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

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INTO the side-show tent the strident blare of a calliope filtered, a barker's raucous shouts, the crack of rifles from a shooting gallery—all the surging, happy tumult of Cranport's annual gala night. It was spring. Salburn's Super Shows once more were starting out on the road, and the factory town was getting a preview of its refurbished marvels.

The simple people of the community were also getting, all unknowingly, a preview of the horror that was to come before the gaudy caravan returned to its winter quarters—horror that would paint faces now ruddy under the flare of carnival torches with the grey of grisly dread; that would make screams of terror tear through throats now chortling with laughter and replace gayety with the desolation of fear-bred madness.

"Hot! Hot! Get 'em while they're red hot," a weenie vendor bawled, and from the Thriller Ride shrilled the mirthful shrieks of its tumbled patrons.

But within the canvas walls of Zortal's tent the clamor was muted by a strained, taut hush. The terraced bleachers were in shadow, so that from Dan King's front row seat the packed benches were only a mounting bank of pallid, blurred ovals. But he knew that their occupants were hunched forward, silently, almost grimly intent on the huge ape in the central arena—staring at the ape and the stocky, swart-visaged human in close-fitting tights of green silk who stood to one side, glowering and quite motionless.

Gasoline flares, high on poles, stabbed down at the hard- packed earth, filled the ring with a dancing, fitful glare. The long black lash of a cruel whip hung down along Zortal's leg and coiled at his feet, but neither by word nor sign was he giving any direction to the shaggy, lumbering primate in its incredible routine.

Naida Stone's little hand crept into King's protective one. It was icy, quivering. "I don't like it," she whispered, tremulously. "There's something wrong about it, something dreadfully wrong." A shudder ran through her slender body, so tinglingly close against his own.

"The brute is better trained than most, that's all," the young automotive engineer rumbled. But even as he said it, chill prickles scampered up and down his spine and he was conscious of a faint quiver at the pit of his stomach.

Was it some atavistic fear that crawled sluggishly in his blood, some ancestral memory of the days when Man first moved into caves and the Tree People still stalked him through steamy jungle aisles? But he had seen great apes before and felt nothing but a mild interest. In the hulking chimpanzee padding noiselessly out there, there was some eerie, too-human quality. Vaguely he, too, sensed that it had passed through some strange metamorphosis into a being neither beast nor man, into an entity beyond the pale of familiar things.

The gigantic beast, bent-kneed, long-armed, blackly hirsute, shuffled to a large mound in the center of the ring and jerked a tarpaulin from it. A stripped automobile chassis stood revealed—with bare framework—and beside it a helter- skelter pile of gears, steel rods, castings, all the multifarious parts of a car's power plant. Ranged on a canvas strip were wrenches, spanners and other implements. The polished tools splintered light into darting gleams...

Muscles tightened along the ridge of Dan King's square jaw. A murmur ran through the crowd, almost a moan. Nearly all of them workers in Cranport's two automobile factories—every man in the gasping audience had often seen just such piles of jumbled parts. King, himself part owner and engineer, of the Mayflower plant had arranged more than one such display for speed tests between crews of expert assemblers. Good Lord! Was the ape...?

The astounding speculation became actuality. The primate snatched up tools, fell on the tumbled mass of fabricated metal. With incredible swiftness it changed—with unbelievable speed a motor grew on the chassis, a crankshaft clanged into place, connecting rods were fitted to their bearings. Muscles swelled under the shaggy hide, the tremendous chest heaved as weights ordinarily handled by clanking cranes yielded to the chimpanzee's gigantic strength, were lifted and dropped meticulously into their beds. Grotesque black paws darted in intricate manipulations with a deftness, a dexterity no human laborer could surpass.

"No! No!" Naida whimpered. "It isn't doing it. It can't be. It isn't possible."

She was warm, palpitant within the curve of Dan King's arm—but in that moment he did not wonder at his daring, at her acquiescence. His throat was dry, his brain throbbed with an astoundment that was almost pain. He pulled his gaze from the fantastic performance, sought saner things for assurance of his own sanity.

