Читать книгу Monster at Play - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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TINY in the great four-poster bed, Rose Lynn sat bolt upright and hugged her knees to firm, round breasts. She stared into wavering, uncertain shadows magnifying the expanse of the spacious bedchamber, and in the sea-tinted depths of her wide eyes dread lurked. The heavy coverlet under which she cringed could not shut out the chill of fear shaking her with the faintest of tremors. Her red lips quivered to shallow, affrighted breathing.

A sound had mingled with the first flash of her startled awakening. A swift patter of wee footsteps rattling into stillness. Such a small patter as a child might have made, scampering down the long, dark corridor outside. A child? In this gloomy structure which no child had entered for forty years? What then? What could possibly have fumbled at her door and whisked away with an eerie glee in the tap-tap-tap of its retreat, a mischievousness strangely sinister?

Rose's eyes ached, and the manifold small noises of the country night were an ominous silence to her straining ears. She heard the sough of wind through foliage, the shrill of nocturnal insects, the distant, melancholy wail of a train. And within the house there was only the crackle of drying beams and the rattle of ancient plaster dribbling inside the walls.

The girl's lips twisted. "I dreamed it," she whispered. "It was only a dream. I ought to forget it and go to sleep." If she slid down under the blankets and forced herself to sleep, in the morning black Isaiah would rap on her door as always and mumble his toothless, "Seben o'clock, missie, an' b'eakfas' am ready." She would laugh at her scare then, when the sunshine streamed through the mullioned window, and she would tell Miss Wayne about it, and perhaps the dear old lady would pat her hand with her own fragile, almost transparent fingers, and say, "My dear. This gloomy house is no place for your fresh youth; it is cruel of me to keep you here."

"Cruel!" Rose forced herself to continue the imagined talk, seeking thus to win her mind from the terror that numbed it. "What would I do if I didn't have this job? I'd starve. And besides, you have been so sweet and kind I feel more like a niece than a paid companion. I—"

Her fingers tightened on the quilt edge. From somewhere beyond the closed mystery of her door, an eerie laugh had sounded—distant, but high-pitched like a child's! The stillness quenched it at once, but a pulse beat in the girl's temple now with a dull thumping, and her mouth was dry. Someone stirred in the sleeping house, some alien presence moved.

Who could it be? Was Loretta Wayne, prim, aristocratic spinstress, trotting her spindly shanks about on some midnight adventure? Despite her unease the corners of Rose's eyes crinkled with fugitive humor at the whimsy. Or was it Loretta's brother, Roger Wayne—tall, austere, black hair silvered at the temples above the chiseled dignity of his patrician countenance? Incredible! But there was no one else in the desolate, crumbling mansion. There should be no one else.

The girl's head jerked. There were the pattering footfalls again—fainter now and farther off, but distinct as the tick of the watch under her pillow. Her throat cords tautened to a scream. She gulped it down, remembering the waxen pallor of her mistress' skin that told of a heart all too fragile. A sudden fright...

Oh, why didn't that scampering stop? It was the patter of leaves blown against a window-pane, of pebbles rattling on the roof. It was nothing, nothing at all. That creak!—? That was a step on the staircase at the end of the hall, the third step from the top. No doubt now. No doubt at all that some alien presence was in the house, that someone was on those stairs.

Rose could not ignore this thing, yet she dared not call for help. Her lips tightened. She slid from the bed, stood swaying, nerving herself, while moonlight silhouetted the clean lines of her young body through the sheerness of her nightdress. She whimpered, fisted small hands, moved. Even the whisper of her bare feet on worn carpeting was somehow a sibilant warning of menace...

She got to the door, got through. The knob was pulled from her stiff fingers by a sudden puff of cold air. The door thudded shut, and blackness engulfed Rose, impenetrable dark. Her nostrils clogged with the mustiness of the ancient corridor through which trailed elusive wisps of fragrance, of scent and powder and vanished flowers of a long ago when once the moribund mansion was aglow with gayety and light laughter.

She stood taut, poised, listening for a repetition of the noises that had brought her out of sleep to fear. Momentarily the silence was absolute. Then her veins were a network of ice and her scalp was a tight cap squeezing her skull.

The stillness had been broken, not by the patter of small feet that she had heard before, but by a voice. A thin, thread-like voice prattling unintelligibly, somewhere in the dark. A babbling voice curiously infantile, lisping the monologue of a child at solitary play. An endearing sound in a sun-filled nursery—but a sound fraught with marrow-melting horror in the midnight murk of this moldering mansion. A sound that struck all power to move from the listening girl's limbs and froze her to nightmare rigidity that wrenched a moan from her tight throat...

The pattering recommenced; the third stair creaked again, and little feet scampered toward her through the hall's lightlessness! Rose's brain flashed a frantic message to unresponsive muscles, and something thudded against her knees, toppling her. As she fell her outflung arm brushed a face in the dark, a damp and coldly clammy face not two feet from the floor! Hands were on her cheek, her breast. Hot hands stroked down her side. Hands hot and harsh through the gossamer silk wrung a scream from her.

