"Г.К.Честертон. The Club of Queer Trades " - читать интересную книгу автора

too long and empty for the shouter to have run away. Even the
rational Major was a little shaken as he returned in a certain time
to the drawing-room. Scarcely had he done so than the terrific
voice came:

"Major Brown, Major Brown, where did--"

Brown was in the street almost at a bound, and he was in time--in
time to see something which at first glance froze the blood. The
cries appeared to come from a decapitated head resting on the
pavement.

The next moment the pale Major understood. It was the head of a
man thrust through the coal-hole in the street. The next moment,
again, it had vanished, and Major Brown turned to the lady.
"Where's your coal-cellar?" he said, and stepped out into the
passage.

She looked at him with wild grey eyes. "You will not go down," she
cried, "alone, into the dark hole, with that beast?"

"Is this the way?" replied Brown, and descended the kitchen stairs
three at a time. He flung open the door of a black cavity and
stepped in, feeling in his pocket for matches. As his right hand
was thus occupied, a pair of great slimy hands came out of the
darkness, hands clearly belonging to a man of gigantic stature,
and seized him by the back of the head. They forced him down, down
in the suffocating darkness, a brutal image of destiny. But the
Major's head, though upside down, was perfectly clear and
intellectual. He gave quietly under the pressure until he had slid
down almost to his hands and knees. Then finding the knees of the
invisible monster within a foot of him, he simply put out one of
his long, bony, and skilful hands, and gripping the leg by a
muscle pulled it off the ground and laid the huge living man, with
a crash, along the floor. He strove to rise, but Brown was on top
like a cat. They rolled over and over. Big as the man was, he had
evidently now no desire but to escape; he made sprawls hither and
thither to get past the Major to the door, but that tenacious
person had him hard by the coat collar and hung with the other
hand to a beam. At length there came a strain in holding back this
human bull, a strain under which Brown expected his hand to rend
and part from the arm. But something else rent and parted; and the
dim fat figure of the giant vanished out of the cellar, leaving
the torn coat in the Major's hand; the only fruit of his adventure
and the only clue to the mystery. For when he went up and out at
the front door, the lady, the rich hangings, and the whole
equipment of the house had disappeared. It had only bare boards
and whitewashed walls.

"The lady was in the conspiracy, of course," said Rupert, nodding.