Читать книгу Thirst of the Living Dead - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

THE Iroquois called the lake Eye-of-Evil. They were long vanished and their harsh word was unpronounceable and therefore forgotten by the few leathery-faced mountaineers who had succeeded them in the region. But Lake Wanda's unsavory reputation still clung to it. And indeed, seen from the summit of Mount Toran, whose forest-cloaked thousand feet soared gloomily above it to the west, the sharp-ended oval with its single, round central island did startlingly resemble a great eye. All day, deep-sunk in its socket of encircling hills, that eye was darkly-shadowed, brooding and somehow ominous; but just before dusk it turned a lurid red, glaring balefully at a baleful sky. Then night would rush down Toran's slope, would engulf the lake like black lids closing—and, to believe the old tales, nightmare horror would stalk its shores.

Whether or not those whispered legends were true—of stealthy murder, agonized suicide and drowned men who would not stay in their watery grave—Ralph Dean did not know and did not care. Solitary except for his dog, Scout, in the living-room of the ancient house on Oldun Island, pupil of the Eye-of-Evil, he stared into the flames of the fire that was its sole illumination, and read in it only the tale of his anguished loneliness. He was but dimly aware that the smoked rafters of the huge, dim room shivered under the blows of a howling tempest, that the night outside was cataclysmic with sky-rending lightning and earth-shaking thunder, that the lake was lashed to fury by shrieking wind and torrential rain and the tall trees on the island itself bent almost double by the gale. Another such storm, exploding without warning from a starry sky, had a week ago darkened his life with a desolation so black and abysmal that he thought himself dulled forever to any emotion other than grief.

If he had known what grim terror this new storm was to pluck from the wild night and cast up on his threshold, he might have pulled open the great oaken door bisecting the long, oak-paneled wall behind him and plunged out into chaos—to throw himself into the bottomless depths that had taken his oldest friend, Anton Walder, and Ralph's laughing-eyed, flaxen-haired wife, Myrtle. Even the thought of two-year-old Billy, forgetful already of his mother and sweetly asleep in his crib upstairs, would have lost the power to hold him back...

Now Scout whimpered in his sleep, and Dean's bronzed, big-knuckled hands clenched on his knees. He was reliving that evening, hearing again the words that had condemned Myrtle to death: "You go with them dear; you enjoy night paddling so. I'll stay with Billy. Don't worry, I shan't be lonely. I'll think of you and Anton and Sonia out on the water..."

The wind thudded at the door as if some soft hand were pounding for admittance, moaned through the trees. The dog woke with a start, heaved to its feet. It stood stiff-legged, its hair bristling to a thick ruff around its neck, its livid eyes fastened on the shadows of the arched embrasure wherein the portal hung. Tiny whimperings came from the back of its throat, whimperings of ancestral fear.

Dean's sharp, grief-lined profile turned slowly to the animal, and he watched its antics somberly. Just so had Scout acted when, after a night of frenzied, fruitless searching, the two had found the overturned canoe floating in a cove on the other side of the island, and Sonia Walder's body under it. The clothes had been pounded from her by battering rocks, her head mashed to a pulp. One foot had twisted under a thwart of the frail boat and anchored her there as if the lake were sending to Ralph a mocking token of the others' fate.

"Down, Scout. Down, old boy. There's no one there. Come here, old fellow. You miss her too, don't you?"

Curiously, the Airedale paid no attention to his master's voice. What did he see, there in the dark, what phantasm to which human eyes are blind? Ralph pulled a shaking hand across his own forehead. He had been seeing things too, ever since Lake Wanda had swallowed Myrtle and refused to give her up. The flick of pale garments in forest aisles, a shadowy form moving among the trees just beyond the range of his burning vision. He had heard things, too, wandering aimlessly in the woods; the familiar timbre of Myrtle's voice, her words not quite distinguishable; Anton's guttural rumble. Once there had been a scream, on a moonless night, and he had rushed pell-mell from the house, sure that Myrtle had called for help. He had found no one, of course...

