Читать книгу The Man Who Would Not Die - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

BLUE flames flickered above the coal on the stone-framed hearth, blue phantoms of fire that threw no light into the vague tunnel of the long room. Even their warmth was cheerless, and their dull mutter ominous, as though brooding fear had found expression in the low crackle of the fire. There was no other sound, except the whispered rattle of a pulled-down window shade, whispering to the uncontrollable quiver of a slim hand that gripped its edge.

The woman whose white fingers crumpled the hem of the blind, pulling it away from the glass minutely to make a slit for her to peer through fearfully, was a taut, pale blur against the broader, vertical shadow of the window's embrasure. The man just behind her, shrouded in gloom so that only the glimmer of his white shirt-front and the pallid oval of his blunt-jawed face were visible; ached to take her slender, maturely rounded form in his arms—to cover her lips with kisses—although his scalp was a cap squeezing his skull and his spine was an icy shiver. But instead, his hand tightened on the rough butt of an automatic in the pocket of his dinner jacket; his ears strained for some hint of approaching menace.

Outside, the long slope of the hill was a boundaryless down-sweep of soft luminousness into which great white snowflakes were endlessly falling out of the night. They came down in hushed myriads, silent as Death, implacable as Time, fluttering straight down in slow haste, merging with those that had fallen before till the blanched field seemed to lift visibly, inch by inch—a rising tide of soundless doom.

But it was not the snow of which the two watchers were afraid. Not the chill smooth snow, blanketing the brown earth. The woman whimpered, far back in her throat. The man stirred, laid a hand on her bare, cold arm. "Come, dear, this is foolish. Even if you were right, he won't come tonight. No one could get here from the valley. The snow must be six feet deep by now and..."

She didn't move, but her vibrant contralto voice, tight-cadenced with the fight she was making for control, cut across his speech. "He will come. Tonight. And—and then—God help us."

"Good Lord, Miriam!" the other was suddenly gruff. "That's impossible!" The harshness of his voice rose to shrillness. "You identified his body yourself—what was left of it when they put the fire out and pulled, it out of the wrecked train."

She whirled at that, half-crouching with virulence, and her response was staccato, bitter. "Yes, I said it was he. The watch was his, and the scarf-pin. That charred, blackened thing wasn't even human, but I was sure it was his corpse. I..."

"There you are. A woman couldn't be mistaken after she had been married to a man for five years..."

"Not if he were an ordinary man, but you know what he could do to himself. The critics called him the greatest artist in make-up ever born. I am not sure that I ever saw him as he really was."

"That's more nonsense. His screen-stuff—"

"Was nothing to what he did at home. I sometimes thought that the parts he played, the monsters and madmen, had warped his soul till he became like them. He used his skill to torture me, to try and drive me insane. He came into my room once, as a bent old man, with eyes sunk in a cadaverous, leprous face—with long-nailed claws with which he tore my night clothes from me and—" She stopped, a shudder ran through her. "He was that awful old man, Ned. How do I know that his usual aspect was less of a fraud? How do I know that it wasn't my wild hope of release at last—and the thought of you—that made me certain the corpse they showed me was his?"

"No one escaped from that smoking car. He must have been killed." Ned said it defiantly but his eyes slid to the shade, smoky, still half dubious. "It is impossible that he is still alive."

Miriam seemed to be listening, listening intently for a sound that did not come. Words dripped slowly from her lips. "Then he is dead. But, alive or dead, he has sent me a message that he will be here tonight. And when he does appear—" her voice dropped to a husked whisper, "we shall not know him—until he strikes."

"A message!" Ned jerked out. "You call that a message!" He twisted. A stride of his long legs took him to the center of the room. A lamp switch clicked and light swirled down to lay a cloth of luminousness on a table-top. A tiny object seemed to gather the light into itself, tinting it yellow—a semi-circle of gold, half of a broken ring. The man glowered down at it as if it were something vile, something beyond the pale. "That piece of junk!"

Miriam spoke, startlingly beside him; he had not heard her move. "'These rings bind us indissolubly together. Even death cannot break their bond.' He said that on our wedding day, putting one ring on my finger and one on his own, and I thrilled to the romantic ring in his voice." She laughed, and the short undertone of that laugh was a curse. "Fool that I was! 'Remember that, my love, not even death.' That was just six years ago—tonight!"

"He might have said it," the man growled, "but his saying it could not make it true. He is dead, and you are rid of him forever."

"Then how did that come here?" the woman questioned. "We found it here when we came in at sunset, right here, and there were no tracks in the snow except our own, no tracks in snow that had just begun to fall and—no one in the house when we searched!"

"Your own ring—?"

"It's in my jewel box, upstairs, locked in. I looked. No. That is half of his ring he sent. Living or dead, he sent it on ahead to let us know that he would follow." Her flat, hopeless accents were utterly resigned. "Ned, can a soul be so evil that it cannot die? So vile that even Hell rejects it and it must remain earth-bound forever?"

"No!" He flung the negative at her, swept the half-ring up from the table. "Damn it, no! When a man's dead, he is eternally dead. This was in your clothes, somewhere, in a handkerchief, in your bag. It dropped out on this table when we went out and you didn't notice it."

