Читать книгу Midnight House - Ethel Lina White - Страница 8

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Not long afterwards, as he drove to the hospital, Evan Evans's thoughts returned to the night before No. 11 was shut up. It was not good preparation for dealing with a mastoid, but he knew that his professional zeal would return directly he entered the operating-theatre.

He remembered the funereal house, which was furnished in what he considered criminal taste. Again he sat in the library with its dead smell and its books which were never read. Confronting him—as judge and jury—sat the General and his wife.

The General's face was grim and snarling as a tiger's mask which looked over his shoulder, from the wall. His eyes were pitted to relentless points of light. His wife—with her dyed hair showing white at the roots—was like a feather whirling between opposing gales. Sometimes she defended her son-in-law, but more often she supported her husband in his monstrous charge.

The doctor defended himself, but in the end had been defeated by shock-tactics. They forced him to sign a paper. He warned them that it was blackmail, while he determined to get it back and destroy it... And then—as he told the lawyer—the telephone-bell rang in the hall.

Before he left his house—when he expected his visit to the General to be one merely of farewell—he told his secretary to ring him in case of emergency. He expected a rush-operation, for he had been called in, as a second opinion, to diagnose May Evans's pain, when it was dangerously late.

Even in his peril, he could not remain deaf to the call upon his service. Resolving to return when it was safe, he slipped down to the area and unlocked the back-door in readiness for a return visit to the house.

On his way to the hospital and throughout the operation, the paper he had signed remained at the back of his mind. It was dangerous as dynamite with its threat of professional exposure and ruin. He was in a fever of impatience to handle it—to shred it and see it blaze into ash.

Presumably his sub-conscious urgency communicated itself to his fingers, for he performed a brilliant feat of surgery. Actually his audacious speed saved the patient's life as her appendix was rotten.

When all was over, he broke away from congratulations in order to return to No. 11. He was driving at his usual furious speed when he overshot the red lamps which warned motorists of road excavation.

Several days later he recovered consciousness in hospital, only to hear bitter news. His wife—who was ill with gastric ulceration—was dead and buried. She had died from heart-failure, presumably caused by the shock of his accident. And No. 11 was permanently locked up.

He inherited his wife's money, bequeathed to her by her godmother, and he moved ino No 2 India Crescent; but throughout the years of growing prosperity there remained the torturing knowledge of the sealed house—and what it contained. His appeal to the lawyer to enter met with flat refusal. Mr. Spree would not violate his client's instructions.

As time passed, his sense of danger remained. He was haunted by a recurring dream of finding a secret entrance into No. 11. Recently, as though a rattlesnake had been sleeping upon a pile of dried leaves, he heard the rustle of his rising dread.

Whenever he looked at the house, he cursed its solidity and prayed for a fire or a stick of dynamite to blast it into rubble... Could he have waited another two years, his desire would have been gratified—when two clean gaps in the curve of the Crescent made it resemble a jaw with missing teeth.

But the War was still a future event and he was beaten by the time element.