The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“Haunted? The old trunk?”
“It’s locked,” she cried. “You can’t open it.”
“I’ll break it open.”
“You mustn’t — oh, Mr. Cater, you mustn’t.”
“I mustn’t? Why not?”
“It’s haunted, I tell you.” She was clinging to his arm.
He tried, quite gently, to free himself.
“White folks don’t believe in haunts, Mammy Stella,” he said, with a short laugh. “Let go my arm; let go, do you hear?”
“Oh, don’t go up there — your father never let you—” Her voice was desperate.
“I’m a man now,” he said, smilingly. “I’m not afraid of the dark—”
“He’ll get you, if you go up. He’ll get you if you go up.”
“Who’ll get me?”
“The devil in the trunk,” she cried.
“I eat devils,” laughed Courtnay.
He took her by the wrists and made her loosen her grip. Then he bounded up the stairs, still laughing.
It was dark in the beamed, stoop-shouldered attic, and in the corners under the eaves was the dust of years. With lighted candle, Cater Courtnay peered about. He had not been up there since he was a boy; then he had gone up once, and had been strictly forbidden by his father to go again.
In the circle of light he saw piles of old trunks and boxes, discarded pieces of furniture, garments, wrapped in muslin, hanging from hooks like so many dead murderers, the odds and ends of a hundred years. Impatiently he pushed the boxes right and left, his eyes searching. He bent over a leathern chest — no, that was not the one. A sound made him start; it was only the creaking of a blind.
“Nerves a bit jumpy,” he muttered. “The old fool and her talk of haunts! Funny it should affect me.”
He started again, at another sound, but checked himself, with an oath; it was the sputtering of his candle. He continued a brisk search. Then, as he bent to examine a corner, he wheeled about, his hand plucking at his hip-pocket — he had sensed something moving in the attic. He laughed aloud. It was his own shadow, grotesque, misshapen in the candle’s wavering flame. His laugh echoed; to his own ears it sounded unreal, smothered.
“A ghost’s laugh,” he said to himself, and he didn’t like the way his voice cracked.
He pushed aside a pile of boxes; then he found what he was seeking — a very old, flat, brass-bound chest, marred by time, its lock rusty, and his grandfather’s initials on it, in faded paint.
He could not understand why his heart was beating with fast, irregular beats; why his brow felt damp; why the words of a superstitious old black woman should just then be dancing in his brain. He bent over the chest with a determined frown, and with a snatched-up poker pried at the rusty lock. A violent twist, and the lock shot open like a hound showing its fangs. He jumped back from it, cursed his nerves, bent over the chest again.
In the old chest there was nothing to alarm him; there was nothing in it but a pile of old clothes, the folded grey uniform of a colonel, the crushed wide felt hat, the black boots. He took them out, one by one, with careful pride. Then came his grandfather’s frock coat with silk facings, his grey pantaloons with straps under the insteps, his white, frilled shirts.
At last, at the very bottom, Courtnay found it — a robe of some coarse cotton stuff, white once, but yellowed by time; to it was attached a hood, with eye holes, and on the breast was a cross, rusty red, like an old bloodstain.
His fingers, unbidden, recoiled from it. He forced them to pick it up, and his hands, usually so steady, were trembling, and he shuddered as he laid it aside.
Courtnay glanced into the chest to see if he had entirely emptied it. The candle, as if to aid him, sent up a spurt of flame, strange flame that seemed greenish in the silent gloom of the room, and Courtnay saw that in the bottom of the chest was a raised place, a swollen place, like the lump after a blow.
He examined it. He saw that the leather lining had been slit, and something flat thrust under it, and the lining stitched together again. His finger-nails tore at the stitching; he was breathing through his mouth, jerkily; he fumbled for the poker, grasped it.
The stout seams resisted at first, then gave up and the slit gaped open like a fresh wound. He pulled out what had been hidden there. It was an envelope, worn and smelling of the must of years. He ripped it open and, by the candle’s light, read the long communication in the handwriting of his grandfather.
Then he screamed, the cut-short scream of a man stabbed through the lungs. He staggered. The candle was overturned and utter blackness filled the attic.
“Lord God, have pity on me! Oh, Lord, oh, Lord—”
He was sobbing, moaning in a delirium of fear.
“Lord, have pity. Lord, have pity. Lord, have pity.”
He was on his knees and the words came from him in the terror-spurred, yet rhythmic, chant of the revival meeting. He struggled to his feet, wildly, as a fallen horse does, and plunged through the darkness for the door; his head struck a beam and the shock steadied him for an instant. He made the door and half leaped, half fell down the stairs.
Mammy Stella was still in the library when Cater Courtnay stumbled in, the paper from the envelope still grasped in his hand. She was kneeling there, praying aloud as she swayed her body back and forth— “Don’t let him find the devil! Don’t let him find the devil!”
He heard. He shook her, his fingers digging into her shoulders.
“It isn’t true,” he cried. “Tell me it isn’t true.”
The old woman moaned. A hot, blind wave of fury swept over him.
“You knew all the time. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She raised her eyes to his; she faltered at first; then she spoke clearly: “Because, Mr. Cater, I know what it is to be a nigger,” she said.
A spasm of pain twisted his face at the word. He sank into a chair; he sat staring dully at the paper in his hand, still held in a grip like the rigid grip of a corpse. He knew now why he had felt that nameless fear in the attic.
He did not see the old woman as, with a cat-like movement, she stole to his side; before he could stop her she had snatched the papers from his hand, and had cast them into the fire that blazed in the fireplace. He leaped up, bewildered. She thrust her body between him and the blazing papers.
“Now,” she said, and her lips parted in a toothless smile, “no one need ever know.”
He stared at her as if he did not understand. Then, thickly, he said: “No — one?”
“No one but me — and you.”
He leaned against the library table; he shook his head, then half muttered:
“But I know. But I know.”
The old negress was about to speak, but he stopped her.
“Please go, Mammy Stella. I want to be left — alone.”
She left him standing there, and he might have been dead so motionless was his body, so fixed his black eyes.
How long he stood there, his stunned brain trying to take hold of what had happened to him, Courtnay did not know. The knell-like stroke of a clock on the mantel broke in upon him, and galvanized him into action, at first dulled and aimless, then, as he got a better grip on himself, into action more coherently directed. For the stroke of the clock pricked him into the consciousness that it was ten-thirty — and at eleven he had a duty to perform. He was due at the cross-roads; if he did not arrive they would start without him; later they would say he had weakened, had shirked. Time pressed.
Mechanically his hand felt at his hip-pocket to reassure him that his pistol was there; the hand that touched the cold metal leaped back as if it were glowing hot. The pistol was there, and ready. Ready? For what? To shoot a nigger. He drove his teeth into his lips.