"The Lurkers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

4

When Janie looked in Gavin's bedroom later that evening she knew that he was faking sleep again; his eyes were closed too tightly so that the lids trembled and his body was too taut, too tense for slumber. Gently she stepped back out on to the landing and closed the door. She must not let him see that she was afraid too. She had to keep her courage for a day or two and in the meantime persuade Peter to leave. And pray that they would be safe until then. Oh God, every minute was hell!

She could hear the typewriter clacking in the front room as she came down the stairs. The sound made her angry; he didn't have any need to work on Sunday evening. It was as though he was doing it deliberately to shut himself off from herself and Gavin, a kind of subtle separation.

Angrily she threw the door open. Her husband was sitting at his ancient Imperial 66 pounding at the keys, one hand half-raised, as if to silence her before she spoke.

Peter!' She almost stamped her foot. 'Do you realise just how terrified Gavin is?'

Annoyingly he finished a paragraph and read it through before slowly turning to face her. 'I don't think so,' he said. 'Maybe about the Wilsons but I'm going to have a discreet word with Hughes about that in the morning, anyway.'

'I don't mean about the Wilsons.' She kicked the door closed behind her, stood with arms akimbo. 'I mean about tonight?

That was all poppycock.' He grinned. Tm surprised at an intelligent girl like you taking any notice of it.'

'You don't understand.' Her cheeks were becoming red. 'Because you're too immersed in this damned book of yours to realise what's going on around you.'

'And what is going on around me?'

She had to get herself under control before she spoke. 'I don't know. All I know is that there is something here, something that has me looking over my shoulder most of the time, wanting to hide in the house, to lock the doors so that it can't get me. But you wouldn't notice because you're all wrapped up in this book of yours. If a bomb went off you wouldn't hear it.'

'It's all in the mind.' He picked up the typewriter cover and draped it untidily over the machine, deciding to struggle with the chapter ending in the morning. 'The change from town to country We, the remoteness. The silence. It'll pass off and in a few weeks you'll feel as if you've never lived anywhere else/

'In a few weeks!' Her voice rose to a pitch. 'Peter, for God's sake I can't stand it here any longer and neither can Gavin. He could've been killed yesterday. He's frightened out of his wits.'

'He's just worried about the Wilsons.' Peter thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans as he stood up. 'We'll get that settled. Look, if there was anything here to be frightened of, d'you think I'd let you stay?'

'You're stubborn enough to blind yourself to everything except your writing,' she sighed, 'and I can see I'm wasting my time with you. Another thing, that cat hasn't turned up. I last saw it on Friday morning.'

'Cats often go off for days on end. Probably he's found himself an attractive she-cat somewhere.'

And talking of sex, he thought, that's one commodity that's in very short supply at Hodre. Maybe Janie was brewing up for a period and that was the cause of her tenseness. He tried to work out the date, and realised then just how much he had cut himself off from Janie lately.

Janie had abandoned all hope of sleep. Her mind, her body simply refused to relax so that slumber could take over. Tomorrow she would get to work on those new curtains for the bedroom window; at least it would shut out the moonlight. A full moon was almost as bright as daylight. She'd never really noticed it at Perrycroft; she had become accustomed to the all-night orange radiance of street-lighting filling the bedroom. Moonlight was more beautiful, certainly. But it was also more sinister.

She found herself holding her breath so that she could listen, though she didn't want to listen, just close her eyes and go to sleep, to get away from this awful place for a few hours. It was like some compelling force; she had to look and listen in case something stole upon her. Like what? She didn't know. That was the trouble.

Peter was asleep, breathing rhythmically. Damn him, he was so insensitive.

Now she was listening for Gavin, afraid that he might get up and go outside again. No, he wouldn't do anything like that at night.

A dog was barking somewhere. Probably a sheep dog from the Ruskin farm on the other side of the big forest. Somehow it didn't sound like a dog; son of—wild! A long mournful howl that seemed to echo across the hills. She wondered if by any chance a wild animal could be loose. It wasn't out of the question. Only a year or so ago there had been some kind of huge feline creature on the loose (oh God, that was somewhere in Wales, too!), and a number of sheep had been killed by it. Like that puma in Surrey which was still supposed to be at large according to the press.

There was something in those hills all right.

Janie slipped into a fitful doze, still listening subconsciously.

