Читать книгу Soft Blows the Breeze from Hell! - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3
ОглавлениеI. — MESSENGER OF HORROR
It was ball-shaped and about the size of a five-year-old's fist. Its color was the yellow-tainted white of a corpse dead a day. It was so weightless that although the lightest of breezes breathed down Stalton's elm-lined Blossom Street it fled before the zephyr, curiously swift, curiously without sound.
In the dusk's dim grey hush the thing was at first noticed by no one, so that for minutes no one thought its presence strange, though the hamlet lay in the midst of rolling fields, and the nearest spot sunless and dank enough for the fungus to grow was Roget's Wood, a full five miles away.
It darted along the narrow, sod-bordered walk, leaping the grass-shoots between the worn flagstones, flitting beneath the feet of the strollers in the dreamy twilight.
None had any hint of how soon all laughter would be stifled in Stalton, of how soon eyes now sparkling with gaiety would be dark and brooding with dread.
It was Hilda Mead who first saw the round thing as it scudded past her along a picket fence pale in the evening's greyness. "Look!" she exclaimed, snatching her slim hand from Hal Curtin's warm clasp to point at it. "Look, darling! What is that?"
"What?" her stalwart lover asked, his gaze reluctant to drag itself from her olive, elfin face, from the sweet promise of her velvet lips. "What is what, dear?"
"That... Oh, I don't like it, Hal." A tiny shudder went through her small-boned, round little body. "I don't like the way it's running along as though it were alive with a queer kind of life, and knows where it's going."
"Silly," the young man exclaimed, his teeth flashing in a fond smile as he peered after that at which Hilda pointed. "It's nothing but a puffball. It's a common fungus, and—"
"And I still don't like it," the girl interrupted, pouting prettily at Curtin. "I'm afraid of it."
"Afraid!" Instinctively wise in the ways of love, Hal Curtin had sense enough not to laugh, had sense enough to draw Hilda within the strong curve of his arm, to hold her close against his body's slender strength and say, deep-voiced: "You need never be afraid of anything while I'm alive to protect you."
The puffball veered sharply from its course, almost as if possessed of the weird sentience Hilda had ascribed to it. It leaped at a dim-seen gate, struck a paling and vanished in the spurt of spore-smoke that gives its kind their name.
In the next moment the cottage beyond that gate seemed blotted out by a dark pall; its outlines merged with the night, the yellow rectangles of its windows gone...
Something's happened to the lights, Hal Curtin thought...
In the blackened house someone laughed. The laugh was edged with shrillness and utterly humorless, and threaded by a mad sort of agony. More appalling than any scream, it held Blossom Street in thrall to a sudden, icy paralysis so that there was no movement under the elms but only blanching faces and the gasp of caught breaths.
Then there was light again in those windows, a burst of lurid light that lay in whirling sheets against the panes and smashed through them with a great shattering of glass, and spouted out of the gaping holes thus made in huge roaring tongues of flame. There was light in the street and on the ivy-clad small homes in the gardens, the terrifying orange-red light of fire. There were shadows; the gigantic black shadows of the trees wavering as the flames wavered; the shadows of humans, arms flung overhead—shouting shadows, screaming shadows pelting toward the blaze.
Shouts and screams and the roar of the flames, and always through the roar that terrible laugh...
"God!" Hal Curtin gasped, Hilda tight within his arm. "They haven't the ghost of a chance!" Those who had been strolling on Blossom Street were past them, those coming from farther off had not yet reached them, and for breathless seconds the lovers were isolated. "They're done for..."
"Look!" the girl throbbed. "Look!" Her free hand flung out to the ridgepole of the blazing house. "There..."
Against sky-glare was blackly silhouetted a thing man-form yet grotesquely not a man. On the narrow crest of the slanted roof that was not yet alight, it capered in a queerly simian frenzy and it was from that capering monstrosity that the brain-curdling laugh came.
From the dark human mass surging against the fence of the doomed house, surging away from the blasting heat of that furnace, a shout went up. Curtin could not know whether it was evoked by sight of the thing on the roof or by the explosion of flame through the black roof-slant. The house was a vast torch now, a pillar of seething orange and crimson and strange greens supporting on its apex the affrighted vault of the sky, within which nothing could live.
Nothing... Hal tore himself away from Hilda's clinging hands, a strange cry in his throat! He vaulted the pickets beside them, his leap a lithe and effortless bound, was hurtling away from her.
His feet thudded into soft garden loam and in his nostrils was the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle. His toes flung the crunch of path-cinders behind him. He whipped past the red-bathed porch of a small home, past its end wall whose dark ivy strove to shield it from the lurid glare. He was beyond it, on the soft turf of its kitchen yard, angling toward the roar whence that glare came and had plunged into the shadow of the next house, stygian by contrast.
Blinded, Curtin battered into a back hedge he did not see, was ripped by its stems, its stiff leaves, as he burst through it into blackness. Tall grass whipped his legs and he knew he was in the vacant lots that lie between Stalton and the fields. He halted for a moment to get his bearings, projected almost useless sight, taut hearing, into the gloom that was the deeper because overlaid by the rubid heavens.
Somewhere within that murk was furtive movement... There! Almost straight ahead was a darkening of the black. Hal launched himself at the vague forms, wrath wrenching a shout from his lips.
The forms were plainer... his ankle was caught by some ground-creeper, pulled from under him. He lurched forward into a blow that exploded white light within his skull...
* * * * *
HILDA MEAD squatted in the tall grass, reckless of her filmy white frock. "Hal!" she whimpered. "Hal. I thought I'd never find you." Her hands tugged at the recumbent form, tugged its head on to her knees. "Hal!" Her fingers found wetness on that head, viscid wetness matting the hair, staining her fingers.
"Ouch!" Curtin winced, jerking his head from the fierce pain of that touch. "Don't..." then, "Hilda. You..."
"Hal! What was it? What were you chasing? What—who did this to you?"
"I saw..." he checked himself. "Hilda! Don't ask me what I saw. Don't let me tell you."
"Hal, you're still dazed. You're talking wildly."
"No." Curtin pushed hands against the ground, pushed himself to a sitting posture. "No. I'm not dazed. I... Hilda, you must not know. It would be dangerous for you to know." Something in his tone told the girl there was utter truth in the words that otherwise were so mad. "And listen. Tell no one it was I... How I got this cut on my head. Say that I started to run to the fire, tripped, banged my skull. Perhaps—perhaps I was not seen clearly, was not recognized." It was fear that sounded in Hal's voice, and Hilda had not dreamed that he could ever be afraid. "Do you understand?"
"No," she said. "I don't understand. But I'll do as you say."
A crash pulled their eyes to where the fire had blazed. Sparks fountained above the dull red glow that was all that was left of the blaze. High into the sky they went, till they were golden stars dancing in the heavens, and then they were drifting down again upon Stalton. Hilda Mead had a queer fancy that they were tiny lanterns guiding a horde of imps to their landing place.
