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

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ELISE GORNOFF whirled as she glimpsed the sudden swoop of some black, phantasmal thing from the corner of her eyes. A soundless scream constricted her throat...

But there was nothing there! Nothing at all was in the huge, beam-ceiled living room of the house on Phantom Island, save the black shadow-shapes that always lurked here, more fearsome now because of the approaching storm's lurid murk... Then for a single, searing instant, the age-darkened grain of an oaken wall seemed to writhe, as though something were melting into it!

A rumble of thunder from the leaden sky faded, and the black surge of terror in the girl's veins ebbed. Her delicately modeled mouth quirked in a brief smile of bitter self-mockery.

She was silly, childish, to be so startled. There were no evil wraiths on Phantom Island, despite the old wives' tales that had kept island and house uninhabited until Serge Gornoff had brought his bride here. Two hundred feet across the west branch of the River was Waterville, a bustling, congested city. There was nothing to fear...

Wood scraped against wood, beyond heavy portieres that cut off her view of the hall beyond. Elise's heart thumped. They were coming out of the mysterious room whose entrance was a secret panel in that hall's oak-lined wall. Serge was coming out of it, and Nikita and Pavel. Their dull footfalls broke the cowering stillness of the house.

In what dreadful ritual did they engage in that room she was forbidden to enter, forbidden even to mention? The old, futile indignation flared up in Elise. She was Serge's wife! Even though he were fifteen years older, she was his wife and had a right to share his secrets. A better right than the two servants, even though they had accompanied their barin* on his flight from the vast, dim Russia that had rejected him and his class. She should long ago have demanded to know... But she was afraid to know.

[* Russian барин: pre-Revolutionary term for "lord" or "master."]

The curtains swung apart, and Serge Gornoff came through them. "My dear," he said. He moved across to Elise, his feet whispering on the rug. The girl's throat pulsed at the sight of his tall, distinguished figure, and her love for him was a dull pain in her breast. "You are beautiful, here in the dimness. Like a white flame. A lonely flame." His ascetic face was lined with weariness, not of the body so much as of the soul, and pain dwelt deep in the dark-wells of his eyes. At his temples a hint of white edged the iron lustrelessness of his hair.

"I am always lonely, Serge." Elise swayed toward her husband, gave him both her hands. His were icy, but they closed on her slim fingers and clung with a strange fierceness, as if he were afraid that she would be taken from him.

It was this savage possessiveness of his love that had made her marriage a long agony of loneliness. He had isolated her on this island, had cut her off from all her old friends in a semi-Oriental seclusion...

"Tonight it will not be so lonely here, when our guests come."

The girl's heart thumped suddenly with warm gratefulness. He was actually looking forward to their arrival. He was human, after all... Thunder, nearer, deeper, growled in the heavens.

Gornoff glanced at the lurid, glowering oblong of the window. "Or perhaps they will not come." He seemed disappointed. "This is no pleasant place in a storm."

"That isn't stopping them. I watched them cross the footbridge from the mainland, a while ago. They're climbing up the hill, through the woods. They are coming..."

A voice from the hallway interrupted her. "They come, panya." Elise turned to face the bent figure in the archway. Nikita's grey, stringy hair straggled across her hook-nosed, witch's face. "But they not go away..."

With an exclamation of sudden anger Elise sprang across the room. "You...!" Her fingers dug into fleshless bone of the woman's arm. "What do you mean?" Wrath choked her voice. Wrath and icy, sudden fear. "What...?"

"Elise." Gornoff s voice was suave, unexcited. "You forget yourself..."

The girl whirled to face him, her grip on the hag unrelaxed. "No, Serge. I've just remembered myself. I've just remembered that it is I who am mistress here—"

A vast, rumbling torrent of sound cut her off—a roaring that battered against the house from without. The stone-walled edifice, the very ground beneath it, shuddered under the tremendous detonation...

Gornoff, in the window bay, stood taut and quivering against the glare of blue lightning. "Bozhe moy," he grunted. "Good Lord! The River..."

Elise, her passion suddenly puny against whatever cataclysm had loosed that detonation, found herself standing beside him. There was no rain as yet, but a roaring, solid gale pressed the forest down; and beyond it—beyond and below—a twenty-foot wall of water rushed down the river channel.

It thundered down on the footbridge. There was no longer any bridge, there were only a few tumbling sticks of timber harried by a chaos of rushing, foaming water. The base of the island was engulfed. The low river-bank streets of Waterville across the incredibly widened stream vanished.

"A cloudburst in the hills!" Gornoff exclaimed. "Look." Elise turned in the direction of his pointing finger. The northern sky was menacing midnight black. "We're cut off from the mainland. Your friends will have to stay here longer than they thought."

"Cut off!" The girl gasped. Was that what Nikita had meant? But how could she have known...? "Serge! They're in the woods. Will they...?"

"Here they are." A wind-tossed figure appeared at the edge of the clearing before the house, then another; but something in her husband's tone pulled Elise's gaze away from them, to his face. Fingers of icy fear squeezed her heart. That patrician face was darkened by virulent hatred. The eyes were red embers...

"Serge! I..."

No, she was mistaken. It was only that the black pall over the sky had thrown a shadow across Serge's countenance, only that his pupils had mirrored a lurid streamer of angry sunset that had broken through the clouds in the west.

"What, Elise? What were you saying?"

"I... I forgot to tell you. Beside my sister Naomi, the Falks, and Dick Tyler and May Bailey—I asked Hugh Rayne too."

They were struggling across the clearing, clinging to one another against the wind's blast, the girls shrieking with bewildered laughter at their own helplessness...

"Rayne... Oh yes, the young man who I displaced in your affections."

Why did Serge say it so slowly, so gloatingly...? "I thought perhaps that being here with Naomi, he would decide to like her as well as he once thought he liked me. I thought..."

Gornoff didn't seem to hear her. "That makes it perfect," he was saying. "Perfect."

What did he mean? Elise moistened her lips, and felt a weird, vague fear at her husband's words. Suddenly she knew she shouldn't have asked Hugh Rayne to come to this house. She shouldn't have asked any of them. It was a trap. It was a place of black menace—and Serge Gornoff...

"Elly. Elly dear." A small, slender girl burst through the drapes, pattered toward her sister. Naomi Wilson was blonde as Elise was dark, her red lips made for kissing. "Isn't it a shame. Hugh couldn't come with us. He said he'd get over later, but now he won't be able to... what? What's that you said?"

"Nothing, dear. Only that I am glad that you got here safely." But Elise lied. What she had said was, "Thank God—thank God."