Читать книгу Lair of the Snake Girl - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 4

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FOR a single dreadful moment I felt eerie panic surge icy in my veins. Then reason fought it back. It didn't mean anything, I told myself. If she had been anywhere near the man in the road she would have been deluged with his blood. That stain meant simply that she had pricked a finger, so slightly that she had not even noticed it.

And then I saw the pulse fluttering in her throat, and the desperate appeal in her eyes! She knew that I had seen...

"You came from the road," her low voice pulsed. "Is Seth Corbin waiting there for me?"

"Waiting!" Her question was a lie! She had been down there, she had seen what lay there. I was as certain of that as I was of the anger curdling my brain. "He was waiting. Now he's..." I didn't finish. The words were cut off in my throat by the terror that flared into her face, terror and despair such as I hope never to see again.

I spun to the sound that had apparently seared the girl with stark fright. A dark form moved in the dimness. My hand darted under my coat, closed on my gun-butt...

A man thrust out of the shadows; tall, gaunt, shaggy-bearded. "Lilla!" he snarled, hawk-like eyes fierce under beetling, white brows. "Lilla! How did yuh get away?"

Despite his evident age his frame was wiry, compact with the rawhide strength of the woodsman, but his chest heaved with long, deep breaths and the seamed brown leather of his countenance was drawn with the weariness of prolonged effort. There was a stout staff in his gnarled hands, a straight tree-branch forked at its end.

"I—I don't know, Uncle. I can't remember." She looked bewildered now, half-dazed, but no longer openly terrified.

But deep down in the dark eyes fear still lurked, not quite hidden.

"Who is this?" The old man jerked to me. There was a curious wariness about him, a tenseness like that which had held the girl, yet somehow not akin. "How did he come here?"

"I'm Ross Kane, Mr.—"

"Thornton. Joel Thornton."

"Mr. Thornton. I saw your niece in the woods here from the highway, and I wanted to ask her for directions. I wasn't quite sure I was on the right road for Eden." Now why did I lie?

"Eden!" Thornton grunted. "Thet road leads there, but it ain't the right road fer yuh." The anxiety faded from his countenance. "It ain't the right road fer no one."

"I don't understand."

The corners of the man's bearded mouth quirked upward in a grim smile, and his look was bleak. "Yuh'll understand when yuh git thar. If yuh git thar. If I was yuh, I'd go back whar I come from, quick's I could."

"What do you mean?" I demanded sharply.

"Take me back, Uncle." Lilla had moved abruptly to him, forestalling whatever reply he might have made, if, actually, he would have replied. "Take me back before the dark."

"Whut fer do yuh think I been runnin' after yuh? Come on!" And then they vanished into the deep shadows.

I stared after the rustling they made, my brow knotting. Queer... Her uncle had furtively moved away from the girl as they started off, leaving a three foot space between them; and sinews had corded the back of his hand, so tightly did it clutch the stick whose other end was widely forked.

Widely enough, the queer thought struck me, to fit around Lilla's supple waist...

Damn! Those people must have had nothing to do with the horror in the road! The oddness of their speech, the queer things they had said, meant nothing save that living in this somber forest they had grown a little imaginative and not quite normal. I had no business mooning after them. My job was to get to Eden as quickly as I could, tell the authorities there about that which I had come upon. I spun on my heels, plunged down the hill.

The corpse of Seth Corbin still lay, stiff and incredible, in the spot where a terrible death had overtaken it. One brown- clotted arm was flung out and its blackening fingers were clenched on the soft earth of the road's shoulder, as if it had snatched at the killer and been unable to hold it with its dying strength.

Something had moved across that road-shoulder, into the woods. I stared at the spoor and my scalp tightened.

The malleable, chocolate-brown loam showed not some animal's footprints, but a wide, blurred depression. That which had dragged across the road-edge to vanish into the woods had been a footless thing that had left just such a track as a snake might have made, wavy and ill-defined, except that this trough was immensely too wide for any reptile known to this northern clime.

It was a snake that Lilla had reminded me of! Had she...?

The thought that popped up in my pounding brain was incredible. Mad! Had the sight of that ghastly corpse snapped the final thread that bound me to sanity?

I threw myself into the car, the fierce necessity to do something—anything—clawing me. The motor coughed into rattling, racking life. The flivver leaped into motion. Its response to my instinctive, unwilled manipulation of its levers and pedals gave me a hold on reality again. I didn't think any more; I deliberately fought to keep myself from thinking.

The road took a wide sweep, and Old Mountain's slope grew more precipitous. Its unseen crest rose till its brooding shadow spread far into the swamp across Lost River. Vague forms drifted out of the darkening reeds, swirled across the surface of the slothful stream; a phantom host of grey, inimical wraiths. They were only wisps of vapor, I told myself with almost hysteric emphasis evoked by the chill of the oncoming dusk from the warmer waters of bog and river. My pondering of eerie thoughts was interrupted by a muffled roar.

Thunder rumbled out of the sky! No. It wasn't thunder. It was something rolling down the cliff... Without thought I vaulted from the car, threw myself backward from the running board, hit the macadam hard and kept rolling back in the road. The unguided car plunged ahead, straight into the path of a gigantic boulder that fairly exploded from the cliff and crashed tremendously down upon the doomed vehicle.

The detonation of that impact, a vast outburst of riven metal, smashed glass and burst tires deafened me, stunned me.

I lay for a moment shaken, dazed, unable to move. Gradually control of my limbs returned. I shoved shaking palms against the ground, heaved myself to my knees, to my feet.

I stood spraddle-legged, rigid, looking at the crumpled jumble that was the car in which I had been riding. If it were not for the instantaneous coordination of vision and brain and muscle that had hurled me out of it in the same split-second of time that I had seen the grey mass launching from the almost vertical hillside, I now would be in that wreck. I would have been smashed out of all resemblance to human form. I would be under the great, lichen-covered grey mass that rested ponderous atop the twisted metal.

My glowering gaze moved to the swathe the huge rock had made when it catapulted down the cliff. It lifted along the rift of splintered trees and flattened underbrush until I saw, a hundred feet up, the mountain's brow.

The boulder had rested up there ever since it had been deposited there by the Great Glacier of prehistory. For countless ages wind, and rain, and the slow forces of decency had undermined its support, till some darting woods-creature, some stronger gust of wind, had at last disturbed its delicate balance, and it had hurtled down to within inches of snuffing out my life.

Perhaps that had been the way of it. Or perhaps... What was it Joel Thornton had said, not many minutes ago? "Yuh'll understand when you git thar. If yuh git thar..."

I moved closer to the wreck. The boulder lay on its side, the loam of its long resting place still blackening its now vertical base. There was a scrape in the rock at the center of what was now its upper edge. And just beneath it, impressed into the coating of earth, so tightly bound to the stone by root-tendrils of moss that it had not shaken free during that cataclysmic fall, was the mark of what had pried it loose from its age-old bed.

It seemed to be the spread Y of branching wood—a fork at the end of a bark-peeled staff.