ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
The Pulp Fiction Megapack. John Wallace
Читать онлайн.Название The Pulp Fiction Megapack
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781434447357
Автор произведения John Wallace
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
I’ve made many mistakes. I’ve been a wicked, selfish old fool. But, for the sake of one I love more than life itself, I ask you to help me. The enclosed check for five hundred dollars will defray expenses.
Thinking back, Stephen Demerest shook his head. He had no inkling of the letter’s meaning. He remembered Benjamin Halliday only dimly, recalling, however, that he had once been his father’s friend. Only a few meager bits of information had come to him about Halliday. The man had grown wealthy in Europe. He had married brilliantly but unhappily. His wife had run off with another man, leaving him with an infant daughter. Then no further reports of Halliday had reached Demerest until, two years ago, he’d seen a brief notice in the paper of Halliday’s arrival in America.
What the man’s trouble now was, why he had buried himself in the wildest part of New England, Demerest could not imagine.
But the size of the house before him indicated wealth. He believed it was Halliday’s place. He approached the door, lifted the old-fashioned knocker and heard the hollow thud of it echo far inside the house.
Footsteps approached. The door was opened and Demerest froze into startled wonder. It was as though the mouth of some fantastic sub-chamber of hell had opened. Never had he seen such a revoltingly ugly man as the one who stood in the threshold.
A single, glaring eye gazed out of a scarred, pockmarked face. The man’s nose had been eaten away by accident or disease. His mouth was twisted into a misshapen hole that showed two broken teeth. The place where his other eye should have been was a gaping, horrible cavity in his cadaverous face.
Demerest made an effort to keep his voice steady. “Is this Mr. Halliday’s house?” he asked.
For almost a minute the single eye of the man before him searched his face, probed like a bright gimlet, trying, it seemed, to read his thoughts. Then the ugly head bobbed. The man stood waiting.
“I’m a radio specialist,” went on Demerest. “Mr. Halliday asked me to come to do some repairing. My car, with all my tools in it, got mired in the mud. I’ll have to get it in the morning. I wonder if I can stay here for the night?”
Again the noseless face bobbed. The man could understand, but seemed incapable of speech. It came to Demerest with another pang of horror that he was not only disfigured but also mute.
The hideous servant stood aside and motioned for Demerest to enter. Demerest did so and found himself in a richly decorated hall. He started to look about him, then jumped as a voice suddenly spoke at his side. “This way if you please!”
He had seen no one else come in, but when he looked around, there was another man almost as ugly as the first—a gnome-like figure with immensely broad shoulders and arms that nearly reached the floor. His simian, brutal face appeared hardly human, yet it was he who had spoken. He added gruffly: “You can’t see Mr. Halliday now. The doctor’s with him. Wait in here.”
The gnome-man ushered Demerest into a big drawing-room, then turned and left him. Demerest nervously drew a cigarette from his coat and lit it. But he’d barely taken a puff when a shuffling step sounded.
He whirled, went close to the door. An old man carrying a physician’s black satchel came slowly down the stairs. He, too, was hideously ugly, chinless, with a great projecting nose like the beak of some bird, and a pompadour of stiff white hair, giving him the look of an evil, crested parrot. He nodded at the servant, turned red-rimmed eyes on Demerest.
Demerest shuddered. Every human being he had seen in this fantastic place had been ugly as Satan.
The gnome-man saw the doctor to the door, then came back and planted himself in front of Demerest. “You may now go up and see Mr. Halliday,” he said, harshly. “I understand he’s expecting you.”
Demerest didn’t answer. He moved up the stairs, heard the gnome-man’s step close behind him. The servant was dogging his footsteps like an evil shadow.
“Right here!” The servant held open a door and followed Demerest into a room where there was a huge, old-fashioned canopied bed.
Demerest’s eyes swung to the figure on it, then to the two others who stood beside it.
The man in the bed was obviously Halliday. That wrinkled, crafty face, prematurely aged, stirred vague memories in Demerest’s mind. The other two, a youngish, fair-haired couple, were the first civilized-looking people he’d seen in the house. The woman had fair skin, a shapely body and washed-out but still attractive blue eyes. The man bore a striking resemblance to her. Both seemed well-bred, quiet.
Halliday turned feverish eyes on his visitor. Demerest could sense the hideous, gnome-like servant standing close behind him; and Halliday’s expression seemed to plead craftily for Demerest to be discreet.
“You’ve come about the radio,” said Halliday in a thin, flat voice. “I’m glad. It hasn’t been acting right. I’m an old man, bedridden, helpless. The radio, which keeps me in touch with the outside world, is one of my few pleasures.”
“I won’t be able to fix it until tomorrow,” Demerest said. “My car, with all my tubes and testing equipment, is stuck in the road a mile from here. If you’ll let me spend the night, I’ll start on the radio tomorrow.”
“I expected you to spend the night,” said Halliday. “We’re far from things here—isolated, as you see.” He waved his thin hand toward the man and the woman. “My good friends, Eric and Nana Larsen! They and my daughter, Gail, are taking turns nursing me.”
Demerest looked into the faded blue eyes of the man and the woman, and knew that these two must be brother and sister.
The woman favored him with a smile that made her look younger and glamorously appealing, in a foreign sort of way. “Please to meet you,” she said, with a slight, becoming accent. Then her eyes fell on the hideous gnome standing behind Demerest. The smile left her face and she shuddered. An air of tenseness settled over the room.
Halliday’s features, now that the first effort of greeting was over, had become wan and corpselike, their only expression one of inscrutable, deep-seated terror. He said, listlessly: “Dinner will soon be ready. I’m sorry I can’t join you; but I shall not be alone. Either Eric or Nana will stay with me.” The invitation to dinner seemed also dismissal. The hideous servant, standing so close behind Demerest that he could feel the man’s breath on his neck, said: “Come, Mr. Demerest. I’ll find you a room.”
Demerest had only a small grip with him. He followed the squat-bodied servant down a long hall. The man thrust open a door, lighted an oil lamp and favored Demerest with a curious leer. He said: “Here’s where you’ll sleep.”
There was another canopied bed in the room—like the one Halliday had. The house was obviously ancient, all the furnishings dating back to Colonial times. The servant withdrew, then abruptly thrust his ugly face back around the door. “Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,” he growled.
Demerest unpacked his things, went out into the hall, and saw Nana Larsen descending the staircase. She had changed her gown, as though for his especial benefit. Her low-cut dress revealed the shapeliness and alluring whiteness of her shoulders.
But a moment later the pale beauty of Nana Larsen was eclipsed by the lush, dark loveliness of the girl who entered the hall below, through another door.
Demerest started, stared, felt his heart contract. For he was again looking at the classic, inscrutable features of the mystery girl, whose great dogs had menaced his life.
Nana Larsen smiled. “Miss Halliday, this is Mr. Demerest, your father’s radio man.”
The mystery girl’s dark eyes searched Demerest’s face. She nodded briefly, acknowledging the introduction. There was something both haughty and tragic in her bearing. She preceded them into the dining room, and Demerest noticed that she was dressed almost as strangely as before. Her gown