Across the ring, nearly opposite, Ned Salburn leaned forward, his heavy-jowled face rubicund, his jaws working on his eternal tobacco cud. Further along was Warren Fenton, superintendent for United Motors of their Hiawatha factory, Mayflower's bitterest rival. Fenton's fox-like countenance was livid, his eyes almost popping from his head.

The emerald-clad man in the arena was somehow more erect. There was a swagger in the tilt of his, Zortal's, shoulders, in the poise of his head, as though he were saying, with gloating triumph, "I have done this. I, Zortal the Great."

From somewhere high up a hoarse voice boomed: "Come out from under that mask Pat Cooney. We know you. Come out!"

Tension broke as boisterous, almost hysteric laughter swept the big tent. The great ape dropped its wrench, twisted around to face the jester—and King's scalp tightened as he saw in the beast's russet fur a bald spot crowning its brow-less skull that had a gargoylesque resemblance to the popular foreman who had quit the factory without notice about a month before. Then the similitude was gone, the ape was altogether bestial as it loped forward, its curved knuckles brushing the ground. Light struck across its snouted, leathery countenance and the bridgeless spread of its flat nose, while the grotesque visage worked with some obscure emotion.

"Get back! Get back there," Zortal shouted, coming alive. "Get back!" He was moving to intercept the chimpanzee's path, his long, wicked lash lifting in his sinewy hand.

The ape came on, ignoring its master, thick lips snarling away from yellow fangs as it came straight for King, and he half- lifted from his seat with some dim notion of fending the brute off from Naida. Suddenly it was very near, and Dan saw its look...

His skin was suddenly a tight sheath for his quivering body, his palms were wet with cold sweat. Good God! Those were not the eyes of an animal. A soul looked out from those eyes, a tortured human soul, and in their blue depths fear crawled in a suffering terrible appeal!

Something flashed across King's vision, and there was the crack of a gun shot. No—! It was Zortal's whip as it lashed across the ape's hairy back, lifted, writhed, and bit savagely again and again into brute flesh.

"Back to your work. Back, I say!"

Clamor beat about Dan. Shouts, a woman's scream, were suddenly swallowed, blotted out, by an abysmal, thunderous roar that filled the tent with sound almost tangible, that blasted its hearers with devastating terror. The ape whirled on its tormentor. The out lash of its colossal arm was the lightning strike of a rattlesnake, and Zortal's whip was in the grip of a black, gnarled paw—was wrenched from the trainer's grip. The beast crouched, pounced. Zortal went down under a grunting, snarling tornado of hairy fury, and the flash of green silk was gone.

Dan King was somehow in the ring. He was tugging frantically at a pole at the top of which a torch flared. A shriek burbled in his ears, a shriek of purest agony. The rod came away in King's hands and he whirled, threw himself at the monstrous, snarling simian. His extemporary weapon pounded down and flame splashed on tossing, red-brown shagginess. Burned hair, frying flesh, stung its nostrils.

The chimpanzee surged erect, twisting. King leaped far back. The enraged beast loomed over him, tremendous. Its brutish mouth yawned cavernous and its bellow was about him like a black flood. Fetid breath gusted over him.

For an appalling instant fear ran icy in the engineer's veins. Monstrous arms flailed, and the giant ape sprang still roaring, to tear him apart. King's muscles exploded into swift movement, and he lunged forward to meet that cataclysmic rush, thrust the blazing flare squarely into the brute's face. The creature screamed and the man leaped back out of its reach, lithely. The flame-pot rolled across the ground, vomiting flame and black smoke.

The chimpanzee thudded to a halt. It clawed at its cooked face with huge hands, and he saw that in the deep-sunk sockets under the overhang of its forehead there were blackened cinders where eyes should be.

Naida was suddenly beside King—clutching his arm. "Dan!" the girl shrilled. "Dan! Come back. He'll kill you!"

