Читать книгу When Love Went Mad! - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

EMMA WAYNE'S small hand shook a little as she fumbled her key into the grey door of the ancient Sprool house, and she was shivering inside her thin suit-coat. But it was not only the sharp chill of dusk that had set her quivering. The old dread lay like a leaden lump in her breast, the dread that, as far back as memory went, inevitably had come when the sun's last red rim vanished behind the jagged ridge of Big Tom and night began to fill the valley's bowl.

As in the old days, the circumscribing mountains were tightening the ominous loom of their ring with the withdrawing light, were becoming formless, vast bulks of blue-grey menace; and, beneath the haze blurring their slopes, crawling, eerie things of the night stirred to unholy being—or so whispered the legends of the countryside. To Emma the very hills were endowed with uncanny, motionless life as they thrust gigantic shoulders against the darkling sky like quiescent monsters waiting in silent, age-long patience; waiting till at last their appointed time should come to crush, with one temptuous gesture, the puny human lives scuttering in the valley.

The girl's mouth twisted bitterly. Here she was just as Kurt Tradin had predicted two years ago, returned to the mountains and their gloomy forebodings... The borrowed horse she had tied to the gate down there whinnied, the sound edged with shrill fear. Startled, Emma whirled to it, peered fearfully into the gathering shadows. What on earth was the animal afraid of? Why had it cried out as if it sensed some threat in the unkempt, overgrown garden? Why was Emma herself afraid, not knowing of what? Perhaps because the place was so uncared-for, so desolate. Gram shouldn't have—

But of course, grandmother was dead. That was why Emma had come back, why Milton, the husband she had found in the city that had been otherwise so cruel, was joining her here. The little old lady whose bleared and rheumy eyes had pleaded with her not to go, was dead—and buried. Kurt's letter had brought the tidings when it finally had reached her, its painfully addressed envelope scrawled with the postman's notations that explained its week's lateness. Gram was in the little cemetery above, where the village was hidden by Big Tom's jutting spur, and the old house was empty...

Something slithered along the door, thumped softly. Emma's breath caught in her throat. Tensely, she listened to the thud of her own blood in her ears and—silence. Silence that lay on the hills like a grey shroud, that was a living, tangible thing within the house. Silence that in itself was fear.

The girl bit her lip. "It's nothing," she assured herself. "Nothing at all." She did not realize that she was speaking aloud. "Just—just my imagination." And indeed there was now no sound, inside or out, save for the pud, pud of the restive horse still straining to break free the rein that held him. "I'm a fool to be scared." But why did the brute whinny again, then snort at something she could not see?

This was silly, unutterably silly! Milton would laugh at her when he got here and she told him how afraid she had been to enter the house where she was born. The lock grated protestingly, clicked over. Lucky she had kept that key all these months.

The door opened under the push of her icy hand. Except for a filming of dust the hall was just as she remembered it with its antlered hat rack and the slender, graceful curve of the banisters where the stairs lifted to obscurity above. Light still filtered in dimly through the arched opening from the parlor, spreading ebony shadows on worn Brussels carpeting. Queer shadows! That one for instance, long and angular as if it were thrown by a horizontal box resting on trestles...

Grisly fingers squeezed Emma's heart. Three years ago just such a shadow lay here, and in the parlor Granddad Sprool had been stiff in the coffin by which it was cast. This was the shadow of a coffin—and the sickeningly sweet odor of funeral flowers was heavy in her nostrils!

No! Gram was buried, buried! They wouldn't have kept her here, untended, for the two weeks since she had died! It was just a trick of light and her own taut nerves?

That dark silhouette tapered slightly, just as Granddad's casket had, but it was smaller. Gram had always been shorter than Granddad and the years had shrunk her. Emma licked dry lips, and knew that she must get to the parlor door, that she must look to see what made that shadow. But her legs wouldn't move...

She got them going at last... It was as if the dusty air had suddenly grown thick, viscous, so that she had to push through it with all her strength. She reached the threshold at last, held onto the lintel and pulled herself into the musty parlor. The windows were grey rectangles in the faded wall; under her feet the floor seemed to heave, like the swelling sea. Emma whimpered, far back in her throat. The coffin was there—an ominous bulk in the gloom...

ONCE started toward it she could not stop. She was close to the thing. She was looking down into it, where the half-lid had been removed—looking down at Gram's closed eyes and the almost transparent hands crossed on a bosom of black silk that was terribly still. The old woman's skin was drawn tight over her fleshless bones, so tight that a skull seemed to answer Emma's gaze... They had edged the corpse-dress with a white neck-ruching. And that brown streak across its starched stiffness was the trail of a slimy, crawling thing...

