"The Sphinx" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

She started to climb out of the car, but he reached out and held her wrist. For a split second, she tugged away from him with a strength that almost had him him off-balance, but then she abruptly relaxed, as if by conscious effort, and allowed him to pull her gently back into the passenger seat.
He reached over and kissed her. Her lips were very soft and moist against his, but she wouldn't open them. He held her closer, trying to push the tip of his tongue into her mouth, but she held her head back stiffly and Vouldn't let him. She didn't seem to resist as long as he was happy with a junior-high-school, lips-closed kiss, but with a girl as sensual as Lorie, he found that the sheer frustration of it was almost more than he could take.
His left hand touched her shoulder. With his mouth against hers, she tried to push him 'away, said "mmmm-mmmmhhh," and wriggled. For one brief tantalizing moment, his fingers caressed her breast, heavy and taut and warm, but then he felt a sharp bite on his tongue, and she twisted away from him, and climbed awkwardly out of the car.
He dabbed his mouth with his fingers. There was blood on them, and he felt the sickly taste of it running down his throat He took his clean white handkerchief out of his breast pocket, and held it against Ms lips.
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Lone stood there, anxious and frowning, tut he didn't look up at her at all. Christ! Bitten by d goddamn high-school virgin! He didn't know who made him angrier—Lorie for .making a midnight snack out of his tongue, or himself for trying to kiss a broad who actually professed to have morals.
"Gene..."
He still didn't look up.
"Gene, I'm sorry, you didn't leave me any choice."
He coughed, and spat some blood into his handkerchief. "Just go home to your mother, will you?" he mumbled.
"Gene, you have to understand that it wouldn't Work. Not in a thousand years."
"You bet your ass it wouldn't work! If I want to get eaten alive, I can go back to the Everglades and lay down in front of an alligator!"
"Please, Gene. Don't you see-that I like you?"
He tested the flow of blood. It seemed to be easing up now, but she had certainly given him a deep and vicious bite. He had nearly ended up joining Mathieu in the tongueless brigade, and that certainly wouldn't have helped his political ambitions very much.
"Just get out of here, will you?" he said. "I'm going. home."
Mathieu had left his limousine and now stood a few yards away, watching Lorie silently and impassively. Another shower had started, and the rain was making a soft, prickling noise on the gravel and the grass.
Lorie finally turned and walked away. Mathieu took her arm, and ushered her over to the Cadillac. As he opened the rear door for her, he looked back at Gene with a face as emotionless as a manhole cover in the road. Then he climbed into the car himself and drove toward the wrought-iron gates.
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In utter silence, as the limousine approached, the gates swung open. Then, after it had passed, they swung closed again, and locked. Gene saw the car's red lights disappearing down the gravel driveway, flickering past trees and bushes until they were out of sight. After that, there was nothing but the high forbidding wall, the closed gates, and the rain that sprinkled the grass.
He sat there for a wh'tle, and then he switched his tar engine off. Still holding the handkerchief to his tongue, he opened his door and stepped out into the rain. Out here, it was so far away from the streetlights of the city that he could see dim clouds passing overhead and a faint moon shining above the trees.
He walked as quietly as he could toward the gates. He didn't want to touch them, in case they were electrified, but he stood as close as he could and peered through. The driveway led down a long avenue of oak •trees and disappeared about five hundred yards away around a bend, which presumably led up to the main house. He thought he could see the dark silhouette of a Tpof and chimneys, but it may just have been the branches of the trees.
There was something sinister and yet intriguing about the Semple house. He wanted to have a glimpse of it, even if only to satisfy himself that it was just another expensive diplomatic mansion with the coach lamps, the rosemary bushes, and all the usual trimmings. He went back to his car, leaned in to open the glove box, and took out the small set of screwdrivers that one of his girlfriends had given him with the attached message "from your favorite screw, with love."
