"Shadow - 360215 - Back Pages - Grace Culver - Hit The Baby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Roswell)

"Like all white elephants-sure!"
"And a projection room, of course?"
Again Eisman nodded.
"I want you to have it run through for my two assistants. Right away." He
turned to Grace. "There is a tie-up some place, I don't know what you'd best look
for. But give that Ik-la-Whoosit a good once-over, anyways."
He strode off purposefully, on some errand of his own. Neither of his helpers
followed. They had their orders.
The redhead met Jerry Riker's eyes unsmilingly.
"Well-here's your chance to take me to a Saturday movie," she said.

THE VOODOO VOW
The darkness of the tiny, unadorned cubbyhole flickered as that out-dated
picture's title flashed on the screen. Tinny and hard, the voices of the early "talkie"
rasped from the screen as the opening sequence slid on.
A native dive in Ornoa. Villainous-looking extra people crowded the bar,
lounged at tables, chanted with the weird native orchestra. The scene narrowed
down to one table.
Two white men, in spotless linen, were talking. An elderly English character
actor and a young, almost too handsome chap Grace remembered vaguely as Barit
Tyson. He had been a promising second lead, once. Since the coming of talkies,
she couldn't remember having seen him.
The Englishman, sardonically amused, said, "So you don't believe in our
voodoo magic, eh? Well, Bob, if you'd been here long enough to see the things I
have-"
Tyson, interrupting, said, "Magic? Mumbo Jumbo, you mean."
Just four words. But Grace straightened quickly in her hard chair. Ugly
voice? It was deep and appealing, even in those first crude days of recording.
Barit Tyson had been a talkie natural!
The Englishman's line, emphasized by a curt nod of the head, was, "Yes?
Glance over there, then, my friend. See that man near the door?"
The camera trucked across the noisy, vicious crowd, once more to show the
dive's battered entrance. A black man, tall but emaciated, crouched there.
He looked like a black skeleton draped in tattered rags. Sunk deep in their
sockets, burning eyes stared out from the screen with a fanatic madness that was
no act. Ik-la-Duk, the antagonized witch doctor!
"Golly!" Grace breathed in Jerry Riker's ear. "If that face was haunting me
with any curse, I'd give up quick! Eisman picked the wrong baby to fight with
about salary."
"The first big .mistake was ever letting him get out of Haiti."
Reel by reel, "The Voodoo Vow" went on with its story of love under the dark
menace of zombies and demon visitations. Tyson, as the unbeliever, was tortured
and driven mad himself amid the tropical jungles that once had bloomed
artificially in the Maysville studio.
Jerry grunted suddenly.
"That knife there! See it in the zombie's hand? It's a dead ringer for the one
the throat-ripper used on that poor Daley kid!"
Grace nodded grimly, Fifty minutes of sitting in the dark and watching this
witch stuff, and you began to wonder.
Could some dark spirit actually be hovering malignantly over this long-closed