Somewhere a door slammed. "What is it?" Loretta Wayne shrilled. "Rose!"

Then the hands were gone, and the shaggy body that had pressed close to hers where she had fallen was gone. From somewhere nearby Roger Wayne said, "All right, Loretta. I'll see to it." His tones were measured, calm, as always. "Don't excite yourself."

The dark swirled about Rose. She fought to hold it steady as Wayne's solicitude recalled to her his sister's weakness, and she managed to call out, "A dream, Miss Wayne. I had a nightmare." Then everything slid into swirling blackness that seemed to lift her in strong arms...

She lay on her bed once more, the blankets warm about her. A lamp's soft yellow centered its nimbus about the chest of drawers and edged Roger Wayne's ascetic profile with a line of light. In all the sudden alarm he characteristically had contrived to don a dark dressing-gown buttoning close to his neck, and it gave him the appearance of a medieval monk. But a brother of a fighting order—for his stiff, ramrod erectness, never relaxed, was that of a soldier trained for years.

"Oh," Rose gasped. "I must have fainted."

The man's thin lips moved in a slow smile. "You did, my dear. Fainted dead away. I had to carry you in here. The hall was draughty, and we cannot afford to have you taking cold."

The commingling of grave courtesy and kindliness in his tone was typical of the fortnight since she had come here. In the crumbling decay of the ancient mansion Roger Wayne maintained, somehow pathetically, the courtliness of more spacious days. He was an aristocrat, and neither the loss of fortune nor the mark of time could change his ways.

"It was awfully silly of me to faint." The words slid from Rose's cold lips, and she looked up at his looming figure, his shadowed countenance, waiting for the inevitable question as to what had brought that scream of terror from her and robbed her of consciousness. It did not come. Wayne stood there, silent and grave, and in his eyes there brooded a troubled murkiness, the faint hint of some hidden pain. Tonight it was more alive, more definite than it had ever been.

At last he said, "You can sleep now." That was all. "Sleep?"

He turned away. His slender, blue-veined hand picked up the lamp, and suddenly the light was gone. Protest vibrated in the girl's throat, but before she could voice it the man was gone, the door shut behind him. She was alone with the silver spray of moonlight in the dim room, and the shuddersome recollection of burning, avid hands desecrating her body, of the embrace of a malformed, horribly small frame against hers. Fear clutched her.

The fear seeped away; for the thump, thump of Roger Wayne's stiff walk had not faded but continued in a measured pacing just outside her door. Thump, thump, thump. Back and forth. Back and forth. He had told her to sleep, but there would be no sleep for him tonight. Thump. Thump. Thump. He was mounting sentry-go, guarding her against the unacknowledged horror that stalked his house.

In the morning there was nothing at all to remind Rose of her terror in the night, nothing in her great sunny room, nor in the long, door-walled corridor, nor in the crisp, white breakfast table set in the wide embrasure of a light-filled window. Nothing—save Roger Wayne's red-rimmed, sleepless eyes, opposite her, and the covert, almost desperate appeal in them for her silence. When she took Loretta's tray upstairs she saw the same appeal in the little old lady's birdlike face, grey against the pillow, and the same avoidance of any reference to what must have been foremost in all their thoughts.

What was it? What secret did the house conceal that had sapped its vitality, that had withdrawn these two from the world and laid upon them a pall of dread? Once more Rose's brain tightened with uneasy fear as she sensed a conspiracy of silence about her, a cabal in which even the bent old Isaiah was included. That which they hid from her was evil, they knew that it was evil and that its menace was now directed against her. Wayne's sentry-go last night was evidence of that. But they dared not warn her of its nature. They would only try to protect her from it, to the best of their ability. And how effective could that protection be—the best of a semi-invalid woman, a shambling Negro, a man well past his prime?

Miss Wayne nipped a bit of toast, sipped the final drops of coffee from a cup whose texture was that of a milky bubble. "I shall not trouble you to read to me this morning, my dear. The doctor is coming—you are free till after lunch."

There it was again, another phase of the mystery that was never obtrusive but always in evidence in the queer ways of this queer place. Twice or three times before it had happened. Loretta would announce the practitioner's impending call and tell Rose that her time was her own. Then Wayne would casually, quite casually, find something for the girl to do, something that would take her out of the house. Out of sight of the house...

Now, closing the door with the tray of emptied dishes on her hand, she would have been surprised not to have found him stumping up the stairs with that curiously stiff gait of his, not to have heard him say, with his humorless smile, "Oh, Miss Lynn...I wonder if I may trespass on your good nature."

This time Rose had to resist the flicker of an impulse to refuse. "Of course. Miss Wayne does not need me till after luncheon. What is it?"

"This letter." He held it out to her. "It came in the morning post and I want it returned at once to the sender, unopened. This is Saturday and if it doesn't make the noon mail out of Lordville it will have to wait till Monday. That is too long for the whippersnapper to think I have read one of his scrawls."

