Читать книгу Bride of the Winged Terror - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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THE dirt road had been climbing for five miles, and Dick Mervale knew from the increasing difficulty with which he breathed that they must be very high. But there was the greater height on the right of the road along which their open-topped roadster traveled: a grey cliff which rose almost perpendicular for a thousand feet, and then became a thickly forested slope running back, but still upward, until it seemed to hang in the overcast sky, a vast, dark, looming shape, somehow foreboding.

"Buzzard Mountain," Fred Harris said, jerking his head toward it. "If my hunch is right, Gorham Carstairs is somewhere up there. Winburg's a mile ahead, around the bend. Remember the story. We're driving through to Haleton. We got twisted off the highway, but someone told us it was better to keep on than to turn back. Better let me do the talking."

"No chance of someone's recognizing you, is there? Like you did Carstairs' photo when the reward circular came into the office?"

"Hell no! I was a kid of fourteen when Mom died an' Uncle Leslie sent for me. Carstairs was a grown man then. He didn't change much in the twenty years he was working in the bank, except that he's got grey. But we got to watch ourselves. These hillbillies hate furriners worse'n poison, an' they stick together like glue. If they're suspicious, we're lawmen our bird'll be gone when we get to his hideout, an' five grand reward will be gone with him. Five grand, an' our big chance to show up the cops an' wedge in on the Bankers' Association business."

Harris might have left the hills twenty years ago, but the hill dialect clung to him; and he was wiry, lean-faced expressionless as all the mountain breed. Dick Mervale was burly, gigantic by contrast; his hard-boned countenance heavy-jowled. But there was an air of competence about him too, and undaunted courage in his grey, level eyes.

"Lord," he grunted. "You don't have to keep rubbing it in that this break means we'll start eating regular at last. I was about ready to pack in the private dick racket and crawl back on the force when..."

Harris grunted suddenly, and pitched forward over the wheel. Mervale grabbed for it, kicking Fred's foot off the accelerator, pounding his own heel on the brake, and fighting for a frantic moment to keep the lunging car from running off the curving road, from catapulting into a shaggy, thick tree trunk that loomed suddenly straight ahead.

The roadster stopped, and Mervale's shoulder-holster automatic was in his fist. But there wasn't anyone to shoot at. There was only the thick greenery of the tree clump that filled the bend where the road curved, and screened the halted car from the heights. There was only the grey glimmer of the cliff-face through the clustered trunks.

"Fred," Mervale whispered. "Are you sick? Fred!"

Harris lolled against him, limp and utterly motionless. "Fred," his partner groaned, sighting a little black hole in the left side of brown-thatched skull, and a dribble of blood that ran down a leathery cheek. Not very much of it. Dead men do not bleed.

DEAD. It took a little time for the realization to percolate into Mervale's numbed brain that his buddy was dead. They hadn't expected anything like this. Not from the grey little man who had been an inconspicuous, trusted bank clerk for two decades, and then had absconded with fifty thousand dollars. They had thought it only a question of tracing Carstairs down, putting the cuffs on his wrists and taking him back with them to the city.

No lead from a pocket-gun had made that little hole. It was steel—a steel-jacketed rifle bullet that did not spread. The hole was an inch above Harris' ear, raked downward. It had come from above, from far above...

Mervale recalled a sharp crack, like the snap of a broken bough, that sounded just before his companion had slumped. It had been so distant he had paid no attention to it. Distant—The lethal shot had come from far up the mountain.

He glanced up, involuntarily. The leafy tree-tops which had saved him from sharing his partner's fate blocked his view of the height. But against the leaden sky he saw a black-winged shape wheel and circle. He remembered the name of the mountain, and shuddered.

The buzzards were already gathering to pick Fred's bones. But they wouldn't get the chance... If he drove into Winburg he'd have to explain what had happened. The quick suspicions of the hillbillies would be aroused, and Carstairs would be warned.

Little muscles, knotting, made a ridge along Mervale's jaw, and his eyes were bleak, dangerous.

There was only one practicable way to climb Buzzard Mountain. Harris had sketched it for him: a narrow, ledge-like path that started a half-mile beyond Winburg and zigzagged up the face of the cliff. Mervale was going up that path. He was going up there alone, and he was going to bring Carstairs down it. Or leave him up there, food for the buzzards.

But he'd have to reach the foot of that path first, and he'd have to pass through Winburg to do it. Well, there was a carpet of dead leaves under the trees there. And there were scattered rocks that could be piled over a corpse and keep it safe from carrion birds, till its murder could be avenged, and it could be given decent burial.

Fifteen minutes later the roadster, with a single occupant now, purred through the shielding woods, rounded a shoulder of Buzzard Mountain...

Again Dick Mervale's heel came down hard on the brake.

A gaunt, cadaverous man was in the center of the road, where it became a street running between a half-dozen ramshackle, unpainted houses. There was a sawed-off shotgun in his gnarled hands and it was lifted to snout straight at Mervale's heart.

"What's the idea?" the detective growled. "This a stick-up?" A pulse pumped in his wrists. Had he been observed concealing Harris' body? Or were Carstairs' friends making sure that no stranger passed through the valley alive?

The armed man came closer. There was a curious wariness in the way he moved. There was something like fear in his faded, red-rimmed eyes. Like fear that had dwelt there a long time. Nor was it fear of Mervale or of any human thing.

