"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Claire Moffatt 01 - Dark Satanic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

A BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOK
PUBLISHED BY BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION
Copyright й 1972 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with the author's agent SEN 425-02231-
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation
Madison Avenue New York, N.Y.
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS о TM 757,
Printed In Canada
BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, SEPTEMBER,
Chapter One
The sign on the door, in modest gold letters, read JAMES C. MELFORD, MANAGING EDITOR. The faintly pretty girl at the reception desk smiled, depressed a button, and murmured, "Mr. Melford? Can you see Mr. Cannon for a few minutes?" She listened a moment, then smiled again, a little more cordially this time, and said, "Take a seat, Mr. Cannon. Mr. Melford will be with you hi just a minute."
The man standing before the deskЧtall, thin, and slightly stooped, Ms face drawn and haggard as if with some overriding worryЧtamed away, fidgeting slightly, and lowered his lanky body onto a plastic sofa. He picked up a magazine but barely leafed through the pages, riffling them as if he were shuffling a deck of cards, and put it down again. He stretched Ms neck to look around the office, frowning as if he had lost something there and couldn't quite remember what.
Whatever it was, it wasn't there, or at least Ms eyes didn't linger on it There was a small, green, plastic
Christmas tree, decorated with blue glass balls and red-ribbon bows, on the reception desk. In a rack beside the desk were a few dozen brightly colored paperback books, the recent releases of Blackcock Books. His eyes lingered momentarily on two titles near the top of the rack, The True Story of Witchcraft and Voodoo in the Modern World, by John Cannon. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, as if in pain, and the girl behind the Christmas tree raised her head momentarily. "Are you all right, Mr. Cannon?"
"YesЧyes, thank you," he said, and reached out a determined arm to pick up the magazine. He held it without opening it, his hands clenched on the edges, as if forcing himself to sit still. The girl's eyes lingered on him a moment, but a ringing phone forced her attention back to the switchboard, and Cannon loosed his grip on the magazine, sighing faintly.
The office door swung open, and a youngish man, his tie loosened at the neck, his thick light hair standing up in crisp curls, stood in the door. His face broke into a hearty smile.
"Hello, Jock, nice to see you. Want to come inside?" He held out his hand. His voice was warm and welcoming, and the clasp of his fingers firm. Cannon, unfolding himself awkwardly from the chair, relaxed a little in a smile and let himself be shepherded inside.
The office was light, bright, and unpretentious, with a big, workman-like desk overflowing with papers and boxes of manuscripts; more manuscripts, in boxes and thick manila envelopes, were piled up in racks and on shelves at both sides. There were brightly garish paintings on the walls, obviously the originals of the book covers of the publishing house, and a small bronze statuette which read, across the base-, SCIENCE FICTION AWARDЧ1967 in a place of honor atop a filing cabinet. One of the colored paintings displayed a green devil with glaring red eyes and enormous horns; Melford saw his guest's eyes linger on it and smiled again, warmly, as he moved around behind his desk.
"Yes, that's The Devil in America. It's still one of our best sellers; we're thinking of reprinting it this springЧproviding your agent and I can come to some kind of reasonable terms. Sit down, sit down." He took the desk chair and waved Cannon into a chart beside him. "Cigarette? How've you been, Jock? You're looking a bit rocky. When I called your agent last week, he said you'd been in the country trying to rest. What's the matter, fella? People our age shouldn't need to rest!"
In the flow of this cheerful chatter Cannon relaxed, with a nervous smile. "Nothing, I guess. A touch of the Hong Kong flu, maybe. Yes, I went up to Massachusetts for a few daysЕ I thought maybe I could work better in the quiet. Only after a few days"Чhe smiled, the shy and self-deprecating smile againЧ"the quiet started to get on my nerves."
"You sound like my mother," Melford remarked, grinning, "always talking about the good old days. And yet when the power went off last year, and she and Barbara had to cook a few meals with canned heat, or over the fireplace, you should have heard her bitching!
I must say Barbara was a good sport, though. She was asking about you just the other dayЧBarbara, that is. So what's doing?"
"Problems," Cannon said, a little diffidently.
Melford still looked friendly, but a very faint frown edged his forehead. "If it's money, Jock, this is the slow season, but maybe auditing would okay another advance."
"Oh, good God, no, I'm not broke," Camion said quickly, "no more broke than usual, anyway. No, I didn't come here about money, Jamie. Like everybody else, I could use it about now, but if that had been what I wanted, I'd have sicked my agent on you." He laughed nervously. "No, no, it's something else. You did get the manuscript of the new book, didn't you?"
"Sure. It's here somewhere." Jamie Melford pulled a large box with the label of one of the larger author's agencies toward him. He took off the cover and lifted out a bulky typed manuscript. "We ought to do something about that title, Jock; Witchcraft in New York Today . . . it's not a bad title, but it's a little cumbersome, and besides, it will remind everybody of William SeabrookЧyou know, Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today! They'll think they've read it already, and they won't buy it. It's a damn good book, Jock. I enjoyed itЕ forgot to proofread while I was going through it!"
