Читать книгу Death Lives in Our House - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 4

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NORMA SAWYER came dreadfully awake. The nightmare still clutched her heart with its gelid fingers. Her decrepit cot creaked with the quivering waves of terror still shaking her. She was no longer asleep, but dread was still a tangible presence in the dark bedroom, a grisly threat.

Mother instinct directed Norma's wide, burning eyes through the gloom to the pallid glimmer that was little Cora's crib. There was no movement, utterly no movement there. Norma's scalp tightened, her throat clamped on a scream. She pushed against the mattress' yielding surface, shoved herself upright, swung cold feet over the side of the bed... Sound impacted dully against her ears, a dull thud, far off. It came again. It was a muffled pud from the front of the small flat. From the door! Someone was knocking at the door. That was what had awakened her. A knock on the door. But it was past midnight! Who could be demanding admission, so late?

"Daddy." The child's drowsy, small voice met her as Norma came erect. "Is it Daddy, Momma, comin' home?"

Cora was all right. Of course she was all right. But pain twisted in the mother's breast. "No, dear." It was hard to say it, so hard. "It isn't Daddy. He's gone away—and maybe he's not coming home any more. Go to sleep while mother sees who it is knocking. If you go right to sleep mother will let you have sugar on your cereal when you wake up in the morning."

"Awight. But I want my daddy." The six-year old's sleep-fuzzed wail tore at Norma's heartstrings. "I—want—my daddy—to come..."

The worn linoleum of the kitchen-living room was clammy-cold to the bare soles of her feet, and the darkness clotted into fearsome shadows in the corners. The knocking at the door was steady now, measured and curiously insistent. Queerly muffled, too, for all its persistence, as though the knuckles were swathed in thick gloves. Or as though they were flabby, boneless.

Suddenly Norma knew that she was afraid—deadly afraid of her midnight visitant. The strength seeped out of her legs, and, in the small hall leading to the flat entrance, she wavered, had to hold on to a door-jamb to keep from falling.

"Just—a minute," she gasped. Her words seemed to fall flatly against the close air, but the one who knocked must have heard them, for his rapping stopped. Was he someone from the hospital? To tell her Dan was gone; that at last his tenuous hold on life had slipped? For a week, now, he had lain there, white, inanimate, only the faintest of possible pulses signaling that he was not the corpse he seemed. If she could only have stayed there with him—but she had to come back to Cora. Cora must not know how sick her father was...

Sleeping sickness, they had told her. But she knew they did not believe it themselves, as she did not believe them. They had found him in the hall, his eyes open, a look of unspeakable terror in them, but otherwise as one from whom life was gone.

They had taken him away to the hospital, but the terror had lived on, almost tangible in the destitute flat. It had been a black pall overhanging her, a brooding, intangible threat. And this summons out of the night seemed a part of it.

"Open up." Door-muffled, a hollow voice jerked Norma back to actuality "Let me in."

Her hand was on the cold doorknob, was supporting her lax weight. She licked her dry lips. "Who it is? What do you want?"

"The room. I've come to take it."

Momentarily Norma's dread gave way to elation. The sign she had only tonight persuaded the corner druggist to let her put in his window, had brought results already! Her desperate need had demanded that she find a lodger for the chamber from which searing memories barred her. The money that had been in Dan's clenched, deathlike hand was spent. A dollar or two, whatever she could get from a lodger, how much it would mean!

Before her fears surged back she had opened the door... Icy prickles scampered along Norma's spine. She could see no one in the vague light filtering up from the dim bulb on the landing below. But the sense of a presence here before her was eerily strong. Involuntarily she closed her eyes against it, shrinking back.

"What's the matter? Are you ill?"

There must be something wrong with her. She had not, perhaps, altogether awakened from her dream. He had been there all the time, the man who spoke. He must have been there. He could not have formed, as her first terrified impression had been, from an uncanny up-swirl of the shadows that lay as a heavy, ominous pool between her and the stairhead. He was real, tangible, for all that his long black ulster made his tall form shapeless, and his broad-brimmed hat darkened his face so that Norma could see nothing of it.

"You—you must excuse me." The muscles around her lips tightened, but she knew that she had not contrived the smile she intended. "I was asleep when you knocked."

"Asleep? Is it so late?" he asked.

Queer. Didn't he know what time it was? "Yes—very," she admitted.

"Ah—then if you will take me to the room, I shall not disturb you longer."

"But—but I did not intend to... I am alone here with my child. I thought—some woman..." An eerie dread of the man was thickening her tongue, was making it hard for her to talk.

"I understand." What was there about his intonation that was so outlandish? "But I am helpless as any woman. I am—blind."

"Blind!" Quick, feminine pity leaped up in Norma, "Oh! How terrible!"

"I shall not be—for long. I shall recover my—sight—very soon." It sounded like a threat, strangely, reawakening Norma's fear of him. "Nothing can stop me from getting it back." He moved, coming toward her, as if to enter. But Norma held her place in the doorway, barring his entrance.

He halted. He stopped short, there in front of her, just before he reached her, just before he touched her. How had he known that she had not made way for him? Had the loss of his sight sharpened his other senses so that the fragrance of her breath, some warm aura, had warned him of the impediment to his progress?

A quivering aversion, some psychic alarm bell deep within her, warned Norma against him. But how could she turn a blind man from her door at this hour? How could she send him out to wander in the dismal streets...?

"I can pay." His misunderstanding of her reluctance to admit him seemed almost deliberate. "I can pay well." There was a coin in Norma's hand. She stared at it, the little hairs at the nape of her neck bristling. He had not handed it to her. She was certain he had not given it to her. But there it was, clutched in her small fist, hard, and round and cold. "I imagine that will be quite enough for a week."

There was some hint of mockery in the way he said it, as though he were laughing at her. Enough! Good Lord! It was gold. It was a verdigris-encrusted, worn disk of gold, and although the almost obliterated letters graven on it spelled words in some language Norma did not know, it was the size of a ten-dollar piece. Ten Dollars. Shoes for Cora! A dress... She had no right to refuse it. No right...

"This is the room. In here." He could not see. She must guide him. She must lift her hand, put her fingers on his sleeve. Her muscles were rigid, fighting the command of her brain which itself quivered with inexplicable aversion. But she managed it. She managed to touch him. Light as was that touch, the fabric of his coat gave under the pressure, dented as though... as though there were no arm within it.

His feet made no sound on the bare boards of the floor. He was swallowed by the dense lightlessness within that room. Norma started after him to turn on the light, checked herself, remembering that he had no need for light.

Her throat twitched with hysterical laughter. To stop it she spoke. "The—the bathroom is next door. Right next door, here to the left, Mister—Mister...?" He had not told her his name.

He didn't answer the questioning inflection. For an eternally long minute he did not answer. And suddenly it seemed that the blackness of the room was starkly, staringly empty—that he was no longer there...

And then the name rustled out to her "Malwa." It was a bodiless whisper hanging in the dark. "I am called Malwa, the Seeker." There was finality in its tone, dismissal.

Norma was conscious of a barrier before her, shutting her out. The door was closed. It had swung silently shut, like a dark curtain dropping. Stunning realization seared her. She had closed that door days ago, and she had not opened it now for Malwa!