Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 21

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The night that followed, both air and moon were muffled behind bolsters of slow cloud. It was the sort of night you do not go walking out late through country not too well known to you.

Tom Molyneux had gone fairly early to bed. There was nothing much to keep him in the bar-room. The clientele had been dwindling lately, and to-night there was practically no one about.

He lay awake for half an hour or so, a smile of dim bliss on his face. The smile persisted after sleep had fallen upon him. So it was that first upon his sleeping ears the lugubrious noises swelled, then on his slowly awakening ears. So on his sleeping eyes first the horrific light flared, then on his suddenly awakened eyes.

“Please, Big Man God, do ah still bin sleepin’? Please, please, God, ah ain’t wakin’, am I?”

Louder swelled the moanings, and the clankings came clearer, nearer. The square of window grew more starkly defined in the white desperate light.

Then the flame itself overtopped the window-sill. Then the apparition that the flame crested. O direful Thing! O hellish Thing! O Thing of flames for eyes, and teeth huge as a shark’s teeth! O Thing swathed round in cerements! O Thing encompassed by moanings and sobbings and the whole hideous reproach of hell let loose!

For minutes that may have been minutes only, or may have been hours, Tom Molyneux stared at the Thing. His body was tight in its terror as a steel bar. The sweat soaked into his pillow like a standing marsh. His eyelids were clamped back in his sockets as if nails held them.

Then suddenly—for he would have gone mad else—he uttered a yell that the newly interred dead in the churchyard must have heard. As if his bed had discharged him like a catapult, he hurtled into the air. He flung open the door, crashed down the stairs like collapsing masonry, thrust his shoulder to the locked door, and emerged through the debris into the appalling night.

He ran and ran as if the Thing would any moment reach forth its hand and lift him from his feet and take him to its icy bosom. He ran and ran, through hedge and thicket, over bog and stream. He ran and ran till he reached a caravan standing solitary in a meadow. He knocked at the door so desperately that it came away as he knocked a second time.

“Let me in! Let me in!” he roared.

“Why!” cried Bill Richmond. “What’s this? What’s the matter, Tom? And you in your underclothes, too!”

“Let me in!” sobbed Tom Molyneux. “De spirrut’s after me! De spirrut of Joe Mason!”

“Sure I’ll let you in! Come in! There isn’t any door to stop you!”

“Oh, Bill, Bill! Ah done him wrong, Bill! Ah stole his girl, Bill! Ah hadn’t no right to do any such thing. Is he dere any mo’, Bill?”

“Of course he isn’t, Tom! You just wait a moment! I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer at him; that’ll scare him. There, see! He isn’t there any more! Why, Tom! Just look at those feet! You won’t be fit to stand on them for weeks! You should have waited to put your boots on, Tom. Honest you should!”