"Henry Kuttner - This is the House UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

"Yes. It burns up."

"But the coal doesn't," Melton said triumphantly. "Three days ago I put a couple of shovels of coal in the furnace. I've had a red bed of coals ever since. The house is warm. It shouldn't be." He reached over to an end table and scrabbled at some papers. "I even figured out how long it should have taken the coal to burn. The answer is four hours at the outside. Not three days."

"What about that automatic stoker idea?" Michaela asked. "Did you look?"

"Well, I didn't use an X-ray. But I looked. Yeah. I'll show you." He stood up, seized Michaela's hand, and

they headed for the cellar, by-passing the eccentric refrigerator.

The cellar was capacious, cement-floored, and with six-by-six vertical supporting beams here and there. In one corner, by the coal bin, was the furnace, a bulging, dirty-white object with insulated pipes sticking out of it and wandering across the beams of the ceiling. All the drafts were shut, but the hydrostatic thermometer atop the boiler read 150. Melton opened the metal door. The bed of coals glowed red; ripples of wavy heat-motion ran across its surface.

"Where's the stoker?" he asked.

"Built in," Michaela suggested, hopelessly. "It's a big furnace."

"The boiler's like a jacket. That fattens it out."

"Why not let the fire go out and start another? MaybeЧ"

"Let it go out? I can't make it go out. I can't even shake it through the grate." He seized an iron crank and demonstrated. "The Souse is too hot, even with all the windows open. When snow sets in, I don't know what we'll do."

Michaela turned abruptly toward the stairs. Melton said, "What's the matter?"

"The doorbell."

"I didn't hear it."

On the landing, Michaela paused to look down at her husband. "No," she said reflectively, "one doesn't. Hadn't you noticed?" She made a despairing gesture and departed, leaving Melton to stare after her. Now that he thought of it, not once in the past three days had he heard the doorbell ring. Yet, he recalled now, there had been callersЧmostly salesmen determined to sell the new tenants insulation, paint jobs, extermination equipment, and subscriptions to magazines. Somehow it had always been Michaela who had answered the door. Melton had taken it for granted that he had been in a part of the house where it wasn't easy to hear the bell.

He scowled, at the furnace, his thin, saturnine face set in troubled lines. Very easy to say, "Ignore the matter." But you couldn't. Not even the single matter of the furnace. And there had been others. What was wrong with the house?

Superficially nothing. Certainly nothing that a prospec-

tive tenant would notice on inspection. The title search had showed no flaws; an architect had approved Melton's plan to buy the place. So they had moved in, grateful for a pied a terre after months of vain house-hunting.

Sixteen Pinehurst Drive seemed exactly what they wanted. It wasn't ultra-modern; it had a certain solid air of assurance about it. It had sat for fifteen years facing the Hudson Palisades across the river, like a prim dowager austerely gathering gray stone skirts about her. The foundation was stone; the upper storiesЧit was a two-story houseЧwere wooden frame. And the layout of the rooms was ideal for their manage, Melton and Michaela and her brother Phil, who lived with them when he wasn't off on a binge, as he was, presumably, at present.

So they had moved in, the furniture had been installed, and the trouble began. Melton wished Phil were here. The guy, for all his erratic tendencies, had the ability to take things for granted; he exuded reassurance. But Phil hadn't even seen the new house yet.

He did not, therefore, know about the hall light, upstairs, which after a few experiments the Meltons had decided not to use at all. There was something about it. It altered complexions oddly, and had a quality of semi-fluorescence. Not quite that, but neither Michaela nor Melton liked to see each other in its illumination. The bulb wasn't at fault; they'd tried severalЧnew ones at thatЧand the quality of the light was unchanged.

Now, why in the devilЧ

Yesterday, when Melton had gone to the refrigerator for ice cubes, he had got a tremendous shock. Electrical disturbance of some sort, obviously; but to see an aurora borealis effect in your refrigerator is inevitably disturbing. And there were other things, shading into subtleties of sensation and emotion, that couldn't be captured in words. The house wasn't haunted. It was rather, Melton felt, simply too efficientЧin an extremely off-beam way.

The windows had been hard to open, extremely hardЧ for a while. Then, without any particular reason, they had all yielded as though greased, just in time to prevent the Meltons from dashing out of their overheated house to get a breath of fresh air. Melton decided to look up a friend whom he'd met while handling the Instar Electric account. The man was a technician of some kind, and might be

able to explain a few puzzling matters. Like the mice. If they were mice. There was something scuttling around at nightЧcertainly too small to be a troll, Michaela contendedЧand the traps Melton set caught nothing.