Читать книгу The Pulp Fiction Megapack - John Wallace - Страница 8

THE SHRIEKING POOL, by G. T. Fleming-Roberts

Staring at the crooked cross of a sign that marked the fork in the road, an unaccountable shudder rippled along Corrin’s spine. It was a very unprepossessing sign, all mottled where old white paint had peeled off. One arm of the cross pointed out that three miles to the east lay Ottville. The other arm; pointing in the opposite direction, carried the words, “To Black Pool.”

When he had asked the old wattle-necked farmer, who ran the roadside filling station, the way to Black Pool, the soul had dropped out of the old man’s eyes. Nor would a ten dollar bill buy the desired information. “Ef you get there, young feller,” he had said, “you get there because the Devil hisself guided you. I ain’t hankerin’ for to have your blood on my hands by tellin’ you how to get there!”

And Larry remembered the incoherent note that Dean Wile, owner of Black Pool Lodge, had sent him:

Black Pool has fallen into ill repute. It is thought to have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. But if you’re willing to gamble on getting a story for your paper, we’d be glad to have you join us for the week-end. Frankly, we need your help. I can’t tell you anything more without giving you the impression that I am a little unbalanced.

And the trip along the Ottville road had been anything but pleasant. A pall of black sky had draped the dying sun; night was born too soon. Pale lightning reveled thunderously around the horizon. Little breezes that wandered above the waste land, stirred the frail, plumose pines, brought exotic, unpleasant perfumes from the moldering swamp that lay hidden in the shadows.

There was a vague, unfamiliar quality in the gathering darkness that no searchlight could dispel.

Then the forks in the Ottville road came in the most unexpected places. The last one had resulted in the bogging of his car. He had proceeded on foot, stumbled across the wreck of a sign that pointed out his destination. But instead of that sense of relief that normally follows the completion of a tiresome journey, Larry Corrin felt an inexplicable dread. Black Pool! An insatiable appetite for human flesh!

To the west, the road mounted slowly to higher and consequently drier ground; the trees became more vigorous, hedging in the road until it was scarcely more than a path. Parting a veritable curtain of vines, Larry came suddenly upon Black Pool. Instantly he recalled how Dean Wile had described it: “A jewel in the hand of a Titan.” He understood now. The five little knolls that surrounded the onyx-like surface of the water were like five stubby fingers. Larry was standing on what he imagined to be the thumb of the giant hand. He could look across the pond at the lights gleaming cheerfully from the lodge.

Floating out over the water came soft music. A woman was singing a haunting, minor melody. Her voice had a strange, fascinating quality, yet its huskiness was not altogether pleasant. Larry listened. There was another sound, that of heavy feet plodding through sticky mud. Tall grasses waved. A splash, and again the night belonged to a woman’s singing.

The black surface of the pool tippled gently in the wake of a punt moving slowly twenty feet from the shore. In the prow stood a long, thin man, poling. In the stern, wrapped in white, was the lovely form of the singing woman—Dean Wile’s young wife, perhaps.

The singing stopped. “You know, Frank,” the woman said, “you may well wonder how I put up with him day after day. I don’t love him. I never could love a man whose mind is completely wrapped up in his work.”

The man in the stern of the punt dropped his pole, crouched in the bottom of the drifting boat, and crawled toward the woman. “Bernice!” The name barely audible from his lips throbbed with passion.

It was the last word he ever spoke. Directly behind the little boat, something marred the black surface. From where Larry stood, it looked like a little watersnake, swimming with head erect. It was rapidly overhauling the craft. Suddenly, the water behind the boat was cleaved by a great, round, reptilian head. A black, three-taloned member fully twelve inches across slashed up through the water, fastened to the edge of the boat, and gave it a sudden lurch.

The man in the boat uttered a strange, terrorful cry and pitched over the side. For a moment, Larry saw his face raised in frantic appeal. Then huge talons struck down in a blow of tremendous power that caught the man full in the face, obliterating his features, turning his face into a gory pulp that uttered shriek after shriek until it was dragged burbling beneath the water.