And now he fancied someone was at the door, was begging wordlessly for admittance, for refuge from the tempest. It was against all reason; there was no living thing on the island save the three within the house and the dog, impossible for anyone to have come across the waters through the storm. It was the wind, only the wind. Dean licked dry lips and told himself again that it was only the wind.

Was his loss driving him mad? The natives—Ira Toombs and old Eri Halden—certainly had thought him so when he had insisted on remaining with Billy on the ill-omened island. He wanted to be there, Ralph had said as they ferried what was left of Sonia to the mainland, when Myrtle's body was washed ashore.

They had looked at each other queerly, and then old Eri had drawled: "Ye'll stay here forever then. Ol' Wanda don't ever give up her daid, leastways not their corpses. Mebbe thet's why—"

A warning hiss from Toombs had cut him short, and Ralph, only half-hearing, had forborne to question what the end of the sentence was to be. But later, an obscure fear had peered from Charity Halden's old eyes when he had offered what to her must have been a small fortune to assume the care of Billy and the slight duties of the household. Nor had her excuse, that the frequent storms isolated Oldun Island so that it was impossible to reach the mainland, been sufficient to account for her obdurate refusal—a refusal only abandoned when the curly-headed child had smiled endearingly up at her and snuggled his warm, confiding palm into her work-worn hand.

Charity Halden was upstairs now, asleep in the nursery...Scout's lips pulled back from his black gums and he growled. The wind dropped in a sudden lull—but the fumbling at the door continued. There was a rasp to it, as of feeble nails scratching at the wood, low down. And that—that certainly was a moan, faint, only just audible...

Ralph shook with a sudden chill. The moan came again, burbled, trailed off to silence. The renewed howling of the wind was like the wailing of a lost soul.

There couldn't be anyone there, anyone—human. But suppose there were; suppose...Dean dared not word the thought that came to him. He fought against unreasoning fear, fought himself out of his fireside chair and to the door. The metal of the doorknob was hot to his icy fingers. They closed around it, slowly; turned it, every thirty-second of an inch of movement a new victory over protesting nerves and rigid sinews.

Abruptly the bolt left its socket and something hurled the door inward, knocking Ralph aside, to his knees. The wind raged around the big room, the rain drove in, a solid wall of water. There was something on the threshold; a sodden, shapeless heap. It was a human form, the form of a woman, face down in muddy water that swirled, a foaming flood, across the threshold.

Dean got hands on her soggy garments, dragged her in, heaved erect and launched a battle against the storm to shut it out. It fought him back, shrieking with the voice of a thousand fiends, determined to hold the territory it had gained. Before the door clicked closed Ralph's back-muscles were stabbed with fire, his legs quivering with exhaustion. But he dropped at once to the woman's side, his knees squelching in the soaked rug.

What she wore had lost all identity, so drenched it was, but it covered her completely. And yet—there was something familiar about the hidden lines of the figure beneath it, something...Dean's lips were bloodless, his eyes black flame in a ghastly face. His arm slid under the cold, wet form, turned it over gently, tenderly. His other arm pillowed the lax head. The shawl fell away from the woman's face...

The whimper that broke the tumult-encircled hush of the big room came from his throat. Oh God! Oh merciless God! The bloated, clammy-white, blue-lipped face into which he stared was Myrtle's face. Myrtle's! Changed, horribly distorted, but he could not mistake it. His wife was back. His wife...Lake Wanda, the Eye-of-Evil, had thrown her corpse up, in wanton mockery, on his very doorstep. "Here she is," the storm howled at him. "You waited for her and we give her back to you. This is the face that will haunt your dreams forever now, this horror—instead of the beloved vision that otherwise would have been yours to cherish."

But what of the fumbling at the door, the scratching, the moan—the moan that had not been the voice of the wind?...

