Читать книгу Riverfront Horror - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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THE night it all happened, we were feeling pretty high in the hut that Jim Hawks and I had made out of wood scrap and old tomato cans. Marge Beals had started to sing a song. Mother Machree it was, and I forgot everything else listening to the kind of husk in her voice that makes it hard for me to swallow. I didn't hear the yowling of Red Connors and Rat-Face Floyd from under the railroad embankment over their smoke—that stuff they stew out of rubbing alky and throw into their lead-lined guts. I didn't hear the slither of the river sliding by under the fog. I didn't even hear the bawling of the ferry-boats—till that one hoot, so close and loud it drowned out the quivery sadness of Marge's singing—and ended in a high, thin scream!

Wow! It was like somebody stabbed a knife right through the dark, and the shack wall, and into my chest. I saw the girl's mouth stay open without any sound coming out of it, and her eyes were all of a sudden big and round and black with the scare of that shriek. I saw Jim's face go the color of a dead fish's belly.

Then the scream came again, wire-edged with pain and something more terrible than pain, and it cut off right in the middle. Then there wasn't any more noise except the hoot of boats feeling along in the fog like blind men, and the rasp of our breathing that made the silence more silent and scary.

In the bunch of lopsided shacks made out of broken boxes, rusting sheet-iron and what have you that we called New Deal Town, we were used to screams. But this one was different. It wasn't any souse that had made it, nor any cokey. You knew the guy that had screamed that way had seen something a man wasn't supposed to see, and it had killed him, and he'd gone crazy before he died.

Marge moved first, twisting to the door and reaching her little hand to open it. That got Jim and me started. We jumped up together. I shoved the kid aside, barking, "Stay here. We'll go!" And my buddy and I jammed in the doorway.

In the seconds it took for us to get through, the yellow fog outside came alive with guys yelling and the squeals of rusty opening hinges and the pound of running feet.

I pushed hard, tumbled as I came out, scraped my face with mud and cinders. As I twisted to get up, Jim pounded by me towards the hollering of the gang, that was going away towards the other end of the muck plot. There was someone else alongside of me. Marge said, "Hen, is that you?" and I felt her little hand on mine. She helped me get up and I started to follow Jim.

"Wait," Marge whispered. "Wait, Hen." I could hear her teeth clicking through her words.

I started to whisper something. Only started—I didn't finish. Because just then the light from the shack-door was gone, and something big and black and shaped like nothing God ever made was there instead, and it was lunging at us like a big bird come out of the fog. I saw a tremendous black wing and hooked claws flashing silvery like, and I yelled and threw myself at Marge. The two of us went down in the mud and the big thing missed us and pounded past.

My yell was answered by yells from the gang and I heard the bunch coming. But I heard something else that made gooseflesh all up and down my backbone. It was a laugh, a laugh thin and loud and screechy and terrible...

Marge pulled at me, pulled me up. "Come on," she gasped. "Come on. It went this way." Nuts. The girl was nuts, but she started away and I couldn't let her go alone.

I didn't catch her till she was stopped by the river. I grabbed her. "What's the big idea, Marge?" I said. "Running—"

"Hush," she whispered. "Hush. Listen."

I shut up. I couldn't hear a thing, nearby, except the oily lap-lap of the river along the rock. The gang hadn't seen us go, and we were alone there.

We were alone, and we weren't. There was someone else there, someone or some thing else. I couldn't see it. I couldn't really hear it. It just was there, if you know what I mean. A feel like eyes on the back of my neck. But no sound, not anything to let me know I was right. Nothing except the little shiver of Marge's slim, cold hand in mine and a whimper from her throat that told me she felt it too.

And then, like the snap of a finger, whatever it was, was gone. But a footfall thudded over to one side of us. I jerked around, started to go after it, stubbed my toe in something soft, and tumbled again. Tumbled and came down hard on something limp laying there. My arms flailed out. One hand splashed into the cold wet of river water. The other touched something wet too—a warm, sticky wetness on skin—on human skin.

I gagged, fought to get away from what I had fallen on. I pushed myself up. Right under me I saw a red face, a face that was red because it was drenched with blood like as if someone had poured a bucket of the stuff over it!

It was lopsided and all twisted around, but I knew it. "Baldy Thomas!" I said, and looked at the top of his head to make sure. My stomach came up into my throat. Because there wasn't any top to his head. His skull had been peeled open like you peel the shell off a soft-boiled egg. And the mess inside was awful.

I was sick. So sick that I didn't think to wonder where the light was coming from that I saw by. But something clicked, and it was dark again. I managed to get to my knees, and to my feet, without touching it again. Then I knew that the light had been from a flashlight and none of us had one, and I grabbed at where I judged the light had come from.

I caught hold of a coat lapel and held on tight. The sounds I squeezed out of my throat didn't make words, and then they did. "Who're you? What—what are you...?"

The man kind of gasped and jerked away. My hand slipped along the coat edge, caught against a button. A fist exploded against my jaw, rocked me back. And in that minute the fellow tore away. I heard foot-thuds running off.

I shook my head to clear it. Marge yelled, "Hen! Are you all right? Hen!" and I felt her grab hold of me. Then there was a lot more shouting all around, and I knew the bunch had found us.

Someone scratched a match, cursed, and I knew he had seen what was left of Baldy. I pushed against Marge, pushing her out of the mob. That wasn't anything for a dame to look at.

"What was it, Hen?" Her voice was like silk tearing. "What awful thing was that behind us just before—before you jumped away from me?"

It takes a woman to crack to the kernel of a nut. As soon as she talked about it, I somehow knew that what had happened to Baldy was only the beginning. No, I haven't got second sight, or anything like that, but I knew just like I had seen them that there had been hate in the eyes watching us from the fog, and a yen to kill that wouldn't be satisfied with just the one stiff. What had been done to Thomas was a giveaway on that too. Back home—don't ask me where that is—there was a sheep-dog went killer once, and something about Baldy's corpse reminded me of the ewes we found in the field the next morning. But this time it was us the killer was after, and not sheep.

"Listen," I said. "Listen kid. Where's Mom Stone?"

"I don't know. In our shack, I guess. She was lying down when I came over to yours."

Mom was the little old dame Marge lived with. A sweet-faced old lady with hair white and soft as the little clouds you see in the morning sky. Kind of gentle too. She and Marge made a pair, though the kid was nineteen and Mom three times that. There wasn't a guy in New Deal Town wouldn't lay down and let either of them walk all over him if it did them any good, and that goes for Red Connors and his mob of hoboes as well as the rest of us what have hopes of going back to our trades sometime.

I say to Marge, "Well, I'm taking you to her, and you're barring the door, and then I'm going for the cops." While I'm saying this I start walking, shouldering her gentle-like toward the little rise about the middle of the lot where their hut is.

"The cops! Hen, some of the boys—"

"Yeah. I know some of the boys won't like it. But they've got to take their chances. This thin—"

I stop as wood crashes somewheres ahead and there's another shriek. It's a regular banshee howl, but Marge plops out, "That's Mom," and starts running. I take out after her, catch up and pass her just as Mom yells again.

I feel the ground lift under me. Sudden-like there's a lighted doorway in front of me and there's something coming out of it. A man? Well, maybe. But all I see as I jump for it is fluttery blackness, big as King Kong, it seems like, and two green spots of light like cat's eyes.

I spring, throw an overhand left jab at those eyes. It lands square...

But it seems like my knuckles just smash! An awful pain shoots up my arm. I screech. Then a locomotive hits the side of my head and I slam up against the side of the shack, slam into blackness. A screaming, crazy laugh follows me out, a laugh that turns my blood cold...