"The Pariah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

THE PARIAH
I don't know when I fell asleep, but I was awakened by the sudden dimming of my bedside lamp.
'John,' whispered a voice. There was no mistaking whose voice it was. Croakily, I answered, 'Jane? Is that you?'
She gradually began to appear, standing at the foot of the bed. Thin, and sunken-eyed, her hair waving around her in some unfelt, unseen wind, her hands raised as if she were displaying the fact that she was dead but bore no stigmata. What frightened me most of all, though, was how tall she was. In those dim white robes, she stood nearly seven feet, her hair almost touching the ceiling, and she looked down at me with a serious and elongated face that sent dread soaking through me like the cold North Atlantic rain.
'Jane,' I said, in a constricted voice, 'you're not real. Jane, you're dead! You can't be here, you're dead!'
'John . . .' she sighed, and her voice sounded like four or five voices speaking at once. 'John . . . make love to me.'
Also available in Star PLAGUE THE SPHINX THE DJINN THE MANITOU

THE PARIAH
Graham Masterton
A STAR BOOK
published by
the Paperback Division of
W. H. ALLEN & CO. Ltd
A Star Book
Published in 1983
by the Paperback Division of
W. H. Alien & Co. Ltd
A Howard and Wyndham Company
44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB
A Star Original
Copyright й Graham Masterton, 1983
Published by arrangement with Wiescka Masterton Phototypeset by Input Typesetting Ltd, London SW19 8DR Printed and bound in Great Britain by Anchor Brendon Ltd, Tiptree, Essex
ISBN 0 352 31367 6
With special thanks to Alan Hay
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.


CONDO DEVELOPER'S WIFE MISSING
IN 'NIGHTGOWN BOAT TRIP'
MYSTERY
- Granitehead, Tues.
Coastguard helicopters were scouring Massachusetts Bay between Manchester and Nahant early today for Mrs James Goult III, wife of the Granitehead condo developer, who went missing from her home late last night, apparently dressed only in her nightgown.
Mrs Goult, a 44-year-old brunette, drove to Granitehead Harbour at about 11.30 p.m. and disappeared out to sea in the family's 40-foot yacht Patricia.
Mr Goult said, 'My wife is an experienced sailor and I don't have any doubts that she is capable of handling the boat under normal circumstances. But obviously these are not normal circumstances, and I am deeply concerned for her safety.'
There had been no quarrel between himself and his wife, Mr Goult said, and her nightgown disappearance was 'a complete mystery.'
Lt. George Rogers, of the Salem Coastguard, said, 'We are carrying out a systematic search and if the Patricia is there to be found, we will find her.'


ONE

I opened my eyes, abruptly; unsure if I had been asleep or not. Was I still asleep now, and dreaming? It was so dark that I could hardly tell if my eyes had actually opened. Gradually I was able to make out the luminous hands of my old-fashioned bedside clock; two dim green glows, like the eyes of an ailing but malevolent goblin. Ten after two, on a cold March night on the Massachusetts coast. But nothing at all to suggest what might have woken me.
I lay tensely where I was, snuggled up alone in that big old colonial bed, holding my breath, listening. There was the wind, of course, rattling and chattering at the window, but out here on the Granitehead peninsula, where your bedroom is separated from the shores of Nova Scotia by nothing but hundreds of miles of dark and ruminative sea, the wind is a fact of life. Persistent, fretful, and fussy, even in spring.
I listened with the acuteness of someone who was still desperately unused to being left alone at night; with the same hypersensitive ears as a wife left at home while her husband goes away on a business trip. And when the wind suddenly rose, and worried around the house, and then just as suddenly died away again, my heartbeats rose and pounded and died away with it.
The window rattled, fell silent, rattled.
Then I heard it, and even though it was almost inaudible, even though I probably perceived it more through my teeth and more through my nerve-endings than I did through my ears, I recognized it at once as the sound that had woken'me up, and my senses prickled like static electricity. Plaintive and monotonous, creakkk-
squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, the chains of my garden swing.
I stared into the darkness, eyes wide. The luminous goblin-eyes of my clock stared back at me, and the more I stared the more they looked like goblin-eyes and the less they looked like my bedroom clock. I defied them to move, defied them to wink at me. But outside in the garden, on and on, there was that creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik. And the eyes refused to wink.
It's only the wind, I thought to myself. It's the wind, right? It must be. The same wind that's been rattling my window all night. The same wind that's been having such breathy conversations with itself down my bedroom chimney. But I had to admit to myself that I had never known the wind blow my swing before; not even on a gusty night like this, when I could clearly hear the seething, disturbed sleep of the North Atlantic Ocean as it eddied a mile-and-a-half away around the rocks of Granitehead Neck; and the garden gates of Granitehead Village banged as they always did in intermittent applause. The swing was too heavy, a high-backed chair carved out of solid American Hop Hornbeam, suspended by iron chains. The only way that it could possibly creak was if somebody were to swing in it, steady and high.
Creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik, over and over; sometimes muffled by the wind, and the background roar of the sea, but continuing without a single break in rhythm while the clock hands moved through five whole minutes and the goblin appeared to incline his head.