The girl swayed, grabbed at the casket-edge to keep herself from falling. Something gritty crumbled under her hand—earth! Mud had caked the sides and top of the black box, had dried there. And here were the gouged places where the ropes had rubbed that had let the coffin down into a grave where it had not stayed...

A scream sliced through the walls of the house! Another, compact with ineffable terror. Outside, wood splintered, crashed. Across a window's oblong reared the head and shoulders of Emma's horse. A gate-picket dangled from its bridle and banged crazily against flailing forelegs. The brute screamed once more, plunged down and out of view. Galloping hoofs pounded away.

Not knowing she had moved, the girl was across the room, was staring out. A dust cloud thundered down the road, stopped suddenly. The horse reared out of it, whirled in a strange dervish dance. In the eerie half-light a grey, shapeless something clung to the beast's belly, reached grey tendrils for its foam-flecked, out-straining throat. Then the frantic animal was gone around a bend. Only the diminuendo of its pudding hoofs and the shrill panic of its almost human screams were left, coming back to Emma through quivering, affrighted dusk...

Moments later, as night welled up the towering slopes, the girl still stood motionless, flattened against the window as that last awful glimpse had left her. She was poignantly conscious of the preternaturally disinterred corpse behind her, but nightmare paralysis held her rigid and her larynx was sore, rasped by unuttered screams. The faceless Things of the hills had come down into the valley at last, into the precincts of her ancestral home. The drear dread of the mountains was a living, tangible presence in this house where she and the man she loved had hoped to find refuge from a world that had denied them. It was here, here in this room. She felt its chill fingers stroking her spine, its icy breath on her neck. Something was here, something that had brought Gram back from the grave, something that itself had come from that mountainside burial ground!

The vague clatter of hoof-beats impinged on her consciousness. Emma lifted burning eyes to Big Tom's rocky summit across the valley, to the pale ribbon glimmering along his darkening flank. That was the new highway, she remembered, the recently opened macadam trail Milt had pointed out on the map as the way he would come when he had finished the business that delayed him. And on it, miles away, the failing light picked out a tiny moving horse—her horse. Somehow, even across the space between, the girl sensed the incarnate terror flogging that anguished beast, flogging him to insane flight from the horror that clung beneath his belly and fled with him.

The distance-dwarfed steed staggered, fell. A final shrill neigh split the awed hush of the mountain-encompassed hollow. Horrible movement animated the prostrate beast; greyness flowed over it, merged it with the grey road. The pallid mound heaved, sickeningly, for long moments. Then the ash-tinted destroyer ebbed slowly from its victim, slithered into bordering trees. A tawny shape was very still as the up-surge of night's sightlessness engulfed it, and the highway, and the trees into which horror had seethed.

It was as if Satan had set a vaulted black lid over the valley to hide it from God's sight. There was no light in the sky, utterly no light in the broad sweep of the dale. No sound except a faint rustle of wind in the forest cloaking the mountain-sides.

Or was it the wind in the leaves? Grisly fingers plucked Emma's quivering nerves to new apprehension. Was it not rather the slithering advance of the wan hosts that so long had danced as pale, mist-like wraiths on the twilight slopes, unleashed at last to their long-deferred invasion of the lowlands? Loosed by Gram's passing, perhaps; by the death of the pioneer's spouse who first had intruded into this valley and driven them back into the hills... Was that why Faith Sprool had been brought back here from the sanctuary of consecrated ground, that in death they might wreak on her a weird vengeance for the thralldom to which her life had condemned them?...

Oh God! Oh good God! Emma's fingers twisted, interlacing, and her slender frame was a shell brimful with terror. The advancing sound was no longer a dim, just hearable rustle. It was a thrum pulsing toward her, a swift-coming burr momentarily louder. They were coming fast now. Faster. They were coming for her!

Of course for her! She was a Sprool, the last of the Sprools, and she did not know the secret Granddad and Gram had had that held Them back. She had always suspected there was a secret Granddad knew, the haughty patrician in whose leathery visage steely eyes brooded and who held himself and his family so high above the valley-folk. But she had never dreamed that this was it. Why hadn't they told her how to drive back the eerie company sweeping down on her?

A green light-beam scythed the darkness out there, struck the road into livid relief. Vague forms seemed to dart for concealment in the thick bushes of the garden... A gigantic grey shape roared around the road-bend, skidded to a halt. The menacing thrum throttled down to the familiar throb of a motor, and a remembered profile was limned by dim dash-lights.

"Kurt," Emma called. "Kurt!" The name was a sob in her throat as she shot into the hall. She was across the verandah, and running through the garden. "Kurt Tradin!" Briars snatched at her, murky foliage; a low-hanging tendril whipped stingingly across her cheek and some furtive thing scuttered out of her path. "Don't go away, Kurt. Don't."

