"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 327 - The Shadow Strikes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

THE SHADOW STRIKES
by Maxwell Grant


A BELMONT BOOK-- October 1964.


1

THAT NIGHT, the beachwear salesman on his way from New York to Beach City passed two
strange figures on the Cape Ambrose Highway. The salesman was driving a blue sedan and he
passed the two lurking figures just this side of Sea Gate. But the salesman saw only one of them.
Later, when he stopped for a whisky in Sea Gate to steady his shaking nerves, the people in the
Sea Gate Tavern laughed at him.
"A giant bat? In New Jersey?"
"You better let someone else drive --."
They all laughed at the salesman. He, himself, did not laugh or listen to them. He knew what
he had seen. He would not forget for a long time. On a sharp curve of the highway, for one long
instant in the glare of his headlights, he had seen the looming shape of a giant bat.
"It was ten feet tall," the salesman said. "At least. It flew across the highway. Fast, but I saw
it. It crossed the highway right in front of me. It went into the trees. I didn't see it again."
"That's powerful stuff you drink," someone said.
"Where'd you throw the bottle? I want the name of that brand," someone else said.
The salesman did not answer. He ordered a third drink and went to sit in a corner booth but
not too far from the light or the other people. He drank and waited for his hands to stop shaking.
The skeptics returned to their own drinks. Some of them still laughed about the salesman's story,
but not all of them.
There was a storm brewing in the hot August night, and when the wind blew against the
tavern windows some of the patrons at the bar looked uneasily over their shoulders.
The salesman, alone in his corner, was unaware that he had passed a second lurking figure
that night. Sea Gate is a rich resort suburb of Beach City on the New Jersey shore, and the Cape
Ambrose highway is dark, curving, and lined with trees as it approaches Sea Gate. The highway
is some half a mile in from the sea. On the beach there is mile after mile of small summer cottage
colonies. But along the highway the houses are larger, more elegant, and widely spaced on well-
tended grounds.
Less than a mile from Sea Gate, and just three miles closer to the resort town than where the
salesman had seen the apparition of the giant bat, a stone gateway stands as the entrance to the
Sea Gate Golf Club. The gateway is isolated and hidden by trees and high bushes. The closest
house is four hundred yards away on the other side of the highway. The Golf Club itself is dark
at night. The golf course spreads darkly beyond the gate, and the houses on the beach are a half a
mile away.
2
That night, the sky darkening with the approaching storm, a man stood hidden just inside the
stone gateway to the Golf Club. The salesman, his hands already shaking from what he had seen,
did not see this man. The salesman passed on to have his drinks at the Sea Gate Tavern, to calm
his nerves, and to continue to Beach City and points south where he would sell his beachwear
and soon forget that night.
The man hidden inside the gateway looked up when the blue sedan of the salesman passed,
and then looked away. It was not the car he was waiting for, and it did not interest him. He
lighted a long, foreign cigarette, and continued to wait. Each time the man lighted a fresh