Larry Corrin shook himself from a paroxysm of horror that had rooted him to the spot. The woman—what had become of her? He raced down the hill, plowed through long grasses and plunged into the water. The woman was swimming toward him, her breath coming in tortured gasps. Larry’s flashlight sought her face. She was very beautiful. His arm went beneath her bare, wet arm, encircled her back. He lifted her bodily and carried her to the shore.

She clung closely to him, murmuring over and over, “Frank…Frank” in her dreamy, caressing voice.

Larry stood the woman somewhat roughly upon her feet. Her wide blue eyes sought his face inquiringly. “You saw it? You saw the monster. You’ll believe?”

Larry scowled. “I—I don’t know what to believe, Mrs. Wile.”

Perhaps she read a second meaning into his words. A frown of displeasure flitted across her face. “You—you’re Larry Corrin?”

He nodded.

“Bernice! Bernice!” A man’s voice was shouting from the other side of the pool. A yellow lantern bobbed along the shore. “Bernice, are you all right?”

“Call out to him. Tell him you’re all right,” Larry commanded.

The girl raised her quivering voice and called back. Then holding to Larry’s arm she ran toward the man with the light.

The man who met them was short, sturdily built, and bearded. He gave the woman’s arm a quick pinch as if to assure himself that she was flesh and blood, then extended his hand to Larry.

“Remember me, Corrin? You’ve arrived a day ahead of schedule, haven’t you?”

* * * *

Larry Corrin clasped Ivan Stern’s hand. He remembered Stern, one of the oldest of Dean Wile’s associates in the Jordan Scientific Institute Larry said, “If I had come tomorrow, I would have been too late then, too.”

“Too?” Ivan echoed. Then his keen, questioning eyes searched the woman’s face. His voice dropped to an apprehensive whisper. “Where’s Frank Mayer?”

Bernice clutched Larry Corrin’s arm. “Tell him,” she implored.

“They were in a boat together, Mayer and—this is Mrs. Wile, I presume?”

Stern nodded. “I heard a shriek coming from the pool. I ran here. And Frank…?”

“Any conjecture you can draw will be as good as mine,” said Larry.

“Then—then the pool sucked him under?” Stem persisted.

“Not the pool. Something else. But we can’t stand here imagining things! Mrs. Wile is wet, and—and nervous.” He remembered the brief scrap of conversation he had heard between Frank Mayer and Bernice Wile. Bernice did not love her husband. Perhaps she had loved Frank Mayer.

He shrugged away the thought and half supporting Bernice Wile hurried along the shore toward the house. Behind them came Ivan Stern growling in his beard. “Why did you go out on that damned pond after all the warnings you’ve had?” Ivan asked.

“Frank wanted to go,” Bernice panted. “He said it was all nonsense, fearing a little body of water because it was black and too treacherous for bathing.”

Stern drew a long, deep breath. “I don’t suppose Dean told you in his letter about Jimmy Droon, one of the members of the group, did he, Corrin?”

The reporter shook his head. “What’s the matter with Jimmy? Nice chap as I remember him.”

“He’s dead. Today is the eighth day!”

Fifteen minutes later, Larry Corrin was seated on the comfortable veranda of Black Pool Lodge. Sitting about him, eagerly waiting for his story of Frank Mayer’s death, were all that remained of perhaps the greatest single group of men devoted to scientific learning. Dean Wile, holding the pale hand of his wife who reclined in a deck chair, leaned forward. His high dome of a head was bald as an egg. His black brows, contrasting with the white of his skin, beetled over piercing, black-bean eyes. “My brother Perry saw the monster,” he said, addressing Larry, “or rather he saw the fore-feet of the thing. That was when Jim Droon said he was going to break the jinx of Black Pool and go for a swim. That was eight days ago. Does that mean anything to you, Larry?”

Corrin reflectively examined the tip of his cigarette. “You mean that if Jim Droon had been drowned, he would have risen to the surface today.”

