"Shadow - 341201 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Double Chocolate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

along the passageway. Her steps were unconsciously stealthy, like a stalking
panther's. Her body was tense.
At the door she stopped, holding her head flat against the unpainted wood
while she listened for the slightest sound from the room beyond. But none came.
It had the eerie stillness of an abandoned place.
Slowly, her careful fingers touched the latch beneath them. She could feel it
lift. The door gave, easily, silently. She stepped across the thresholdЧinto Ivan
Jorgen's hideaway.
The cellar room was lighted solely by a dingy bulb set into the middle of the
ceiling. Its walls were only the whitewashed foundations of the rickety building
above. There were a few chairs about the place. In one corner stood an iron bed,
its covers disordered; in another, beneath a powerful arc light which was not
turned on, the wall was flanked by a table covered with a mass of sticks and
wires.
Grace, a soft sound of triumph in her throat, started forward,
Etcher's tools, on that table! Knives Чbottles of acidЧscalpelsЧcopper
plates. The counterfeiter's workbench!
The door creaked on its hinges in closing, and a menacing shadow wavered
suddenly over the dim white wall before her.
Gasping, the girl from Noonan's whirled.
The man who stood there was little better than a Thing. He had long, hairy
arms, a huge chest, powerful shoulders. His head, atop them, seemed unnaturally
small.
Much of the flesh of his face had been eaten and scarred beyond recognition,
in some long-ago mishap with chemicals. He was horrible to look at; and he was
grinning at her with the cunning of a murderous animal.
Swinging inward as she had entered, the door had screened him from sight.
But now it had closed again. She was alone with himЧtrapped in the strange
cellar room.
With a low cry of instinctive terror, Grace leaped for the first weapon her eyes
lit uponЧan ink bottle on the stand beside the iron bed.
But as she moved, the deformed guardian of the doorway hurled himself
upon her.
Arms like huge iron bands clamped about her with rib-crushing violence. A
force as irresistible as gravity jerked her up into the air.

With savage fury she clawed at the giant who held her imprisoned in his pitiless
grasp. Her fingernails dug into the soft mass scar tissue that was his jaw. Her fists,
driving furiously, thumped his chest.
But she might have been belaboring the whitewashed stone wall, for all the
good her resistance did her. The iron arms tightened. Hot breath fanned her cheek
as her captor lifted her higher from the floor. The cellar rumbled with his brutish
laughter.
"LetЧmeЧdown!"
Her face kicked wildly, but the man held her off as easily, as though she were
a rag doll. His whole great body pivoted slowly, like a barber's pole, dragging
her with him.
"SoЧyou try put one over on Rocco, eh? You try take away tools from Boss?"
Chuckling ghoulishly, he set her on barren corner of the big room, now. He
had selected a position from which he could cut off her approach to the work