"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 009 - The Czar of Fear" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

with the terror in her eyes. "It is more than an hour's drive to New York. And we may be very busy for
several hours, trying to find Doc Savage."

"Eat!" Aunt Nora snorted. "How can I, Alice? The way you and Jim are acting takes a body's appetite
away. Bless your Aunt Nora, honey! You children are acting like two rabbits about to be caught!"

The girl forced a faint smile, reached over impulsively, and gripped the older woman's arm.

"You're a brick, Aunt Nora," she said gratefully. "You are just as scared as we are. But you have control
enough not to show it."

"Humphk1" Sniffing, Aunt Nora grabbed her sandwich. Squaring both elbows on the white counter, she
began to eat.

Rain purred on the lunch-room roof. It crawled like pale jelly down the windows. It fogged the street of
the little New Jersey town. The gutters flowed water the color of lead.

The little radio made steady noise. It was picking up canned music from Prosper City, a manufacturing
town in the Allegheny Mountains. Aunt Nora had tuned it to the Prosper City station when they first
entered the lunch room.

"Good little set," she said, nodding at the instrument. "Prosper City is quite a ways off, and the set brings
in -- "

She stood up suddenly, splayed both hands tightly to her cheeks, and screamed.

The young man whipped off his stool and spun to face the radio. His face was distorted; his eyes bulged.

His sister also leaped erect, crying out shrilly. Her coffee cup, knocked to the concrete floor, broke with
a hollow crackle.

EVEN THE noise of the breaking cup was not enough to drown the strange sound which had come
abruptly from the radio.

It was a tolling, like the slow note of a big, listless bell. Mixed with the reverberations was an unearthly
dirge of moaning and wailing. The din might have been the frenzied crying of some harpy horde of the
ether, shepherded by the moribund clangor of the hideous bell.

The lunch room proprietor got off his stool behind the cash register. He was startled, but more by the
terrified actions of his three customers than by the hideous uproar from the radio. However, the
bewildered stare he directed at the set showed he had never heard this sound before.

The fanfare in the radio ended as unexpectedly as it had arisen. The lunch-room owner smiled, evidently
from relief at the thought that he would not have to pay a repair bill. The three customers stood in a sort
of white-faced, frozen immobility.

Rain strings washed moistly on the roof and swept the street like the semi-transparent straws of a great
broom.

Aunt Nora was first to break the rigid silence.