“Of course he was drowned.” The speaker was Mathew Ince, a fiery haired little man, the only one in the group who was not a scientist. Mathew Ince was the manager of the huge estate that Dr. Jordan had left to the institute bearing his name. A keen business man was Ince, careful and calculating. “I’m inclined to think we’re all a bunch of marbleheads. We got ourselves all worked up because some drunken ass around here said he saw a dragon or something in Black Pool. Nothing would do but what the whole crowd must sneak up here and watch for the damned beast. And have we seen it? Science be damned. Dinosaurs are dead! None of us but Perry have seen it, and we’ve no proof that he wasn’t drunk, too.”

Perry Wile, his brother’s junior by ten years, but already making a name for himself in anthropology, had just entered the room. “You can’t argue around the eight days, Ince. A body rises to the surface of water after that time just as the body of Jim Droon would have risen had it not been for the fact—well, to put it brutally, the fact that he was devoured.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Ivan Stern. Then he asked fearfully, “But what devoured him?”

“Brontozoum,” Dean Wile muttered.

Corrin turned, scowling at his host. “What?” Mathew Ince chuckled. “Never mind him.

Larry. He’s nuts on the subject of genus Brontozoum. Been that way ever since he reconstructed one of the ancient brutes from a footprint or something for the museum.”

Perry Wile flicked a cigarette stub into an ash tray. “Suppose,” he suggested, “that we let Larry tell us exactly what he saw.”

Corrin nodded his agreement. “The thing had an oval head, reptilian you might say, but if it had a neck, I didn’t see it.”

Ince laughed hoarsely. “There goes your Brontozoum, Dean! I’m going to bed, and I’m not going to let any prehistoric monsters interfere with my sweet dreams.” He stretched from his chair and left the room. Ivan Stem and Bernice Wile followed soon after.

“Frankly, what’s your idea, Corrin?” asked Perry Wile when the others were gone.

Larry Corrin smiled sadly. “My idea is going to be upsetting. I believe that your monster works through the agent of genus homo or whatever you call mankind. You see, there were some hellish, trouble-begging, impractical provisions in the will of the late Dr. Jordan. As I understand it, this group of scientists to which you belong was chosen by Jordan to carry on his work. His estate was to be used as you saw fit as long as any of you were here on earth to use it. Don’t you see a two million dollar murder motive in this monster business? And why the monster at all? Well, the very suggestion of a dinosaur roaming around these parts was enough to bring you all up here together where the work could be carried on without interference—I mean the work of killing you all, one by one!”

There was a moment’s silence. Larry Corrin had another theory also—it involved a very lovely woman who did not love her husband and was not above loving others. Naturally, he could not voice that!

“You know,” he said after a moment, “I keep missing someone. Where is that brilliant bacteriologist, that blond fellow who used to be in your crew? Name was Daniel Palmer.”

Perry and Dean Wile looked at one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally, Dean said, “He was always a hothead. He quarreled with the rest of us. Two weeks ago he came up here—”

“Then?” Larry prompted.

“He vanished,” concluded Dean. “Not a trace of him. Perhaps he too was dragged into the pool.”

Larry raised his eyebrows. “Or perhaps…” he muttered. “Two million dollars. It would buy a lot of jelly beans!”

Again the two brothers eyed each other solemnly. Perry got up to leave the room. “Show him the tracks, Dean,” he said with an air of finality.

“Yes,” Dean Wile murmured, “I think you’d better see the tracks.” He got up. “We go outside, Larry.”

“Just a moment,” said Corrin. “I’m going to get my automatic out of my bag. When I meet your monster next, he’ll wish he’d stayed back in his B. C. century!”

On the way to his room, Larry Coffin heard a stealthy movement in the hall. He stopped, peering cautiously around a corner of the wall. At the other end of the hall, standing in front of the closed door of Mathew Ince’s room, was Bernice Wile. She took a key from the pocket of her kimono, put it into the lock, and gave it a twist. Then she walked softly back to her room.

