Читать книгу Satan's Handmaiden - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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PAYTON RANDALL, motoring through the out-of-the-way hamlets of France in search of ancient legends that he might turn into tales for modern magazines, got a story in the Estaminet de la Fraternité at Lussac sur Gironde, but he hasn't written it yet. He probably never will. Even Randall hesitates at putting into other brains the haunting terror that has wrecked at least two lives. It is enough, he thinks, that ever since that night he himself has dreaded sleep and its attendant nightmares.

A fine drizzle, cold and penetrating, had accompanied him all the way from Libourne. Perhaps that was why the dark central plaza of the little town sent a shiver up his spine. But there was a peculiar atmosphere of dread about the place, the only visible lights those seeping somehow furtively through the little stars and crescents cut into the solid wood surfaces of tightly closed window shutters, and the dim luminance outlining the narrow window of the tiny cafe and hotel next the darkened Town Hall. Randall wasted no time getting from his Citroen to the comparatively warm interior of the inn. "Un rhum chaud, vîte," he barked as he entered. Maybe the steaming dynamic drink would warm the cobwebs from his brain.

Queer! At this early evening hour the place should have been crowded with stolid-faced Latins; but beside the aproned innkeeper it had only one other occupant, a powerfully built chap standing up to the zinc-topped bar. Payton couldn't see the man's face, but there was no doubt that he was an American. His gray tweed suit could have been cut nowhere but in New York. No doubt he was staying here for the night. He was hatless and the grimy light tangled in his silky white hair and was somehow strained of its filth.

"Oui, monsieur, tout de suite," the bartender acknowledged Randall's order with a promise of haste, and bustled through an inner door to where could be glimpsed a kettle boiling in a blackened fireplace.

The American turned then, and Payton was startled to see that his broad-planed, square-jawed face was that of a young man, a man not over thirty. Then his eyes pulled Payton's glance to them, sunken pits veiled by a misty curtain behind which tiny flames glowed unsteadily. Oddly enough, they made the writer think of coffin-candles flickering in a breeze.

"Good evening," Randall said, trying to cover his startlement, "I—"

A scream interrupted him, a burbling scream of mortal terror, from somewhere outside! It came again, and as Payton whirled, something crashed against the door. It flew open and a form catapulted within, the shrieking form of a black-smocked farmer, his white face convulsed with terror. The fellow staggered across the sawdust-covered floor, stumbled, and clawed at the bar-edge.

"Pierre!" he screamed. "Pierre! Le diable—the woman of the devil has killed me!"

Randall found himself with an arm around the Frenchman. "What is it that you said?" he snapped, trying to keep the chap from falling. His hand slipped inside the opening of the man's sleazy covering, touched bare flesh, was suddenly wet with warm and viscous liquid. "Good God!" he exclaimed. He pulled the fabric aside, saw a ragged gash in the man's breast pumping blood. "You're wounded!"

The Frenchman's face jerked around. His pupils were rolled up so that only the whites of his eyes showed; his flat nostrils twitched animal-like, and his lips were inhumanly contorted. "She..." he squealed. "She..."

"Dubois!" another voice barked from behind. It was a gendarme, his blue cloak powdered with moisture, his mustached face stern. "Shut up!" The words rang out imperatively. The policeman got a hand on the peasant, pulled him away from Randall! "Come with me," he snapped. "And shut your mouth." He forced him expertly to the door.

"I say," Randall interrupted. "The man's hurt!"

The policeman twisted angrily. "Vous—" He saw who was addressing him and stopped. Then, "Pardon, monsieur l'Americain, a thousand pardons. But we are used to his tricks here, and monsieur need not discommode himself." He kicked the door open, was gone with his prisoner.

Randall stared at the door, looked down at his hand. That was blood in which it was bathed; unmistakably it was blood. He turned, frowning, to find a smoking glass on the zinc. "What—" he started to ask the innkeeper. "What—"

The words died in his throat as he saw the other American. The man's face was white as his starched collar, the blood had drained from his lips, and his hand was fluttering on the edge of the tiny bar.

"Zat ees René Dubois," the bartender answered Payton's unfinished question. "He ees—how you say—enivré, drunk. Often he ees so, and then he sees ghosts, men wizout heads, an' ozzer theengs. Ze devil, for example, like he has seen tonight. It ees nossing, Roual weel take care of heem."

Payton wiped his hand with a handkerchief, slowly. "But he had a knife slash across his chest, pretty deep. He certainly didn't imagine that."

