Читать книгу The Little Walking Corpses - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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FEAR was a living presence in the streets of Staneville. It was visible in the pallor that underlay the weather-beaten countenances of the small town's inhabitants, in the furtive glances with which their eyes, bloodshot by sleeplessness, searched every chance-met face with suspicion and challenge.

Worst of all, it was manifest in the flare of their nostrils as eternally they tested for an alien taint a breeze otherwise fragrant with the crisp autumn tang of the forest that coated Buzzard Mountain.

The odor of death was what they sought and found; the stench of a corpse from whose bones the flesh sloughed, moldering.

On Thursday the smell was faint as the smoke-haze from some brush fire the wardens fought where the Range dipped below the northern horizon. Between Monday and Tuesday last, it had been a fetid reek flooding a moonless midnight in which the shrill of the cicadas was stilled, and the countless small noises that make up the country's nocturnal hush were utterly absent.

No one in Staneville had not been waked by that sudden cessation of all sound. None there was who had not lain for interminable minutes stifled as by a noisome, intangible palm folded over nose and mouth while the darkness, pressing against the houses, throbbed with the beat of vast, unseeable wings.

Rousing to a breathless, sultry dawn, none at first knew his nocturnal experience to be other than a peculiarly vivid nightmare. Then the shadow of a charnal stench drifted into opened windows of the houses on the Slope, into the drab shanties of Frog Hollow, and faces turned questioningly to one another.

In dark pupils the knowledge grew that what had passed in the night had not been a dream, but before paling lips could form the words trembling upon them a scream shrilled through the hamlet.

Knife-like where the woods stretch the tentacles of their underbrush toward the last white dwellings of the well-to-do; distance-dulled yet still startling in the lowly slum west of Main Street; it pulled all Staneville into the open, and streams of half-dressed humanity frothed up the steep eastward ascent to Oxford Lane.

Pouring into the Lane they saw the woman on the trim lawn before her cottage, her countenance contorted, her dark hair a tumbled storm on nude shoulders, her arms outflung and imploring.

Sun-blaze striking through a gossamer nightgown stripped her taut body of all concealment, its broad hips and full-formed breasts, its rounded, sturdy thighs; but no one saw her as a naked woman, only as a frantic and terrified mother. For now that they were near, the scream formed into an intelligible shrill call.

"Dickie! Where are you Dickie? Dick!"

"It's Jane Horn," the word passed back to those who could not yet see nor hear. "She's screaming for her little Dickie."

Icy fingers closed on every heart at the mention of misfortune to the freckle-faced, tow-headed ten-year-old, whose cheery whistle and twinkling eyes everyone in the village knew.

Cole Simpson was already at the gate, his gaunt fingers on its latch, having beaten them there because his was the next house to the Horn's. He twisted to the fore-runners and flung at them a barked command.

"Stay back! I'll take care of this."

He went through onto the lawn, his slippers flapping on the dew-wet grass, his tall, spare figure clothed only in trousers and long-sleeved undershirt, his iron-grey hair unkempt. Behind him the first of the crowd stopped short, thrusting back against others who halted in turn. A hush spread swiftly among them and although the woman's cries had died to a sobbing whimper it was distinctly heard by even the farthest removed.

Distinctly heard too was Simpson's voice, strangely gentle, not dry and harsh as was its wont. "What is it, Jane?" The woman's head turned to him but there was no recognition in her eyes.

"Jane!" Simpson snapped sharply, grasping her elbow. "What's the matter?"

"Dick," the name ripped from her. "Gone!" With that she seemed to break up, the tenseness leaving her, her legs folding so that save for the dart of the man's arm about her waist, she would have crumpled to the ground.

"Listen," he said, his narrow, hallow-cheeked face more like grey granite than ever, "listen to me. You must hold yourself together. You must tell us exactly what has happened so that we can help you, so that we can find Dick for you. Tell us what you know."

Somewhere in the crowd a voice whispered, "That smell! It's stronger here..."

"Know?" Jane Horn was saying, looking at Simpson now, seeing him. "All I know is that I went to his room to wake him up and he wasn't there. Not there—nor anywhere."

"Maybe he sneaked out to go swimming before school, or for some other kid's nonsense."

"In his nightshirt? Barefoot? His shoes are there, all his clothes. And he wouldn't do that without telling me. Not my Dickie. Not while his father is away."

"Even your Dick might. He's a boy, after all, and thoughtless. Go into the house, my dear, and get something on. Meanwhile I'll look around. There will be footprints. The ground is soft and I've kept the people from trampling your lawn. Don't worry, we'll find him."

"Footprints! That's it. Look for them. We'll look for footprints under his window." The mother pulled free from Simpson, darted toward the side of the house, her uncovered feet splashing the dew.

There were no footprints in the loam where she bent, peering at the ground. There were no footprints anywhere on the lawn. There was nothing to tell where Dick had gone, or what had happened to him.

By the time this had been ascertained the police arrived: the trio of peace officers that was all Staneville could boast. Balloon-paunched, dull eyes fat-drowned, Chief John Mault wheezingly posted his two lank constables to bar out the buzzing throng by a show of authority less effective than Cole Simpson's simple command, and waddled through the gate to join Cole in his search.

While pendulous jowls concealed Mault's collarless state, no amount of fussy self-importance could hide his fat-brained futility, yet it was he who discovered the only trace of the vanished lad. It was a book, Ken Thomas: Junior G-Man, that he picked up out of the rank weeds where the Horn property ended at the rear of the house and the ground lifted sharply to the forest edge.

He turned it over in his pudgy hands, an abrupt stillness cloaking him. Staring at it over his shoulder, Jane Horn vented a tiny scream.

"It's Dick's!" she exclaimed. "Lou sent it to him from Buffalo. It came last night and Dick took it to bed with him. He fell asleep holding it so tightly I couldn't take it away. Give it to me."

She reached for it. Mault evaded her grasp. "No," he sighed. "No, I've... I've got to keep it." The pink of his plump cheeks had faded to a sickly green.

"What is it?" Simpson demanded, coming up. "Fingerprints?"

"No," the police officer replied, his voice low and toneless as though it were being squeezed out of a clamped larynx. "They'd be washed away by the dew. But... but..." His one hand jerked away from the book. There was a dark brown smear on it, of some viscid, sticky gum. The hand lifted to Simpson's nose.

"Smell," Mault husked.

There was no need to bring that stain so close to the man's nostrils. The stuff that Mault's hand had rubbed from Dickie's book had the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh!

Jane Horn smelled it and her mother's instinct, swifter than any man's thoughts, seized its meaning. "The Thing took him," she shrieked. "The Thing in the night." Then she was a crumpled and pitiful heap in the grass.

They heard that scream, the people buzzing in the road, and blanched, recalling the black quarter-hour they had forgotten, recalling how close the beat of vast, unseen wings had throbbed to the walls behind which their own children were.

That was when the Fear was born in Staneville, the Fear Staneville had not for one moment forgotten because never for one moment of the dreadful days or the sleepless nights since had the air been untainted by the smell of the unknown Thing in the night.