"You read it? Already?"
"Damn right. Well be buying itЧno point in not telling youЧwe'll probably have a contract for you at the agency before the end of the week. Should have the money in time for you to do your Christmas shopping."
"The fact is," Cannon said, with an air of taking the plunge, "I'm not quite happy about the book."
Melford pursed his lips. The gesture made him look ten years older and was incongruous in his boyish face. "I don't get it, Jock. It's a fine bookЧgood as anything you've done. Oh, it goes a bit far, of course"ЧI can't say I buy all this weird stuff about witch what-do-you-call-'ems, covens, operating right here in New York CityЧbut after all, that sort of sensationalism is what sells books, and' I don't think very many people take it seriously, any more than they take Bela Lugosi in Dracula, on "The Late Late Show," seriously. Except for a few assorted nuts, of course."
"That's the trouble, Jamie," Cannon said. "I seem to haveЧwithout realizing itЧstepped on somebody's toes. I've been having troubleЕ"
Jamie chuckled. "Oh, I suppose all the local witches are sticking pins in your image," he said.
"I wouldn't be surprised," Cannon said quietly. Jamie stopped and looked at him. Then he said, "You're serious, Jock?"
Cannon twisted his long nervous fingers. "Yes. I was so damn afraid you'd laugh at me."
"Hell no, man. There are so many assorted nuts hi this city, somebody is sure to take offense at damn near anything we publish. Do you remember the piece we did about vice on the streets? Believe it or not, some crackpot society calling itself the Sexual Freedom League called me up every day for a week saying that we had set back sane sex laws in this country ten years, or some such rubbish. And that biography ofЕ oh, what the hell was his nameЧyou know, the general that got firedЧthe John Birch Society kept calling us up and calling us a pack of dirty red radicals, and worse things." Jamie smiled his warm, reassuring smile. "So you're beginning to get the crackpots, too? Hell, it's a complimentЕ shows you're well known. Who bothers to slander the village idiot?"
Cannon still looked shaken and nervous. He said, "It seems so real somehow. And then, last week, when I got sick"Чhis laugh sounded hollowЧ"I beganЕ wondering."
"Look," Jamie began, but the ringing phone cut him off. He leaned forward, picked it up, and said, "James Melford speaking."
Gradually his face darkened and knotted into a frown. "Yes, Cannon is here nowЕ what is that? What! Say, who is this, anyway? Hey, youЧ" He stood holding the phone in his hand, the dial tone faint and buzzing, clearly audible.
"Some damned nut," he said angrily, "some obscene lout. Is that what you've been getting, Jock?"
"That and more," Cannon said, and then the floodgates broke. "It started with the phone calls. Just a nasty whispering voice, neither man nor woman, just aЧa voice, threatening me with all sorts of ghastly things if I finished the book. It's why I went to the country. I thought I'd get away from it there. Only then it was letters, and once a dead chicken on my doorstepЧall bloodЧand once a pictureЕ a picture of a filthy little doll with pins sticking in itЧ" His voice broke and he shuddered.
Jamie looked at him aghast. "Insane!" he muttered. "I've thought I was going insane."
"Good God! I don't mean you, Jock. I mean the filthy bastards who'd do a thing like that. Look, Jock, it's either a complicated practical jokeЧand about the unfunniest I ever heard of, believe meЧor else some lunatic who takes all this stuff seriously has decided to try and get your goat, break your nerve. But use your head, man! He can't do you any harm with all this hocus-pocus unless you let him get on your nerves!"
"I'm not so sure," Cannon said, still in that quiet voice. "Seabrook took it seriously. He knew of people who had actually been killed by what you call that hocus-pocus."
"SavagesЕ superstitious natives who believed in itЧI've read his book, too. It can't hurt you unless you believe in it."
"I'm not so sure of that either," Cannon said. "I've been researching and reporting on this kind of thing for five years and eight books now. I am beginning to take it seriouslyЧdamn seriously. I think it shows in my books, and I think that's why they're after me."
Jamie Melford looked at his friend with a troubled frown. He was entirely too good-natured to laugh off anything that was troubling the older man this badly; and yet his own inherent skepticism told him it was rubbish. He said, and his voice reflected his dilemma, "Well, Jock, I just don't know what to say to you. I never thought that you, of all people, would let this sort _ of thing get you down. Wasn't it you who exposed four dozen fake mediums for your first book?"
"Yes," Jock said slowly, "and only later did I begin to realize that there were a few I couldn't expose. They couldn't all have been simply too clever for me. It only occurred to me later, too, that nobody would bother to fake psychic phenomena without some real psychic phenomena to imitate."