Magic Terror. Peter Straub

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on the lighter. The sudden hollows and shadows in his face made him resemble one of the corpses I had opened up when I was in graves registration at Camp White Star.

      ‘You want to know what it is, Poole? Okay, you tell me what it is.’

      He held the lighter before him like a torch and marched into the hut. I imagined the entire dry, flimsy structure bursting into heat and flame. This Lieutenant was not destined to get home walking and breathing, and I pitied and hated him about equally, but I did not want to turn into toast because he had found an American body inside a hut and didn’t know what to do about it. I’d heard of platoons finding the mutilated corpses of American prisoners, and hoped that this was not our turn.

      And then, in the instant before I smelled blood and saw the Lieutenant stoop to lift a panel on the floor, I thought that what had spooked him was not the body of an American POW but of a child who had been murdered and left behind in this empty place. The Lieutenant had probably not seen any dead children yet. Some part of the Lieutenant was still worrying about what a girl named Becky Roddenburger was getting up to back at Idaho State, and a dead child would be too much reality for him.

      He pulled up the wooden panel in the floor, and I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The Lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell of blood floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The Lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. ‘Now. Tell me what this is.’

      ‘It’s where they hide the kids when people like us show up,’ I said. ‘Smells like something went wrong. Did you take a look?’

      I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn’t about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.

      ‘Taking a look is your job, Underhill,’ he said.

      For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.

      ‘Give me the lighter,’ Poole said, and grabbed it away from the Lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the Lieutenant and myself by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The Lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.

      The lighter flared again. I could see Poole’s extended arm, the jittering little fire, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole’s head. He moved away from the opening.

      ‘What is it? Are there any –’ The Lieutenant’s voice made a creaky sound. ‘Any bodies?’

      ‘Come down here, Tim,’ Poole called up.

      I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.

      Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was almost sickeningly strong.

      ‘What do you see?’ the Lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

      I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.

      ‘Hot,’ Poole said, and closed the lighter.

      ‘Come on, damn it,’ came the Lieutenant’s voice. ‘Get out of there.’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room, and the topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like poetry, like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

      ‘Well, well,’ Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

      ‘I want you guys out of there, and I mean now,’ whined the Lieutenant.

      Poole snapped the lighter shut.

      ‘I just changed my mind,’ I said softly. ‘I’m putting twenty bucks into the Elijah fund. For two weeks from today. That’s what, June twentieth?’

      ‘Tell it to Spanky,’ he said. Spanky Burrage had invented the pool we called the Elijah fund, and he held the money. Michael had not put any money into the pool. He thought that a new lieutenant might be even worse than the one we had. Of course he was right. Harry Beevers was our next lieutenant. Elijah Joys, Lieutenant Elijah Joys of New Utrecht, Idaho, a graduate of the University of Idaho and basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was an inept, weak lieutenant, not a disastrous one. If Spanky could have seen what was coming, he would have given back the money and prayed for the safety of Lieutenant Joys.

      Poole and I moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The Lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand – uselessly, because he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We levered ourselves up out of the hole stiff-armed, as if we were leaving a swimming pool. The Lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and thick, fleshy nose, and his Adam’s apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. He might not have been Harry Beevers, but he was no prize. ‘Well, how many?’

      ‘How many what?’ I asked.

      ‘How many are there?’ He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.

      ‘There weren’t exactly any bodies. Lieutenant,’ said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

      ‘Well, what’s that good for?’ He meant, How is that going to help me?

      ‘Interrogations, probably,’ Poole said. ‘If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods.’

      Lieutenant Joys nodded. ‘Field Interrogation Post,’ he said, trying out the phrase. ‘Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated.’ He nodded again. ‘Right?’

      ‘Highly,’ Poole said.

      ‘Shows you what kind of enemy we’re dealing with in this conflict.’

      I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with Elijah Joys, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use of, Highly Indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry – I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.

      For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: ‘The Walk to the Paradise Garden’, from A Village СКАЧАТЬ