SHE had reached the car, was clutching its sill with both hands. Gaunt-visaged, somehow older than when he had laid suit to her in the shy manner of a country swain, Kurt Tradin peered at her. His slow smile was tinged with some strange apprehension. "Em. Emma Sprool! Be you all right?"

"Yes—Kurt, why isn't Gram buried?"

"Why what? He half-rose from his seat, shoving toward her. "She was! I see her laid to rest myself, in the graveyard."

Emma's last faint hope vanished. Her nails dug into the auto's steel, her throat worked. Then—"But she isn't. She's in there, in the parlor."

Kurt's lips were ashen. From above the lumping of his high cheekbones wormlike lights crawled in the depths of his shy eyes. "In—the parlor," he husked. "Almighty Godfrey! They knew ye was a-comin', then! Christopher, I'm glad I come out to see if you was here, like I done every dusk the past week."

"In God's name! Kurt! What is going on here?" Kurt's stalwart frame, his big-boned, handsome countenance, wavered in Emma's vision as though a heat-haze screened them. "Who—what knew I was coming?"

The young farmer seemed to have difficulty in forming words; his gnarled hand was trembling. "We—don't know. Whut-ever it is thet's been prowlin' the nights since yer gran-maw was buried. Grey things in the hills thet ain't shaped like man nor beast."

"Grey things!" Emma thought of the anguished horse and the thing that, hanging beneath its belly, had reached gruesome tentacles for its throat. "I saw one! It killed my horse, out here?"

"Yer hoss!" He rapped the syllables out, and a little muscle twitched, once, in his cheek. "They've killed more nor hosses—Gaffer Wilson, an' Ely Trenholm's Iry an' Alice, an' Spad Perkins' hull family when they tried ter get out along Big Tom Highway. Thet's why I bin watchin' fer you to warn you not to stir out o' the house after sundown."

Emma did not hear that last sentence. "Big-Tom Highway—Kurt! Are they—is there any danger on that road?"

He laughed shortly, without humor. "Danger! Thet's whar they was first seen—an' thar ain't ary one got through thar by night fer three days. Spad's outfit was the last ter try. Jed Harker an' me found what was left o' them." Horror flaring in his eyes spoke volumes. "The car wasn't hurt aytall 'cept'n the gas tank was ripped open? We buried 'em quick, an'—" Once more a hesitant, quivering pause. "An' found their graves open the next mornin', open an' empty."

The girl swayed. Her lips parted, but no word came from them. Kurt's smoldering gaze was fixed on her, and his voice was a hoarse croak. "No one's come in or out of Ekwanok by night, since then. Not by night... Though by day thar's been plenty agoin' till thar ain't but a half-dozen families left in the valley... Whoa up, Emmy!" He seemed to notice the girl's state for the first time, grabbed for her wrist just in time to keep her from sliding to the ground as her knees gave way. "What...?"

Emma squeezed speech through her tight throat. "That's the way Milton is coming—maybe tonight."

"Milton?"

"My husband." She recalled that his letter had been addressed to Emma Sprool. "I'm married. Kurt. We had given up our room, had the car packed and ready to start for here, when someone sent for him to audit an account. It meant twenty dollars, the first in months; he couldn't turn it down. It was cheaper than a hotel for me to come by rail to Kingville. No one would drive me here, but I borrowed a horse. Milt said he would leave as soon as he finished—perhaps tonight. Tonight! And he is coming by Big Tom Highway!"

"Your—husband..." The syllables dripped from Tradin's twisting mouth; evidently he had heard nothing else. "Husband." Life drained from his broad-sculptured visage; his eyes were dead things, and his upper lip trembled like a hurt child's. His shoulders slumped. There was something abject about his big frame. Emma had seen him thus once before, when old Jeremiah, her grandfather, had flayed with cutting words the yokel who had aspired to mate with a daughter of the Sprools. "I—Great Jumpin' Godfrey!

Someone had screamed, far down the road. Some thing—for there had been nothing' human about that high-pitched wail of agony. The girl twisted to it, her heart pounding to the anguish, the utter terror in that cry—and it came again. Tradin's hand was on her shoulder, was shoving her away. "Git in th' house, Emmy. Git inside an' keep the door locked."

She jerked away. "But you, Kurt. You..." His face was set, his sleepless eyes ablaze, "Come with me and—"

"Can't," he snapped through tight, white lips. "I—maybe I'll get 'em this time. All week I've been too late. But thet warn't fur away..." Motor roar drowned his voice—faded to let him shout, "Quick, Em. Git inside an' let me go"

His urgency got her started; panic spurred her, and she was hurtling through tangled brush that ripped and fought to hold her back. Her feet thumped on the creaking porch. As the door pushed open before her frantic rush she heard the farmer's car dart away. She slammed the portal. Musty dark swallowed her as she fumbled for, and found, the great bolt and shot it rattling into its socket.