Читать книгу Lair of the Snake Girl - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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I THOUGHT it was only the brooding cold that made me shiver as I crouched over the wheel of the battered flivver I had hired at Centredale, where the railroad ended. It struck through my light topcoat to my very bones, that damp chill of air shadowed all day by the brooding dark height of Old Mountain. Yet there was something beside that dank coldness that chilled me deep within...

North of Lost River's shallow flow the flat land was lushly green, but as I had been told, it was a spongy swamp into who's tall, rank reeds only belly-crawling, noisome creatures ventured; a morass whose treacherous black mud would suck a man down to hell itself if the ancient tales were to be believed. That was why this narrow road that was the town of Eden's only connection with the world, clung to the southerly bank of the murky stream.

I stared at the brown ribbon of earth rolling under the tires of my car and wondered dully why a village had ever been planted here. For miles now I had seen no farms, no signs of any human habitation; had encountered no traffic. For more than an hour I had pounded on and on through a hushed, desolate solitude.

Well, my lips twisted bitterly, I was looking for quiet and isolation. Peering at an outspread map with red-trimmed, haggard eyes, I had read those names—Eden, Lost River, Old Mountain—and had stabbed at them a determined forefinger.

"That sounds forsaken enough," I had mumbled. "I'll go there, Doc."

"Good boy!" Dr. Stone had exclaimed. "It's the only thing that will save you from going to pieces. Complete rest for a month, somewhere where they don't know who you are, where you won't be constantly reminded of what you've been through."

"Quit it!" I had snarled. "Quit hammering at me. I've said I'd go, haven't I?" And then I had flung out of the office, the aching swirl inside my skull beginning again...

Yards ahead the trail seemed to end against a blank wall of gloomy foliage. It was only a spur of the mountain around which river and road curved, but I fought an eerie premonition that beyond it something waited in ambush. Something grisly, malignant... I reached for the emergency brake.

But instead of pulling it I stepped on the accelerator once more. The feathery quiver along my spine was only hysteria. It was the same sort of jitteriness that had made me see staring faces, pointing fingers, all about me as I pounded to my lodgings from the physician's office, as I had taxied to the station. The same rebellion of ragged nerves that had rasped me in the Pullman car, resenting my fellow passenger's covert, curious glances, their sly whisperings.

They had known me, of course. They couldn't help recognizing me. They had seen my face in the newspapers for a week. They had read my name, in shrieking black headlines and my description in the columns of the sob sisters.

I felt a muscle twitch in my cheek as I recalled the saccharine words: "Blond-haired, blue eyed, blunt-jawed, Ross Kane might be the reincarnation of an ancient Viking." "Broad- shouldered, narrow-waisted; under his trim blue suit one senses the flat, powerful muscles of the trained athlete." "Nerves like steel piano wires, a brain keen and flashing as a rapier, this is the man who has broken up the Scarlet Legion, the man who for four interminable days has sat in a witness chair and with cold implacable speech has condemned fifty men to the execution chamber. He is a man of iron, without emotion, without fear..."

Without fear? I had lived with fear for six dreadful months, with the fear of death and of worse than death. With the fear that I fail and let the murderous legion that had stunned a nation go unpunished.

I had not failed, but I had paid a terrible price for success. When at last I had penetrated to the identity of the Scarlet Legion's masked leaders, I teetered on the very brink of madness...

An uncanny howl cut across my thoughts! From beyond the mountain spur it came, bestial in its wordlessness, yet somehow human—and filled with unthinkable agony... It ended abruptly, with an awful finality.

I gasped, pounded my heel down on the gas. The motor roared as the car leaped into swift motion. The hillside flung its racket back at me as the car surged around the curve. Brakes squealed, skidding rubber scorched. The flivver rocked to a halt.

I was already out of the car. I bent over that which lay utterly still in the road. A sick nausea twisted at the pit of my stomach.

IT —it had been—a man, a lad not long out of his teens. Above the midriff it still had the form of a man, scarlet with blood that had fountained from a gaping mouth, but everything below—flesh, bones, even the corduroy trousers and leather half-boots—was squeezed into one heterogeneous pulp.

Squeezed! The fearful pressure that had crushed the youth had been exerted equally from all sides, so that the gory mass was almost cylindrical, and gruesomely elongated. Legs, hips, abdomen were constricted as though a gigantic fist had grasped them and tightened...

