Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933
- Автор: Day Stanley, Dunn J. Allan
- Год: 1933
- Язык: английский
- Год: Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 75, No. 4, April 15, 1933». Краткое содержание книги:
“Put down the lamp, woman,” said Silbi imperatively. “Bring another, with your husband. Have him fetch kindling and logs and light a fire. It should have been laid. It is colder than the soul of Lucifer. Begone!”
II
There was a dramatic and tragic air about him, an aura of force, the hint of a dynamic will never at rest within; that made his somewhat stilted phrases not unfitting as he stood wrapped in his cloak with his yellow, evil eyes gleaming in the lamplight while his distorted shadow fell upon the paneled wall like the shadow of a swooping bird of prey, hunting carrion.
There was a touch of madness in his lambent orbs that stared the woman down as she looked at him with a certain latent rebellion that dissolved like ice at the gate of hell.
He chuckled hideously as she turned away, in a low but frightful cackle of.malice and satisfaction. Then he turned impatiently to the empty hearth, chafing his hands. For all the vigor that seemed to seethe within him, his face was pinched, and carved with suffering, and the hands he chafed were cold. There was a ring upon one long, clawlike finger, a ring of gold with a deeply incised design of a demi-griffin, its eagle wings outspread, with tufted beak and pointed ears, its lion’s tail showing above the sheer line of the coup.
There came a shriek from the woman in the dark hall and Silbi laughed noiselessly with intense enjoyment, his red tongue tip showing between his teeth. He knew the cause.
The next instant a strange shape came into the room, a creature with a microcephalous head, no bigger than an infant’s, set neckless upon the shoulders of a blacksmith. The body ended at the hips, it swung between two enormous arms that raised the trunk clear from the floor with hands set knuckles down. Silbi’s grotesque fancy had dressed this unfinished being in a sort of turtle-necked sweater with long hairs woven into it like those of an Angora goat. There could not be much intelligence in that contracted cranium, but the eyes showed delight and obedience.
The freak was mute, but it babbled inarticulately as it came noiselessly to the side of its Master, the man known to a horror-stricken world as the Griffin, the monster once caged but kept alive by the law of the land for the criminally insane. Now he was free again, launched again upon his fanatical crusade against those whom he envied, or fancied had done him wrong; always the choicest citizens.
The Griffin patted the monstrosity as if it had been a dog. He called it by its monosyllabic name and the creature lip read the title and fawned with hands that could crush a potato to pulp, stroking those of Silbi, the Griffin.
AL — that was its name, the Griffin’s title for the misbegotten object he had bought from a traveling show. AL — one of the gruesome group of demons in Persian mythology that sit in sandy places meditating impure designs.
This AL was peaceful enough now, but it was not hard to imagine it surcharged with malevolence, handicapped but horrible. It could travel from beams or trees with the effortless ease of a chimpanzee, it could have wrestled on even terms with an orang-outang with those long, sinewy arms where the sheathed muscles scarcely showed more than the constricting muscles of a boa. It could walk and even run on its arms as well as an ordinary man could travel on his legs.
The Griffin motioned it to a corner where it stood squat in the shadow with eyes still twinkling from the fright it had given the woman.
There was light outside the room again. Cyrus Allen and his wife both carried lamps. Allen had kindling wood and paper. He fixed them in the grate and went away to bring back a double armful of logs. The flames gathered strength and soon the fire was roaring up the chimney, sending dancing shadows about the room with shafts of light as the wood snapped and distributed its heat. The Griffin warmed his hands, then stood with his back to the blaze, arms folded.
“Well, Allen,” he said, “have you completed the device? Are you ready to demonstrate it to me, as I asked? You got all the apparatus you asked for, I believe?”
“I got the tools and the machinery,” said Allen slowly. “They came at night, like you said they would, like the other things came. Mine is set up in the vault. They took the stuff in through the passage back of the paneling in the dining room. The other stuff’s been set up in the cellars. I ain’t inspected none of it. It ain’t in my line. The men are living here, keeping upstairs, using the back way. My wife’s fed ’em, but she’s through. It’s too much work for her. I don’t aim to stand having that freak swinging around, spying, noiseless. It scares my wife, coming on it unexpected, like I did once, in the vault. It ain’t human. Also the work’s getting too hard for her.”
“Hard labor, eh?” asked the Griffin. His tone was almost jovial, but his eyes were the eyes of Satan, the eyes of an old he-goat in the dark. “You’d like to avoid hard labor — for her, or yourself, I suppose,” he added.
“I’m not afraid of work,” said the man, “but I ain’t got that contraption ready for you. I don’t aim to have it ready, not unless I know what you’re going to use it for. It don’t figure legitimate to me. I could fix it, easy, but I won’t,” he went on, with growing firmness. “We’re quitting, the two of us, right now. Give us what’s coming to us and we’ll leave tomorrow morning. This place ain’t right. We just waited for you to come...”
Cyrus Allen had worked himself into indignation, but now he faltered under the baleful look of the Griffin’s sardonic expression.
“You want what’s coming to you?” asked the Griffin. “I wonder? Let me see, Allen, when you and your wife came to see me in town, at my studio, you said she was an excellent housekeeper and that you were an expert electrician. If I remember right, you told me of certain inventions you had made and that should have brought you money, if the capitalists had not robbed you. There was another one you were eager to complete. You said you preferred a quiet place, for yourself and your wife. A quiet place like this—”
“It’s too quiet,” broke in Allen passionately. “It ain’t right or natural, the way things are run. You didn’t say my wife should work her fingers to the bone for a lot of cranks, half of ’em foreigners—”
“Well, well,” the Griffin said soothingly. “You may quit if you want to, only, I want you to remember that I showed you the crystal globe, the Orb of Truth, with its swirling fires. You remember that, Allen?”
“I remember looking into it. It gave me a headache.”
“It gave me the creeps,” his wife spoke up, and then the Griffin’s diabolical laughter checked them to silence. He laughed like a demon who watches some tortured soul racing down a corridor in Hades that will end in a blazing pitfail; his eyes were like the eyes of a snake watching the fluttering of a fascinated and already helpless bird.
“The Orb of Truth brought out your hidden thoughts, your memories and your fears,” the Griffin said at last. “You told me everything. You signed a paper, which was duly witnessed. Let me read it to you.”
They listened with whitening faces, with terror growing in their eyes. The woman shook like an autumn leaf in a cold wind. The man broke the spell with a screaming oath.
“Damn you for a fiend!” he cried. “I’ll get rid of that and you, too!”
The Griffin did not move, but AL came in three great hitches, and reaching upwards, gripped the man’s arms at the elbows so fiercely that he howled with anguish, unable to shake off the legless creature whose fingers clamped down on his nerves and paralyzed his efforts.