"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 317 - Ten Glass Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

thing. The peeling plaster on the walls looked like something you would see upon turning up a stone.

The stairs were rickety, and noisy as the smells that pushed at him. He took another look out the
window. His trailer was easing around the little huddle where one policeman talked to Bates and the
other was holding on to another of the four who had been leaning against the lamp post when he walked
up.

Two of them had run away. They had made a getaway. Why couldn't he? But then they didn't have the
tall, lean man after them. There, he was coming up the stoop of the house.

The man in the hallway looked around. This was the dead end, unless... he looked up the narrow stair
well. Some of those old houses, he had read somewhere, had stairs leading up to the roof. If he could get
to the roof, run across a couple of buildings and come down into a completely different house, perhaps
he could still...

But as he started up the stairs, he could hear only a floor below him the steady determined footsteps
which were getting to be the only reality in the all encompassing nightmare that tore at his sanity.

Only a floor separated hunted from hunter. There would not be time to make the roof. His frantic eyes
lighted on a door near him. There was a sliver of light stabbing out into the darkness that hung in this hall
even in the day time.

The door must be slightly ajar to allow all that light to escape. He reached for the door knob. If he could
throw himself on the mercy of whoever occupied these rooms...

He slid the door open quietly. He stepped into the room. That was all. Time came to a halt. It was as
though he had stepped from one universe into nothingness.

CHAPTER II
HE opened his eyes. Lines. Wavy lines that shimmered off into the distance. His eyes couldn't focus on
whatever it was that he was staring at. He blinked them.

Nothing happened. The same brown dirty lines wavered off out of the range of his vision. He moved his
head. Something was wrong with it. The lines wavered then came together. He thought suddenly,
stupidly, parallel lines extended into infinity do not meet.

He pressed his hands down. They met resistance. He moved. His hands were pressed flat on the floor.
The reason he had not been able to make out the lines was that his eyes were too close to the lines.

He was lying full length on the floor. The lines were the demarcations between splintered boards that
made up the floor. He lifted his head which felt mushy. There was no pain, not yet, but it felt as though his
brains had been cooked over a slow fire. He sat up.

He was in a tenement kitchen. That seemed a little bizarre, but then, so did everything else. There, not far
away, was a stove. It was greasy and grimy. There was a pot of something on the front burner. He
twitched his nostrils. Whatever was on the stove was burning.

He tilted forward as he got to his knees. Only then did he realize that he had something in his hand. He
looked at it dully. It was a knife. A bread knife with a serrated edge that looked something like the Malay
kriss his father had hanging on the wall in his study.