The ape whirled to the sound, lurched blindly toward it, great paws sweeping out to clutch Naida, to rend. In a single flash of action Dan hurled the girl aside, lanced the stake at the cyclonic onrush of the maddened brute, jabbed its pointed ferrule into the ape's gaping mouth. The impact threw King backward, sprawling upon the ground; but the beast's own terrific momentum impaled it, drove the pole out through the back of its neck. Blood-rush choked off the nerve-shattering roar, and the gigantic animal pounded down, was a threshing, gory horror.

King rolled over and scrambled to his feet, frantically seeking Naida. He fought nausea that retched bitterness into his mouth.

Figures were all about him, blocking vision. Someone grabbed his hand, pulled him around. A crowd ringed him in, white-faced, spewing oaths. It split apart and Zortal came through, his green suit ripped, one arm dangling limply, shoulder askew.

King stared at him, stupid with amazement. The man's face was contorted with rage, his eyes black with fury. "Damn you," he squealed, rage thinning his voice. "You've killed him! Murderer!" The fellow's good hand came up, fisting. Dan's muscles knotted, but pudgy fingers, Ned Salburn's, grabbed Zortal's wrist.

"Stop it, you fool!" the showman roared. "Stop it. He saved your life. You'd be in little pieces now if it wasn't for him. The rest of us were paralyzed."

The trainer's thin mouth twitched. His stocky frame quivered as he visibly fought to gain control. "But—" he husked. "But he's ruined the work of years. The greatest attraction..."

"The devil with that!" Salburn came back. "You'll get another chimp, train it. I'll keep you on the payroll and next year..."

"Next year hell!" Wrath seemed to have drained out of the man, but his countenance was still livid, tiny fires still smoldered in his eyes. "I'll have another one for you in two weeks. A better one. I know how now."

Disbelief showed in the carnival proprietor's expression. "All right then. Two weeks. But come away. Come out of here—and let's get your arm fixed."

"Dan! Dan darling. Are you hurt? Are you all right?"

King wheeled to Naida. Her white frock was dirt-smeared and there was a brown splotch across her cheek. But something in her eyes sent a thrill through him, surging warmly in his veins.

"Naida!" He reached for her. "Naida! Let's get out of this." Words were on his tongue that for months he had choked down, had hardly dared to think. "Let's get out."

The crowd parted for them. They went past Zortal, and the man lipped, "I won't forget you, Mr. King. I won't forget this." It might have been thanks, but somehow the man's green costume seemed to make him oddly reptilian, poisonous. His black, cold eyes flickered from Dan to the girl his arm encircled, and little lights crawled in them, little lascivious lights.

There was a crowd outside too, and more coming on the run, brought by swift rumor. "What happened, Mr. King?" someone called, reaching out to stop them. Dan scarcely heard, did not answer. They were in his Mayflower Eight and were roaring away, out of the Fair Grounds, out along the car tracks of the Shore Road to where the Big House stood, set far back from the road.

As a shoeless kid he had long ago brought the laundry to the back door of that house. The small girl in crisp organdie whom he would see on the lawn—black ringlets curling about her tiny, piquant face, fat little legs twinkling—had made him poignantly conscious of his tattered clothes, of the tumble-down shack in Frog Hollow that was his home. Once she had smiled at him and he had run away.

He thought he had forgotten her in the long years between, years filled with days of grueling labor, with nights of more grueling study. His inventions, his genius for the management of labor, had multiplied the production, the profits of the Mayflower plant. Even when Roger Stone had recognized his ability, had given him greater and greater responsibility, had last year taken him into partnership, Dan King had remained the kid from Frog Hollow, and the Big House a palace, with the girl who lived there unapproachable as royalty itself.

She had come into the office more and more frequently. He had been wordless in her presence, awkward, had found duties to take him out into the plant. But increasingly she had haunted his dreams, and, when her father had asked him today to take her to the carnival he had trembled inwardly...

He braked the car at the big stone gate, turned to her. "Naida," he murmured. "Naida. I love you. I have always loved you."