Fearfully, not daring yet to hope against the black despair flooding him, Ralph's hand found an opening in the sodden fabric cloaking the limp form, crept within. His hand felt flesh—gelid, clammy flesh that tingled his fingers with the cold feel of death. Bloated flesh that dented to the pressure of his hand—and a vague, dim flutter, a hint of movement where the beating heart should be! A pulse, vague yet perceptible. She lived. Miracle of miracles, she was alive!

Then Ralph, too, came alive. He lifted the flaccid figure, surging to his feet with her in his arms as a new, unfamiliar strength surged within him. In seconds he was across the room, had laid her tenderly on the bearskin rug before the roaring fire, had forced a drop or two of brandy between her lips, and was chafing her arms, her dear hands.

"Myrtle," he babbled. "Myrtle dear...Wake up. Wake up." He mumbled broken, pathetic phrases from out their lexicon of love. Again he felt for her heart. It beat a little more strongly now, but the wax-white lids still hid her eyes, and her flesh was still cold, cold as death itself.

Warmth! She needed warmth, blankets. "Charity," he called. "Charity! Bring blankets down. All we've got!"

Ralph did not think then, did not dare to think, of how Myrtle came to be alive, of where she had been in the week since she was supposed to have drowned, of how she had gotten home at last. He did not think, even, of where Anton might be, of whether he too might not have been saved from the lake. He was absorbed, wholly absorbed, in bringing Myrtle back to consciousness, in fanning the flickering spark of life that was still in her, the spark that threatened momentarily to go out.

Where was that woman? "Charity!" he roared again. "Charity!"

There was no answering thump of bare feet on the floor above; no querulous, age-thinned voice. Nothing but silence reached him, and the tumult of the storm. She slept too soundly; he must get the blankets himself.

He slid carefully out from under Myrtle, surged to his feet and was running up the broad steps that lifted from the other end of the room. The hall was dark, upstairs, except for a line of dim light under the nursery door. He jerked that open as he passed, yelling "Charity," glanced within. And he stopped abruptly.

The cot where the woman should be was empty! A night-light floated in a glass of oil, and by its vague luminance he could see the white covers thrown back, the mark of her form on the under-sheet and the dent of her head on the pillow. And he could see something else on the pillow. There was a fleck of red on that pillow-case...another, a third...tiny drops of blood still freshly scarlet!

Steel fingers of fear pronged his heart as he whirled within. The baby! But Billy was in his crib, blond locks curling about his white forehead, smiling in sleep disturbed by neither storm nor shouting.

Billy was asleep, but on the floor there were other droplets of blood. Ralph's eyes followed them to the window. Good Lord, the pulled-down shade, the sill, were wet. Wet by rain! And Dean himself had closed that window when he had come up to hear his son's prayer and kiss him good-night, twenty minutes before a drop of rain had fallen!

The fact that only a few drops showed, on pillow and floor, was somehow more fearsome than if the room had been a shambles. There had been no struggle here, no fight. But a vein had opened, somewhere on old Charity's scrawny body, and she had gone—out of the window, out into the storm!

The floor rocked to that storm's buffeting, the dark exploded into blue light; Ralph was deafened by blasting thunder. A cataract pounded down upon the house, streamed across the pane. She couldn't have gone out into that of her own free will!

Dread was a tangible presence in the room, dread of something that threatened the child. He couldn't leave Billy alone here, alone with the tempest and—whatever it was that, had left those crimson drops. But Myrtle was below—restored to him from the dead—needing him. Dean's neck corded and a visible pulse pounded in his temples.

A furry body brushed against his legs. Ralph gasped—jumped back. The Airedale looked up at him, whimpering. Dean gasped again—but with relief. "Scout," he snapped. "Scout! Stay here. On guard, Scout. On guard!"

The dog whimpered again. But he stalked across to the crib, whirled, stood stiff-legged, shaggy lips curled back from white fangs. Nothing human, nothing animal, would get past that faithful sentry to harm the boy. "Guard him, good Scout," Dean said, and knew he was free to get the blankets and minister to the other, below. But as he blundered down the dark hall his brow wrinkled. The dog was afraid—somehow he knew it—was terrified of something in the house that the man could not sense?