"Who are yeh?" the fellow demanded, hitching a shirt-sleeved shoulder to keep the frayed strap of his once-blue overalls from sliding off. "Whar yeh comin' from an' whar yeh gwine?"

Mervale forced a mirthless smile to his tight lips. "Why all the questions? This town quarantined or something?" There was something queer about the place, some brooding strangeness that was seeping into it with the dusk, making it silent and—evil.

"I'm doin' th' askin'." The man's flesh-less lips seemed not to move at all. "An' you th' answerin'—ef yeh're smart."

"All right. Keep your shirt on. My name's Dick Merton." There were initials on the bag strapped to the luggage-carrier, lucky they were his own and not Fred's. "I'm driving through from Louisville to Haleton." Mervale's look slid covertly past the gun bearer.

There were others on the crazily canted wooden sidewalk bordering the street—all men. There wasn't a woman to be seen, nor a child. The door of each house was shut, its windows covered by shutters or tattered cloths.

The men were all armed, all silent...They watched him with lackluster eyes in which there lurked that same old expression of ancient fear.

"Haleton, huh. Whut yeh doin' on this road?"

"I got twisted, back a way. By the time I found I'd taken the wrong turn I'd gone about two miles. I was told I might as well keep going, it wasn't much farther this way. That right?"

"Right enough. Who tol' yeh thet?"

"He didn't introduce himself." Out of the corner of his eye Mervale saw that the other men were closing in on him, moving stealthily, as though they hoped he would not notice. Their ill-shod feet slid through the grey dust of the road, and the dust was a grey film powdering them from head to foot. There was a creeping menace in that slow encircling, and yet he was aware that they were all in the grip of a nightmare dread.

"Whut'd he look like?"

Mervale's expression did not change, there was no flicker in his level, steely gaze. But apprehension ran in his veins and tightened his scalp. He was caught. They would know every inhabitant for miles around... In the nick of time he remembered a figure glimpsed at the edge of the woods, peering as if surprised at the passing roadster.

"He was about sixty. He had a scrubby white beard and there was a white scar on his cheek, like this." The detective gestured in description.

"Thet's Elton Stane, Zebediah," a new voice behind him said. "Thar's a Louisville newspaper wadded under the strap here on his bag. Date on it's th' twenny-fust. Thet wuz yestiddy. Guess th' furriner's story's squar'."

The threatening shotgun wavered, dropped. Mervale relaxed. He had passed the cross-examination...

And then he stiffened again as Zebediah asked another question. "D'je see anythin' flyin' in th' sky, mister? Like a big, black bird?"

They knew something then, or suspected something, about what had happened behind the mountain spur. They had seen the buzzard...

"No," the detective answered. "No, I saw no bird."

The corners of Zebediah's mouth twitched briefly. "Yeh will," he muttered. "Yeh'll see it afore yeh're many hours older. An' mebbe yeh'll feel it."

"What do you mean?" Mervale rapped the question out, his neck cording with sudden anger. Was it a threat? Was it a prophecy that his own body would lie out on the mountain, carrion for the buzzards. "What the hell are you driving at?"

"Show him, Elmer. Let him see."

"Gee, Pop!" It was agonized protest, wrung from the throat of a tow-headed, gawky youth of about nineteen. "Gee—I..."

"Show him," the man with the shotgun repeated inexorably.

Elmer turned and shuffled to a burlap-covered, shapeless heap which lay on the paintless boards of a stepless porch that crowded the road. He bent, pulled back the drab rag.

Horror twisted at the pit of Mervale's stomach. It was a child who lay there, a flaxen-haired little girl. It had been a child. Now it was a contorted, stiff cadaver over which black flies crawled and buzzed; a corpse whose breast and throat were gashed open, ripped open, by fierce, sharp talons. He could see the marks of the lethal claws, the long, ragged gashes where they had dug in, striking for a firmer grip.

"Thet's whut I mean," Zebediah's voice was utterly without intonation, without emotion. "She ain't th' fust, nor th' last."

"Good—Lord," Mervale husked, his fisted hands pushing down on the steering wheel, lifting him from his seat. "I get it now. You're hunting the thing that did that. I'll help. I'll..."

"Set down! An' get on. We uns'll take take care of our own troubles. Git on whar yeh were gwine, an' keep yer mouth shet, Winburg don't need no help from no furriners. Git!"

He meant it. And he was going to enforce his order with a shotgun that was lifted again, a gnarled finger tight on its trigger. Dick Mervale shot away from that strange group, in that strange, stricken town. He felt their eyes, in which terror dwelt, watch him until he had rounded the spur of the cliff that hid him from them.

Shuddering with the memory of the thing he had seen, with the memory of the queer men who would keep their vengeance to themselves though their blood was watery with the fear in their veins, Mervale almost passed the point where the zig-zagging path started up the cliff to where Gorham Carstairs hid. But he saw it in time, and braked the roadster to a skidding halt.

He too, had a mission of vengeance. He too, would carry it out alone, though Satan himself should try to stop him.

There, on the right of the road, was a clump of bushes where Fred had planned to conceal the car. Climbing the face of the cliff he would be hidden from the killer above. But there would be no concealment from the black bird, the sight of whose work still sickened him.