When the hall was empty, Larry entered his own room, procured his automatic and hurried to meet Dean Wile on the front lawn. More than ever he was convinced that monster or no monster, behind the mystery lay human agency and a very human, even sordid motive.

Together, they walked down to the edge of the pool. The water, so recently churned with the death struggles of Frank Mayer, was now glassy smooth.

“Just follow along the edge,” directed Wile. “I think I can remember where I found them yesterday.”

Half way around the pond, they stopped. Wile’s flashlight pointed to the earth. In awe, his eyes followed the beam. In the center of the spot of white light was a footprint—an impression of a gigantic three-toed foot that an eighteen inch circle could not have circumscribed.

“See?” said Wile excitedly. “There’s the whole trail leading right into the water. Notice the mark of the broad tail. Dinosaurs of the genus Brontozoum walk on powerful hind legs using their ponderous tails to help support them. Now, what do you think?”

Larry Corrin stammered, “I—I’m not thinking. I—I won’t let myself think!” His gaze drifted out over the placid pool. What sinister creature lived within its secret depths? He turned, and with head bent, walked thoughtfully back to the house.

* * * *

In his room, fortified with pipe, tobacco and fertile imagination, Larry looked at the mystery from all angles. The surrounding country was not very populous. Even so, he could not understand how a huge prehistoric “thunder-beast” such as Dean and Perry Wile talked about could spring up over night, unless there had been some slip in the Einstein space-time spirals! He laughed mirthlessly—and the laugh died unfinished.

Out of the night, up from the Black Pool came shriek after shriek, harsh, strident, throbbing with agony, to be choked off suddenly leaving an awful after-silence.

Corrin’s pipe dropped unheeded from his mouth. He was on his feet, sweeping up his automatic, then pelting down the hall.

He switched on the living room light in time to see Ivan Stern opening the door. “Stop, Ivan!” he ordered huskily.

Stern turned around, a startled gasp on his lips. Larry’s automatic nosed from his pocket. “Stay right where you are, Ivan. You’re not to let a soul leave this house. Understand? I’m going to get that thing. I’m going to bring it back dead.”

Larry shoved the startled Stern away from the door, leaped through and crossed the lawn in running strides to the canoe mooring. Looking out over the surface of the water, he saw angular ripples flashing on the other side. He knelt, loosened the painter of a small canoe, and shoved off. He paddled madly and not very skillfully toward the origin of the ripples. But when he reached the spot, the ripples were scarcely discernible. He let the canoe drift. Taking the paddle, he leaned precariously over the side, sounding for the bottom. The water mounted about four inches above his wrist before he struck mud. He was about to raise the paddle when the canoe gave a drunken lurch and capsized.

The shock of striking the water head first was eclipsed by the sensation of stark terror experienced when his thrashing arms and legs brought him to the surface. He threw one glance over his shoulder. Not four feet behind him was that sinister little thing that looked like a swimming watersnake. After it, came an oval, dome-like head, the gray-black color of a mud catfish centered with a gleaming, cyclopian eye fully three inches in diameter!

Larry struck out madly. A three-taloned claw broke water and slashed down. Sickening pain throbbed through his entire body as he felt flesh tear from his left leg. But he was swimming fast without thought of direction toward the very center of the pool. He twisted his head in a frantic effort to see the monster again. There was not a sign of the beast save bubbles bursting on the surface of the pool.

Larry kicked down in an effort to tread bottom. Pain in his wounded leg sent sharp stabs to his brain, threatening unconsciousness. His body shot down…down. He realized with sickening suddenness that he was far beyond his depth. The water swirled about him. And it was cold! Circling slowly around him were—were fish? No—no! long, white things, with shredded strands of garments trailing behind them. They were men! Men—bloodless, lifeless corpses circling about him! A triumphal procession of the dead, waiting for others to join them.

