Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #2. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон

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СКАЧАТЬ passed Epernay. The air grew cold with a hard bitterness while the fog congealed to sleety rain that spattered like thrown sand against the window and gushed down the glass like the backwash of a sullen tide. The window casing somehow rattled loose from its sides, and a current of chilled air, with now and then a spit of sleet, came straight against me. After several ineffectual efforts to right matters, I turned the collar of my trench coat up about my ears, slid down until I rested on the extreme end of my spine, and sought forgetfulness of my discomfort in sleep.

      Conversation had died down to monosyllables. Even apKern seemed drained dry of wisecracks, and Amberson rose lurching from his seat.

      “See you in the morning—I hope,” he rumbled, jerking at the leather cord that worked the single light in the compartment. For a moment the globe glowed with fading incandescence, then we were smothered in Cimmerian darkness.

      Was it a trick of tired nerves, the retention of the light-image upon my retina in the dark? I wondered. Somehow, it seemed to me that as night flattened on the window and the blackness closed about us the orange eyes of the girl sitting opposite me glowed with a sort of smoky, sulphurus luminance like those of a cat in the gloom. The impression lasted but a moment. Either she had lowered her lids or my eyes had grown accustomed to the lack of light, and I was staring sightlessly into a shadow as impenetrable as a velvet curtain.

      Memory was scratching at my brain, softly but insistently as a cat demanding admission to a room. Miss Waltrous’ face was poignantly familiar to me and, dimly, I connected it with something vaguely unpleasant.

      I tried to fit the pieces of the mental picture-puzzle together, assembling keywords, fumbling with my thoughts. The riddle of her strange familiarity—that persistent thought, “I’ve seen her somewhere”—was within reach of my brain if only I could get the facts in proper perspective, I was sure. Her name: Felicia Watrous. Did its syllables strike some note of memory? No. Try again: That face, that sweet, pale oval face, almost too perfect in its symmetry; the long red lips of that red, sensitive mouth; those glowing orange eyes and hair as russet as the leaves of a copper-beech in autumn; she came from Philadelphia—

      I had it!

      The triumph of remembering brought me up right in my seat, I almost snapped my fingers in delight. Not faintly, but clear-cut as a motion picture flashed upon a screen, I saw that scene in Fairmount Park. I was in my final year of internship and, as always, short of money, had gone to the zoo for the afternoon. Beside the monkey cage a boy and girl stood idly. Through closed lids I could see them perfectly with my mind’s eye, the lad in baggy trousers rolled high above his ankles to display bright socks, a V-necked sweater with the “F” that showed he was an athlete at Friends’ School; the girl in Peter Thompson suit, hatless, her small proud head aflame with copper hair as sweetly poised as a chrysanthemum upon its stalk. They had a bag of sugar cookies and had tossed one to the ravenous little rhesus monkeys swarming up the bars. One of the greedy little simians fastened on a cake fragment with its hand, then, not content, seized another with its hand-like foot, leaped to an overhanging perch and proceeded to feed itself, nibbling first from the bit clutched in its hand, then from the fragment grasped in its prehensile foot.

      “Look there!” the lad exclaimed as he nudged his companion. “Lookit that glutton feedin’ his face with hands and feet. Bet you couldn’t do that!”

      The innocent remark was devastating in effect. The girl seemed suddenly to lose all strength and wilted brokenly against the railing set before the cages. Her face was twisted in mute agony, her brow was glistening with sweat, her cheeks had gone pale with a pallor that passed white and seemed gray verging on green. And from the tortured mask of stricken features, her eyes seemed to beg for pity.

      I ran to offer her my help, but she smiled away my kindly meant assistance. “A—little—faint,” she murmured in a voice that shook as if it took her last remaining ounce of strength to speak. “I’ll—be—all—right.” Then, with the frightened boy assisting me, we got her to the red-wheeled dog-cart waiting by the fountain, and he had driven her away.

      That had been in 1910—nine years ago. I had been a barely-noticed bystander—a member of the audience of her brief drama—she had been the star of the short tragedy. No wonder she had failed to recognize in the uniformed medical officer the callow intern who had helped her.

      Was there, I asked myself as I leaned back against the hard, uncomfortable cushions of the German railway coach, some connection between the lad’s reference to her inability to feed herself with her foot and her collapse, or had she been seized with a fainting spell? If she had, it sounded like a cardiac affection; yet the girl who slept so peacefully across from me was certainly in the prime of health. More, she must have passed a rigid physical examination before they let her come overseas. Puzzling over it I saw the lights of Chálons station flash past, watched the darkness deepen on the window pane once more, and fell into a chilled, uncomfortable sleep.

      *

      Consciousness came to me slowly. The window had worked farther down in its casings, and sleet-armed rain was stabbing at my face. My feet and legs felt stiff with a rheumatic stiffness, and my head was aching abominably.

      “Damn these Jerry coaches,” I swore spitefully as I rose to force the window back in place. “If I ever see a Pullman car again I’ll—”

      My anger protests slipped away from my lips. The blackness of the night had given way to a diluted gray, and by this dim uncertain light I made the forms of my companions out—and there was something horribly wrong with them. ApKern was slumped down in his seat as if he had been a straw man from which the stuffing had been jerked, Amberson lay with feet splayed out across the aisle; Weinberg’s shoulders drooped, and his hands hung down beside his knees and swung as flaccidly as strings with each movement of the train. The girl across from me lay back against her cushions, head bent at an unnatural angle. Thus I called the roll with a quick frightened glance and noted that the stranger was not present.

      Yes, he was! He was lying on the floor at apKern’s feet, one arm bent under him, his legs spread out as though he’d tried to rise, felt too tired for it, and decided to drop back. But in the angles of his flaccid legs, their limpness at the hips and knees and ankles, I read the signs no doctor has to see twice. He was dead.

      The others? I jerked the leather light-cord, and as the weak bulb blossomed into pale illumination took stock. Dead? No, their color was too bright. Their cheeks were positively flushed—too flushed! I could read it at a glance. Incredibly, I was the only person in that cramped compartment not suffering carbon monoxide poisoning.

      I drove my fist through the window, jerked the door open and as the raw air whistled through the compartment, I bent to examine Miss Watrous. Her pulse was very weak but still perceptible. So were Weinberg’s, Amberson’s, and apKern’s. The stranger was past helping, and the air would help revive the others.

      My first job was to find the chef de train—the conductor—and report the casualty.

      “Find whoever is in charge of this confounded pile o’ junk,” I told an enlisted man I met in the corridor of the next coach. “There’s been an accident back there—four officers and a Red Cross woman gassed—”

      “Gassed?” he echoed unbelievingly. “Does the captain mean—”

      “The captain means just what he says,” I snapped. “Go get me the conductor toot sweet. Shake it up!”

      “Yes, sir.” He saluted and was off like the proverbial shot, returning in a few moments with a young man whose double bars proclaimed him a captain, with the red R denoting he was in the Railroad Section on his shoulder.

      It СКАЧАТЬ