Then, suddenly, she heard a harsh long-drawn-out scream that jarred her brain with the force of an electric shock, juddering every nerve in her body and bringing her up to a sitting position before she was full awake. Her hands covered her ears in a futile attempt to shut it out. Waking, she tried to tell herself that it had been a dream, that the events and fears of this past week had combined and exploded in one mind-shattering nightmare.

Trembling. Listening. The room seemed to vibrate with the hellish animal-like cry, and the moonlight dimmed as though even the silvery orb in the heavens feared to cast its ethereal glow upon whatever lurked in the wooded hills.

For a few seconds she seemed—to be paralysed. She was unable to shout or to shake her sleeping husband, imprisoned by that same inexplicable force which had taunted her and terrified her ever since their arrival at Hodre.

'Peterl' Now it was Janie who was screaming, her limbs freed so that she could grasp Peter's shoulder and dig her long fingernails deep as she shook him. 'Peter, for God's sake wake up!'

'What the hell's the matter?' He rolled over and opened his eyes. 'Can't a feller get a good night's sleep without—'

'Didn't you hear it? You must have!'

'Hear what?' He struggled up on to an elbow.

'That scream. Something out there's screaming. Listen.'

Together they listened, but heard only the distant hooting of an owl. So peaceful. And so menacing.

Anticipating another scream, Janie clung frantically to the man at her side. It came as an anti-climax, so different this time, harsh like the dog's barking had been earlier; but not so ear-shattering, not so hellish, as the one which had awoken her. It died slowly away and somewhere there was an answering bark.

'Foxes!' Suddenly Peter burst out laughing, a peal of enforced mirth and relief. 'My God, that's what those screams were that people reckon they hear up on Hodre after dark, the screech of vixens! I read somewhere that vulpine mating begins any time from mid-November onwards. You'd think country folk would know that.'

'No!' Janie gave an indignant hiss. 'That's not what I heard, Peter. The first scream was nothing like that at all! It was the most unearthly sound I've ever heard!'

Damn it, her nerves were getting the better of her, he thought. Of course it was foxes; Janie, like the villagers, was letting herself be scared. He had to reassure her right now before she became hysterical.

'I tell you it's foxes. Listen again for a moment.'

Silence. Peter thought he could hear Janie's heart pounding; maybe it was his own. He prayed that the vixen would screech again. It did, a few seconds later—a wild, hideous scream that shattered the stillness and made the prowling male of the species bark again. Both animals were somewhere in the big forest.

There, what did I tell you? That was a fox, all right.'

'That was. 'Janie's voice quavered. 'But the other wasn't. I tell you, Peter, it was the most unearthly, awful sound I've ever heard in my life.'

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. Women! Once they got a stupid notion into their heads there was no way of changing their minds. 'Have it your own way, but I'm getting back to sleep because I've a lot of work to catch up on tomorrow. As far as I'm concerned it was mating foxes up in the forest and I don't want to hear any more about it.'

'But it wasn't up in the forest, not the sound I heard, anyway,' she almost screamed. 'Peter, it came from that stone circled

'For Christ's sake! This is sheer nonsense. You're forcing yourself to believe what that pair of bumpkins in the pub were ranting on about. No wonder Gavin's scared. You're frightening him to death. Now, I'm getting to sleep. You please yourself.'

Janie went over to the window, and stared out forcing her confused brain to register details; the sloping grassland ethereal and silvery, the bare hedges. In the distance the mass of pine trees seeming to glower threateningly. She tried not to turn her head, but in the end was compelled to, mentally flinching from the stunted pines only a couple of hundred yards away—so eerie, so majestic, so vibrant that she could almost feel their power. Wide-eyed, frightened, she was held there at the window as though they were hypnotising her, warning her.

Finally they let her go and she shuffled barefooted and trembling back to bed and lowered herself down alongside Peter. He was already asleep, she could tell by his regular breathing. The fool, he had scorned the final warning, scoffed at it. And there might not be another . . .

For the rest of the night she lay there just staring up at the ceiling, watching the latticed square of moonlight pale until finally it was replaced by the cold grey light of a mountain winter dawn. That scream—she could still hear it like a catchy tune that persistently sticks in the brain. She heard it again and again, a long-drawn-out cry of agony, the embodiment of every fear known to man or beast, the ultimate in terror.

Her train of thought led back to wild beasts, ferocious creatures that had escaped from captivity to return to the only way of life they knew: stalking their prey with a ruthless patience, pouncing out of the darkness and ripping it to shreds with huge sharp claws. Nature's law, the law of the jungle.

And Hodre was now that jungle.