Larry struck out with all his strength, tearing himself from the grip of that icy undercurrent. His lungs seemed on the point of bursting. His heart hammered audibly in his ears. Lips, long locked between his teeth, broke open, drinking in a choking, gurgling combination of water and air. He spat strangling water, tried to take calm, even strokes. Twenty feet from the shore…now ten…now eight. His hand clutched an overhanging branch. He dragged himself to the shore, then lay there, completely exhausted, half in half out of the water. He felt very, very sleepy.…

Whether or not he became completely unconscious, he never knew. However, it must have been twenty minutes before his mind regained its normal function. His left leg was numb and almost lifeless. He crawled slowly up the bank, hobbled toward the house.

Ivan Stern saw him coming across the lawn and ran to help him. “Thank God you’re safe, Larry! I thought it had you. Mathew Ince has disappeared! Something broke through the window of his room and must have forced him down to the pool and thrown him to the monster.”

“Are all the others there?” Larry asked.

“All in the living room. Perry has an idea that quicksand at the bottom of the pool might have done for the bodies. He’s planning to bomb the pool and try to raise either bodies or monster.”

“He’s wrong about the quicksand,” declared Larry. “I’ve met the monster face to face. I know what becomes of the bodies! Still”—he added after a moment’s thought—”a bomb isn’t a bad idea.”

* * * *

When Larry struggled into the living room, Bernice Wile sprang from her chair. “Mr.

Corrin, you’re hurt!”

Larry glanced carelessly down at his leg. The cloth of his trousers had been ripped and there was a deep gash in his leg. “Got some bandage?” he inquired.

“Of course,” replied Bernice. “Perry, get the bandage. I’ll have some hot water in a moment.”

Perry Wile handed a queer looking contraption to his brother. “You have a good arm, Dean. Toss this at your dinosaur out there in the pond. I’ll help Bernice get things ready to dress Larry’s wound.” And he left the room hurriedly after Bernice.

Across the room, Dean Wile reflectively examined the homemade bomb. “Wonder if this will raise the bodies to the surface?”

“Try it,” Larry urged.

Dean Wile approached one of the casement windows and flung it wide. He hefted the bomb, took a step back, and pulled the primer pin.

The room was suddenly filled with the roar and smoke of the explosion. Larry’s chair was hurled over backwards as if by an invisible hand.

He rolled over, picked himself up. Ivan Stern was flattened against the wall, right arm extended, jaw sagging, eyes wide with horror.

Larry’s gaze followed that pointing hand, and saw, sprawled on the center of the floor, Dean Wile. His shirt front was blackened by the premature explosion of the bomb. But two feet from him was something else—a stiff, starkly naked body. The abdomen was bloated from internal decomposition. The face was a hideous thing—nostrils and ears plugged with plaster; tongue lolling, dry and white with plaster dust; hair a discolored blond shade.

Larry’s eyes traveled up toward the ceiling. The explosion had caused the plaster to give way, revealing the ghastly secret that had been hidden behind it.

Ivan Stern’s lax lips moved, “That is the body of Dan Palmer who disappeared a week ago!”

Clues flashed across Larry’s brain, linked, forming a chain of events that pointed unmistakably to the killer. He sprang over to Ivan Stern, seized his arm, shook him. “Snap out of that! You’ve got to take care of Dean Wile. See if he’s dead. Do something for him. This time, I’ll nail the monster!”

Larry crossed to the gun rack, picked up a shotgun, and ran through the door. He encircled the house, and came abruptly upon a milk-cellar that had been dug in the side of a little mound. A line of yellow light crept beneath the door. He could hear voices coming from the cellar. Bernice Wile was saying, “It’s all over now. We can go—together!”

As the cellar door swung open, Larry leaped. He drove the gun muzzle into Perry Wile’s ribs. “Got you! That bomb was to be a lot faster than dragging men down in the Black Pool, wasn’t it? That bomb was set to explode prematurely. As it happened, only the priming charge went off, otherwise every member of the Jordan Institute would have been wiped out, and you would have had the entire Jordan estate in your care. And you, Mrs. Dean Wile, were clever enough to lure the men out on Black Pool when the monster lurked below. And you locked Mathew Ince’s door tonight so that there could be no interference when the monster dragged Ince through the window!”