Rose took the white envelope, glanced at it, wondered if her flush was visible to Wayne as she read the sender's name. Philip T. Horn. But she knew her voice was cool, steady. "I'll take it down for you. As soon as I give these to Isaiah."

"Thank you. I—"

"But will you be very angry," she added hurriedly, "if I ask you something?" A saucer clinked against the tray rim as her arm trembled.

Wayne seemed puzzled. "Angry?"

"Please don't be. Mr. Wayne? Why are you so bitter against your nephew? Why do you refuse to have anything to do with him? Miss Loretta tells me you have never seen him."

His face took on the immobility of marble; his eyes were dark flame. The response dripped slowly from his white lips: "I have no nephew."

"But Philip Horn is your sister's son. He—"

White spots showed along the knuckles of Wayne's hand as his fingers dug into the banister. "Miss Lynn, you will not mention that name again, nor refer to the subject. Loretta is my only sister. The only sister I ever had. Do you understand?"

"You—" Rose checked herself as the hot glare in his eyes beat her down. "I—I understand. Please forget what I said."

Suddenly as it had come, the icy wrath was gone from the man's face. "You'll take care of the letter?"

"At once." Something like a tear trembled on Rose's eyelash as she started down, passing Wayne. She wished...

The half-formed thought was cut short by a muffled exclamation, a thud, behind her. She whirled. Wayne was sprawled on the landing, a frayed carpet-edge still caught in his heel.

"Oh!" The girl rid herself of the tray in a lithe motion, leaped to help him.

"Get away!" Wayne squealed, and struck at her hand. "Let me alone!" His countenance was suffused with purple, his lip curled in a sudden, astounding snarl! "I don't need help. I don't want it." He was on his back. His arms were cramped to acute, unnatural angles; his hands were hooked, were claw-like. His legs trailed down the stairs with a curious helplessness.

Half-stooped to him, Rose froze, and the short hairs at the nape of her neck bristled with a queer repugnance.

"Get away!" the strangely enraged man spat once more. The virulence of his command jerked the girl upright, sent her fleeing down the staircase, through the beamed gloom of the entrance hall, into the brick-walled kitchen. Isaiah's face was a black moon against ranged rows of burnished copper pots. He put a hand out to her, halted her wild flight.

"What's the matteh?" the Negro demanded. "Whut's happened, missie?"

The pound of her heart shook Rose's small frame. "Oh, Isaiah. Mr. Wayne fell, and...and..."

"Yoh done tried he'p him git up." The black's eyes were blue-white marbles, rolling frenziedly. "Youh didn't ought to do that. He doan lak it nohow."

"But why, Isaiah?" The words quivered. "Why?"

Abruptly there was something electric in the air of the vaulted, dim kitchen. A grey film dulled the dark gloss of the old servant's skin. His hand on her arm was trembling and, queerly enough, there was the same appeal and dread, in Isaiah's eyes as had been in Wayne's this morning.

His protuberant mouth moved, and Rose tensed. Then he spoke. "Doan ask, missie. Doan ask no queshuns 'bout anything yoh see heah. But git out. Doan sleep anotheh night in this yer house."

"But Isaiah—"

Rose stopped as the thump, thump of Roger Wayne's stiff-legged walk sounded from the foyer. "Miss Lynn," he called. "Miss Lynn."

She turned, and he was in the doorway. "Miss Lynn. I want to speak to you."

There was dust on his black velvet smoking-jacket, and his antiquated stock of lustrous black silk was slightly askew, but he was his dignified self again. His eyes slid momentarily to the Negro. Rose fancied she saw the flicker of a signal pass between master and servant, was aware that Isaiah had shambled through the swinging door into the dining-room and that she was alone with Wayne.

A tiny muscle twitched in her cheek. "What is it?"

The corner of Wayne's mouth quirked. "I wish to apologize for my actions just now. My rudeness was—uncalled for."

The girl's brows arched, and she straightened with unconscious hauteur. Inexplicably, his bearing obliterated the difference between them of age and position, and she was aware that some obscure importance hinged for him on her reception of his proffered amends.

His hand made a gesture toward her, somehow pathetic. "You—you will not leave us? You have done Loretta so much good. We—she needs you. You have brought into this house the first sunshine that has lightened its gloom for more years than I care to think."

In someone else, in more usual surroundings, the speech would have been stagy, mawkish. But from him, in this place, it was quite natural, quite sincere. Rose recalled that this man, well past his prime, had given up his sleep to protect her, and her indignation, her fear of him gave way to a sudden, inexplicable pity.

Impulsive words spoke themselves for her. "Leave! Of course not. I'll stay as long as you need me."

Something splintered in the rigid lines of his face, and momentarily it was flabby, quivering, like that of a frightened old man's. Then it firmed again, and he was nodding gravely. "Thank you. You are very good to us."

Rose almost said something then that afterward she would have regretted. But she changed it to, "No, I'm not. But if I'm to get this letter mailed in time..."

It was only later she realized Wayne had apologized for his strange actions at the head of the stairs, but had not explained them...