The Frenchman stroked a drooping wing of his black walrus mustache, and shrugged. "Zat ees from Soulange, no doubt. Rene sees le diable, yes—his wife ees herself a fiend. All women are crazee. But that one—" His hands went side-wise in an expressive gesture—"she ees—ze handmaiden of Satan himself! I haf seen—"

"Pierre!" an acidulous feminine voice shrilled from some inner precinct. "Pierre, viens ici. Dépêche-toi! Come here, on the hop!"

The hotel man winced. "Right away, my old potato," he called. "Right away, sweet cabbage." Then, sotto voce to Randall, "You see. They are all crazee. All." He bustled off.

Payton remembered the terror that had been mirrored in his companion's countenance, a terror not quite called for by the little scene. The man was more nearly normal now, but he was still white around the gills. Curious!

"Rather dramatic," Randall offered.

"Dramatic!" the young-old man blurted. "Good God! For a minute I thought they were around here, the devil-worshipers!"

The other smiled superciliously. "Lord, man," he scoffed. "That sort of thing belongs to the African jungle. This is a civilized country."

"Civilized! Yes!" There was a queer excitement in the fellow's tone, a peculiar resentment. "So is the United States civilized, and yet..." He stopped himself, his lips tight-pressed.

"And yet?" Payton repeated softly. He scented a story now and was like a hound on the trail. "Come now, you aren't going to leave me up in the air like that. Finish it, man." He fixed the smoldering eyes with his own. "You've got to finish it."

The other man seemed to come to some difficult decision. "All right," he said, somehow desperately. "All right. I've got to tell someone about it. But you won't believe me. No one could believe that such things could happen in the twentieth century, in America, five miles from one of the country's most respected colleges."

"I shall believe you," Randall said quietly, and he did not lie. "Go ahead."

There was a long silence. Then the man spoke again...

"My name isn't Harlan Lithow, but you can call me that. If you read the sports pages of the newspapers you have seen my real name there, often. One columnist used to say that I carried the ball through a broken field as if ten thousand devils were after me, and that is—almost funny. But I shall never carry a football again.

I was due that fall at—I'll call it Coronal College—a week before school was actually to open so as to start football practice, and even though I was jittery as all get out from the worst hangover I had ever had I was pushing my rattling roadster as fast as she would limp. It was one of those Indian Summer days when the sky is like a red hot copper ball, and all nature seems to pant under a thick blanket of silence, waiting for the sun to drop below the hills and let it breathe again. But this particular late afternoon seemed to have an eerie quality all its own. All the way from Joe Hammond's cabin there had been no one on the road, the few farmhouses had been deserted, their blinds drawn, and even the insects had made no sound. I had seen no living creature, in fact, except a solitary cow standing with bowed head and spread legs in the sparse shadow of a caterpillar-stripped tree. The great eyes of that cow had seemed afraid as I shot by, and they had made me afraid; afraid of the heat, and the silence, and an obscure threat that seemed to be waiting for me somewhere ahead.

Stanton Township, where Coronal is located, is a bone-dry town, you understand. But Horseface Joe Hammond's hideaway up Holton Turnpike offered a very satisfactory oasis, one that I had discovered early in my freshman year. I had spent the past night there—and it had been a large night. Joe's moonshine had never been so mellow and so potent—and for the first time in three years Horseface himself hadn't been in evidence. Which I thought a break, as did Jenny, his daughter. Hell! A fellow, I excused myself, is only young once.

I didn't know, then, how soon my youth was to end...

The highway curved around the flank of Mount Eda, dividing the woods from the parched pasture land on the lower slopes; and just ahead, I knew, a dirt road branched off. I came around a curve and saw the fork. "Whoa Betsy," I grunted, braking hard. The car skidded in the dust, stopped. And I sat there, staring through heat-haze at a signpost that leaned crazily askew in front of me. There were two boards on that post. When last I had been here there had been only one, the one whose eroded legend I knew was meant to read, Stanton— 5 Miles. The new one stabbed a flaring red hand, up the narrow, rutted trail that climbed abruptly to vanish into the gloomy pines cloaking the upper slope of the height.

I could read the emerald inscription clearly; but it didn't make sense. 3 Miles, it said. Nothing more. 3 Miles, in green against flaming scarlet!

My hands tightened on the wheel and unreasoning, hot resentment surged inside my dizzy brain. The sign seemed a personal affront, a grim challenge. I had always wondered where that road went, but no one around Stanton would tell me. There were certain old farmers whose eyes had suddenly gone empty when I asked them about it, whose mouths had become thin, straight lines. Sanctimonious old beggars they were around here, not excepting Horseface, despite his extra-legal occupation...

