, its astounding implication? The murder-axe, whose blood-smeared helve had shown no fingerprints, had come from that very shed!

Perhaps it was not yet too late. Perhaps if she told her story—

Shrill sound sliced across the thought. It stopped, spurted again. Rrrring—rrrring—rrring. It whirled Leila around to it. Rrrring—rrring—rrring. The telephone! Three rings, the Monroy signal! Who could be phoning her. Stan? Incredible! Eve Starr, perhaps? Eve, her neighbor and closest female friend, calling to extend sympathy, consolation. Like Eve to remain loyal when every one else shunned her.

Rrrring—rrring—Leila, flinging across the room, into the hallway's dimness, jerked the receiver from its hook.

"Hello."

"Lock your doors," a hoarse, unrecognizable voice grated without preamble. "Lock your windows." A voice choked, coarsened by some inexplicable terror. "Don't let any one in. Not any—"

The telephone was suddenly dead, with the flat, inanimate deadness of a line from which the humming life of its current has gone. Dead! Had the storm blown down a frail wire or had some human hand cut it? Some human hand, just too late to stop the husked warning?

Some human hand! Icy terror once more struck at Leila Monroy. The hand of some one who even now crept up on the house. Then she was moving, had flung herself to the great front door, was thrusting into its socket the heavy bolt clamped to its sturdy oak.

The back door was already locked, she remembered. The windows! Old-fashioned shutters creaked out of recesses in their embrasured sides to the frantic pull of her trembling hands, were also bolted. She rushed in frenzied haste through dining room, through kitchen, clicking on light as she went, light from which shadows fled that were black, sinister silhouettes waiting around corners, behind doors, to spring upon her. The lower floor was at last a blaze of light, was a locked and barred fortress against whatever menace threatened. The lower floor—

But there was the upstairs yet, the upstairs that was blacker, as Leila's dilated pupils stared up into its mystery, because of the luminescence about her. No longer was it the warm, familiar bedroom floor of the old house but a precinct of stygian gloom haunted by some darkness-shrouded threat.

The girl's small fingers—tightened on the newel post to which she clung, tightened till the blood was driven from them and they were grey, trembling splotches against the lustrous patina of the wood. It was only the dark, up there, of which she was afraid. Over and over she told it to herself. It was only because of the dark that she had that hint of evil lurking just beyond the stair head, of monstrous evil crouched just beyond the range of her vision, haunched and waiting to pounce upon her. There was nothing more in the corridor above, Leila assured herself, than shadows like the eerie phantoms that had fled from the lights she had turned on.

Nothing? A shriek sliced down to her, the high, shrill scream of a woman in deadly terror.

It checked off, faded into vague thumpings as of a fierce struggle, into the thud of a storm-tossed branch against the building wall. It came again!

Tiny muscles twitched in Leila's cheeks. Insensate, humorless laughter sounded in her fluttering throat. It was the wind that had screamed from up there, tightening her scalp with fear. It must have been the wind. No one could possibly be up there.

But she was afraid. Afraid to go up there and look. Afraid of the storm and the dark.

A sharp crackle jerked her around. She stared wide-eyed at the entrance door. Fool! That had been only the splintering of a gale-riven branch—It came again. Unmistakable this time. The crunch of a heel on the gravel pathway outside!

A foot thudded on the porch just beyond the door and unseen fingers rattled the door knob. Through a crashing peal of thunder the terrified girl heard a threatening, hoarse bellow. Someone was just the other side of the sturdy portal. Some one—The killer! The mad killer, seeking her!

He bellowed again, pounded wild fists on the wood. The great panel shuddered under the berserk attack. Its hinges creaked. The furious pounding piled a frenzied terror on her fear of the storm and the dark. Realization pierced her that only five feet of air, two inches of wood, separated her from the monstrous creature that had made of Shean Rourke a mangled horror. It twisted her about, sent her hurtling headlong up the stairs that a moment before dread had barred to her, sent her dashing through the lightless corridor in instinctive flight to the fancied sanctuary of her own bedroom.

Her hand clutched the knob of its door, swung her to it. Frantically she thrust open the panel, slammed it shut behind her, leaned back against it, gasping, quivering.

Rain lashed against the window pane, threshed on the roof above her. Dulled by distance, the savage pounding on the door below beat about Leila as though tangible blows buffeted her. Momentarily the lightning had ceased. The chamber was obliterated by tar-barrel darkness. A feeling grew on Leila that she was not alone here.

Leila Monroy whimpered, stabbed blindly at the light-switch she knew jutted from the wall to her right. The small room sprang into sight. A disheveled apparition stared at her from her dresser mirror, russet wealth of hair tumbling about her now pallid face, mouth twisting and livid, grey eyes dark with the frenzy of her terror. She pulled her gaze from it, saw the bed—

Crumpled on its scarlet-flecked counterpane lay the contorted body of a girl. Blue-black hair veiled her face, but where a pink frock had been cruelly torn away, lurid finger-marks on a white throat showed the manner of her death. Her death—there was no motion, no movement at all in the awful stillness of the pathetic figure. The exposed, blanched breast stirred with not the slightest breath.

"Eve," Leila whimpered, unable to do no more than stare and whimper. "Eve..."

Forgotten the tumult of the storm, the battering at the entrance door. Forgotten everything but the horror that burst within her skull. But she had no memory of Eve's arrival. No memory...

Time must have dropped out of her consciousness. Time enough for her to have summoned the girl, to have lured her up here! Time enough—for her own hands to have clenched on her friend's throat, to have pressed, pressed, until life no longer throbbed beneath her throttling fingers!