His hand jerked. A flash of gold streaked through the murk, clinked into the fireplace, vanished between two coals into the white heart of the fire. "That's the end of that, and we'll forget it. We'll forget him too—" He whirled, seizing her, pulling her roughly to him, devouring her lips with burning, avid kisses. "You're my wife now, my wife! He's dead and gone and he cannot come between us."

"Ned! Ned, darling. I... What's that?"

They clung to each other and the ague of fear shook them. Fear hissed in the slow burning of the coals, gibbered from black shadow-pools beyond the lamp's radiance. Terror was a living presence in the room, brooding in the white silence outside the close-pulled blinds. Fear was a voice calling from that silence—a long-drawn wail, snow-muffled, that rose, died away, and came again—nearer. "He-e-lp! He-e-lp!"

Ned moistened dry lips. "Miriam. It's someone out in the storm, calling for help. Someone in the snow!"

"Someone in the snow," the woman repeated, shuddering. Then as the man moved, "No! No, Ned!" Her fingers snatched at him feverishly, caught his lapels. "Don't open the door. Don't go out. Maybe..."

He hesitated, his mouth tightening. "But dear," he almost groaned. "This is the only house in miles. That snow is death to anyone on foot. I..." He checked himself as the cry came once more.

Miriam stiffened; her hands ceased their flutter. "That sounded like a woman, Ned. A woman." Her whisper was plaintive. "He could not imitate a woman's voice, could he?"

The man pulled her wrists away from his coat. "I don't know and I don't care. I'm going out to see. Woman or ghost or devil, I'll take care of you." Saying it flogged his own courage to belief. "I'm not skulking here like a scared dog any longer." The feel of the gun in his hand was comforting as he thrust out through the portières to the entrance hall, his broad shoulders swinging.

There was no wind, but the snowfall had redoubled so that the beam of the flashlight he had snatched up in the foyer shone against a white wall only a few feet ahead of him, unrevealingly. He went knee deep into wet softness that clogged his legs; wet lumps settled on his mackinaw and uncovered head. "Hello," he yelled, and the snow-filled air swallowed his shout. "Hell-o-o, where are you?"

Silence again, and the soft hiss of the descending flakes. Ned's skin prickled to the sensation of unseen eyes watching him, inimical eyes somewhere in the snow-filled night. He threw a haunted glance over his shoulder. Nothing was there but the blanketed loom of the house, its windows black, irregular oblongs against the white. "Where are you?" he called again.

A moan answered him, to the right, not far off. It couldn't be far off or he would not have heard it. He plowed a step in that direction, swung his torch, and its ray picked out a curling mound in the snow—a mound that was not yet all white. He heaved to it, saw brown fur, shaggy, framing an incredible face. It was huge, unbelievably large. Beetling eyebrows and the faint down of a mustache were ice-speckled. There was something unmistakably feminine about it; but something evil, too, as only a woman can be evil.

Ned shuddered, but he thrust the gun and flashlight into pockets, bent, and pushed his arms under the great bulk. He could not lift her; he had to drag her, and the snow fought silently, viciously, to keep its prey. Another yard—he thought as he felt stone steps under him—and he might not have made it. "Miriam! It's all right. Open up!"

The knob rattled above him; warm air swept out and around him. Miriam was at his side, helping him with his burden, sobbing a bit. "She's frozen, exhausted. Oh, the poor thing! And I—wanted to keep you from helping her."

They had her on the floor, near the fire. Her fur coat was a dark pile near the table, lying in a gathering pool of melted snow. She was tremendous, her lax arms elephantine, the slow heave of her bosom like nothing so much as the swell of the sea. Her face was dough-colored, was like a blob of unshaped dough. Straggly black hair was plastered against the dead-white of her forehead. "I'll give her some whiskey, Ned, and you go up and get the blankets from our bed. We've got to get her warm."

The man stripped off his wet mackinaw as he hurried through the entrance hall, tossed it over the banister-post of the stairs up which he ran. Pitch blackness greeted him in the upper corridor, but he did not stop to switch on a light. He would be up here only a moment, and he would have his hands full when be returned.

His footfalls thudded on thick carpeting, echoed—did they echo? He stopped short, his throat drying, and those other footsteps stopped too. Of course what he had heard had been an echo. Something, the snow perhaps, had made this hall reverberant. Why, his very breathing was unnaturally loud in the quiet up here.

But he could not rid himself of the eerie sensation that he was not alone—that someone, something, was waiting in the dark. Ned's hand stole to his pocket, fumbled in, fumbling for the gun, felt only cloth. He had forgotten it—left it in the thick-fabriced, short coat down below. He bit his lip, shrugged. He'd get the blankets, get down again. And get the automatic out of the mackinaw pocket as he passed.

A little light seeped into the bedroom. Ned stripped blankets from the bed hastily, turned back to the door. What was that thrumming noise? Did it come from within the house or from outside? Just as he heard it, it stopped, and silence swept in again. It had sounded almost like a laboring automobile motor, but no auto could be passing on the hill road, deep as it was in the clogging snow. What then? Could... A scream sliced the darkness, "Ned! Ned!"