That reminded me, Jenny had fooled around the door of my car and winked as she said good-bye. Maybe... I fumbled in the pocket there and my fingers felt cold glass. Damn it, the girl wasn't such a bad scout after all. I pulled out the flask, put it to my lips.

The white mule scorched as it went down, exploded in my gullet. I shuddered, but the pounding ache in my skull eased a trifle. What the devil, once what this bottle held was gone it would be three months before I would touch another drop. In the morning I would enter the strict regime of the training table—and I always deliver what I am paid for.

Paid for? Surely you don't think I was attending that sanctimonious, church-ruled institution for my health? You don't think Coronal could assemble its championship teams from the anemic, long-faced lads whose fathers send them there because of the "moral atmosphere and Christian training" its prospectus boasts? Hardly...

The drink steadied me, or so I thought, gave me courage to look at that mysterious sign again. 3 Miles. It was a challenge, a dare. I wasn't going to take it lying down; this time I was going to find out where the road went.

My shoe pounded the starter button. The motor whirred, gears clashed, and Betsy poked her nose uphill. A queer chill went over me, the sort kids used to say meant someone was walking on your grave. I fought an overwhelming impulse to push the gear-lever into reverse, back out, and speed away. God! If only I had yielded to that impulse!

The foliage of the pines met overhead and green dimness was all around me. The roadster rocked and bucked over boulders, but the coolness in here was grateful after the torrid heat of the Turnpike. Balsamic fragrance mingled with earth-smell. I breathed it gratefully.

Lord, but it was quiet in there. There wasn't the slightest breeze to rustle the pine-needles, there wasn't the faintest scutter of a woods-creature. The silence swallowed the rattle and bang of my car, quenched it at the very road-edge. There was something ominous about that silence... But I felt the muscles along the ridge of my jaw harden. I wasn't going to turn back now. I wasn't going to let the woods laugh at me.

Hell! Where did that fool idea come from? How could the trees laugh at me? They weren't alive!

But something was alive off there, to my right, something that was watching me with hostile eyes. I braked suddenly, the din of my progress stopped. Something else stopped too, at the same instant, a sound that I couldn't hear before because of Betsy's noise, that I couldn't hear now because it wasn't being made any more. I bit my lip. I was acting like a two-year-old. There could be nothing there, nothing at all.

Nevertheless, as the roadster started off again, I peered furtively into the gloomy reaches among the tree-trunks. Light-flecks, struggling through thick foliage, were oddly red-tinged like flickering droplets of blood, on the ash-brown carpet of dead needles.

The rustle to the right, just beyond the range of my vision, recommenced. I was certain that I heard it now. The road leveled and I put on speed. That damned sound kept even pace with me. I slowed, it slowed too.

Straight boles, rough-barked, were silhouetted against a shaft of sunlight ahead. I gasped with relief, pressed down on the accelerator pedal. Lurid light quivered in a small clearing, and something was a shapeless black blotch at its very center. Before I could stop, the roadster's radiator almost touched it. I saw a blurred face...

"Damn you!" I yelled. "Why the hell—" And the words choked in my throat! My pupils had accommodated to the glare and I saw more clearly. God!...

I was looking at an enormous head. Where its hair should be was a livid scar, a glistening cap of drying blood. One eye was gone; its socket was an abysmal pit, tunneling deep into blackness within the man's skull. The other, lidless, was bloodshot, bluish white, its pupil a mere pinpoint. And beneath those eyes of horror what I thought at first was a red mask resolved itself into a small-meshed network obliterating nose and mouth; a network of deep cuts, threadlike, that oozed tiny droplets of ruby moistness.

A belly-voice, resonant but edged with thin pain, boomed from the apparition. "Back! Go back before it is too late."

My lips moved, but no sound came out. That awful head was perched atop a voluminous black cloak, and the shape beneath it was—not human. I licked dry lips, managed to force a squeak through my constricted throat. "Why? Who are you? What—what did that to you?"

The Thing did not answer. Its one eye stared at me, menaced me with its baleful glare. It couldn't be real; someone was playing a trick on me. Horror swirled into red rage behind my pounding temples. I twisted, jerked open the car door at my left, lunged out, started forward.

The man was no longer there! In the instant my eyes had been averted from him he had vanished, soundlessly, like some phantasm of my own imagining... I had to steady myself with a hand on the roadster's hot metal before I could get my legs moving to take me out in front. I was afraid to look at the road-mud there. Afraid. Then I managed it.

Stamped in the soft muck were two indentations. Water was oozing from the clean-cut sides of the little pits so that there was no question but that they had just been made. But they were not the prints of human feet. They were the marks of hooves—of cloven hooves!