“That’s all a damned lie!” Perry Wile insisted. “You’re crazy!”

Larry turned as he heard footsteps outside the door. Ivan Stern stood there, looking from one to the other. Larry thrust the shotgun into Stern’s hand. “Cover these two. I want to have a look around here”

He walked over to a large wooden chest and threw back the lid. Inside was a long burlap bag stuffed with sand. He lifted it out and threw it on the floor. “That’s the tail of the dinosaur!” Again he thrust his hands into the chest and this time brought out a pair of shoes with a peculiar, three-pointed affair fastened to the soles. “Used for making dinosaur tracks,” he explained. “Perry wore these shoes with the reconstructed feet of the monster on the soles and dragged the weighted sack between his legs. I thought your dinosaur walked a little bow-legged when I saw the tracks! And here is the monster itself!” He pointed to what lay upon the bottom of the chest. A complete diver’s uniform, round metal helmet, rubber suit, weighted shoes, and oxygen tank! A curved pipe was attached to the helmet. It would have looked very much like a watersnake when partly submerged. This, no doubt was some sort of a periscope through which the killer could watch his victims. And beside the suit was an iron grapple with three bloodstained tines—the “monster’s claw!”

Larry turned. Ivan Stern was bending eagerly over the chest. But where was Perry and Bernice?

“Damn it, Stern, you’ve let them go!” Larry jumped through the cellar door. Running down toward the pool was a shadowy form that he recognized as Perry. Larry broke into a run and Stern was close behind, waving the shotgun and shouting.

At the little landing, they came upon Perry. He was trying to get one of the canoes untied, but as Stern and Larry appeared not ten feet from him, he leaped to his feet. Stern raised the gun, shouted a warning. Perhaps he pulled the trigger accidentally. Both barrels of the shotgun roared at once. Perry uttered a cry like an injured animal, staggered and pitched back into the black waters.

Another wail broke out of the night. A white, wraith-like figure came running toward the spot where Perry had vanished. Bernice! Quickly comprehending her intention, Larry leaped for her and fell sprawling, feet caught by a tangle of vine.

Bernice Wile sprang into the water. For a moment her white, upturned face lingered near the surface, gleaming like an ivory cameo modeled after the face of some Grecian fury. Suddenly, an unseen hand seized her, dragging her down… down.… Black waters bubbled above.

“Good God!” Larry breathed. “There’s an undercurrent right there! It drags them down. And that lower current is cold as ice. That’s why the bodies don’t rise to the surface. The cold delays decomposition!” He kicked off his shoes, stepped to the edge of the pool.

Ivan Stern’s hand shot out, seizing Larry by the collar. “Isn’t it better so?” he demanded. “A murder trial is a torturous thing. There has been justice.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Larry said thoughtfully. “It was a damnable plot. They would both suffer full penalty. Perry Wile knew where the deep and shallow parts of the pool were. He would drag his victims down until the undercurrent caught them—and kept them! He had no fear of police interference because he had half convinced your group of scientists that there was some prehistoric monster in the pool. Yet if the story of the monster was made public and found to be false, the Jordan Institute would be laughed at.”

Ivan nodded. “I see. Then if we decided that human agency was behind all this, Perry was also well prepared to throw suspicion on Dan Palmer. Palmer had to disappear, had to be murdered and his body hidden.

“His body would not be found with the others if the pool was dragged. He had quarreled with the rest of us. Motive enough for a hot-head like Palmer!”

Larry stared down at the waters, now innocently smooth, covering the treacherous undercurrent. “God!” he muttered. “They’re down there together. Dead, but always moving, circling around and around, an endless journey. Never resting. Tortured souls!”

“One thing,” added Ivan. “Dean will never know his brother’s treachery, or his wife’s infidelity. When the bomb knocked him over, his skull was fractured. He can’t live.”

Larry turned back toward the house. “That, too, is justice!”