I whirled to a rustle, the furtive threshing—instantly quieted—of some large body in the pines. My automatic snouted from my fist at the dark wall that was the woods.

Consciousness of peril sloughed from me the palsy of my illness, and I knew my muscles were once more coiled springs, ready for instant action. My every sense was keenly alive to locate and combat the imminent threat. The sound of my approach must have frightened the killer from its prey—the crushed youth—but it was lurking now in the gloomy underbrush, watching its chance to spring upon another victim—me...

Old Mountain's flank rose steeply above me, its shadows impenetrable to my staring eyes. The odor of needle-carpeted earth, of rotting wood and putrescent fungi, breathed down from it; and its silence, after that single warning rustle, was unbroken. There was a strange, foreboding quality to that hush, as though the murk and the soundlessness cloaked the very essence of fear, as though nature itself crouched beneath some overhanging terror.

A twig snapped, the tiny sound thunderous. And then once more there was the rustle of something moving through the underbrush. Moving away!

Wrath exploded within me; red wrath at the thing that had violated the sanctuary of a human body and was now escaping. It sent me hurtling up into the woods.

My feet slipped on the slick carpet of dead pine needles, my heels ground in, hurled me forward. Brambles tore at my pants legs, low branches lashed my cheek. Above me the sound of my quarry was louder, swifter, but momentarily I gained on it. Then I saw it, a flicker of motion through motionless tree trunks, a pallid flutter glimpsed between huge black columns. My finger tightened on its trigger—and instantly relaxed.

"Hey there," I contrived to shout. "Stop! Stop, I say!"

It was no ravaging, lethal beast that fled from me, but a woman, or rather—a girl. The pale flutter was that of her white loose frock that fell from molded shoulders and was caught up at a slim waist by a belt of some shimmering, iridescently green leather. In the half-light the stygian cascade of her unbound hair had made her seem headless, but just in time to check my shot she had thrown backward a terrified glance and I had seen her profile, a cut cameo of ivory against the ebony of her tresses.

"Wait for me," I called, more calmly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

SHE halted at that, turned. One hand was curled at the tender curve of her heaving breast. Her parted lips were ruby and velvet-soft. Her small nostrils flared, blush-lined. Her eyes, glowing deep wells fringed by long, slumberous lashes, were fixed on my weapon. I returned it to its armpit holster.

There was about her some strange quality that at once frightened and fascinated me, something exotic and not quite... human. No question but that her face was beautiful, but its beauty was the discomforting one of a minor chord, akin somehow to pain. It was oddly shaped; the chin narrow, bluntly pointed; the cheek bones too wide, so that its outline was distinctly a triangle and not the usual circle or oval.

"I—I thought I saw a deer," I stammered, and knew by her slow smile how inept my lying was.

There had been a space of about five feet between us. It was closing now, and it was she who was closing it. She moved with a sinuous grace, undulating rather than walking...

"I must sound like an awful tenderfoot," I said. I had to say something, anything. "This is the farthest I've ever gotten from the city streets. You—you seem to belong in these woods." Not to the woods, something in me said. To the swamp. Suddenly I knew what creature it was she reminded me of. Incredibly...

"I've lived here forever." She was looking straight into my eyes, with an almost eerie intensity. Inexplicable terror in me was a black flame. I wanted to run from her, desperately I wanted to, and yet nothing on earth could have made me move.

Was it only my consciousness of the absurdity of my terror that kept me rooted there while she came closer and closer to me? With a strange, indecipherable purpose?

"Your forever can't be very long—" I tried to break back to naturalness with a natural response. I forced a smile. Actually, she could not be more than eighteen—"unless you are a wood nymph. Were you already wandering this hillside when Old Mountain was yet young?"

Now what was there in that bit of persiflage to bring back to her eyes the look of stark, marrow-melting fear?

She halted, and a long shiver went through her. "No. Not here." Strange reply. Stranger still the flicker of her tongue tip between her pallid, parted lips. "I don't often come here. It's too far. I live on the other side of Eden, where the river is lost in the swamp."

I wasn't quite sure she said that. Her fingers were fumbling blindly at her belt, and the movement had taken my glance down to it. I felt tiny muscles harden along the ridge of my jaw, and the chill that quivered under my skin was not the cold of the ambient air. There had been a stain on the narrow leather, a smear no larger than the nail of the girl's forefinger that wiped it away in the instant I glimpsed it.

That finger was red now! That which it had wiped away was blood—a single drop of blood that was still moist!