One of the screwdrivers was a bulb-tester. He took it out, and walked cautiously back to the wrought-iron. gates. Then, very gingerly, he reached out with the
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metal tip of the screwdriver and touched one of the iron curlicues. Nothing happened. The gate wasn't electrified, after all. He looked up at it. It was so high, and spiked with such long and barbaric spears, that it probably didn't need to be. The thought qf being impaled on one of those made his groin feel distinctly odd.
He grasped the gates with both hands, and then found a foothold. It wasn't difficult to climb up the first six feet or so, because there were plenty of scrolls and leaves to hang on to, and even though he was breathing hard from the exertion, he was able to get up there in only a few seconds. Higher up, it was more difficult. There were fewer curls of iron, and at the very top there were nothing but upright spears, with points that were rusted into vicious sharpness.
He stopped to rest for a moment about ten feet up. Looking behind him, he could see his white car with its doors still open, and beyond that the darkness of the road that led up to the Semple house and the distant gleam of a few neighboring lights. In front, through the prison-like bars of the gate, he could still see nothing more than gloomy overhanging trees, and the pale ribbon of the driveway leading between them. The rain had eased off now, and there was a light, fresh breeze. He wished his tongue wasn't so damned sore, but then that was partly the reason he was halfway up this Gothic gate.
"Upward, my boy, ever upward," he breathed to limself, quoting the long-ago words of his campaign agent hi Florida. He gripped two of the iron spear-shafts, pressed the soles of both his shoes against the gate, and began to hoist himself further up like a Fiji islander scaling a coconut tree. Panting, he reached the top. The tricky bit was go-24
ing to be climbing over the spikes themselves. There was no foothold, and he would have to try to wedge his feet in between the uprights and hope that they didn't slip or, even worse, get irrevocably stuck.
He jammed his left foot in, and carefully swung his right leg over the spikes. The gates rattled a little under his weight. He stayed there, taking deep breaths, until he could summon up the strength to wedge his right foot in between the shafts on the other side and swing his left leg over.
Just then, he heard a deep rumbling noise from the direction of the house. He froze, sweat trickling down the sides of his face, and listened. It was probably nothing more than distant thunder. There was a warning of electric storms overnight, and they usually rolled into Washington from this side of the river. He gripped the gates tighter, and prepared to hop over.
The rumbling came again, and this time it definitely •wasn't thunder. It could have been a motorcycle, or a jet airplane, but it definitely wasn't thunder. He squinted into the Semple grounds through the darkness, but a bank 6f clouds had obscured the moon and it was impossible to make anything out but shadowy trees. The rumbling was certainly coming from there.
Then he heard the most frightening sound he had ever heard in his life. It was the bounding, rustling noise of large animals running through the bushes and trees. What's more, they were coming his way. The Semples had set their dogs on him!
Tense and terrified, he swung his leg back over the top of the gate. The running noise was coming nearer, and he didn't dare to look toward the house. He struggled to extricate hiff left foot from between the spear-shafts, but because he was off-balance it wouldn't
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come out. He wrenched it as hard as he could, but it was still stuck.
He was aware of huge, pale shapes leaping through the oaks and the undergrowth, and the scuff of heavy paws on graveL Then he lost his grip,- and half-slithered, half-dropped off the gate .to the ground, twisting, his ankle and leaving: his left shoe still wedged between the bars.
Gasping in pain, he limped towards his car as fast as he could. Just behind him, he heard the rattling thump and scratching of the Semple's beasts as they reached the gates and threw themselves up at them, snarling and growling in frustrated aggression.
He started the car, swung it around in a slew of gravel, and headed back down the winding hill with screeching tires. It was only when he was back on the main highway toward Washington that he slowed down and allowed himself to breathe normally. His whole system felt swamped with fear and hyped with adrenalin.
He reached his apartment in Georgetown and left the car parked in the street. It was a quiet, old neighborhood, and he had been lucky to rent the top floor of a dark, brick house that was set back in its own paved yard. The owner was' a friend of his father from the days when students wore coonskin coats and thought that Artie Shaw was the bee's knees. He swung open, the gate and limped on his sprained, stockinged foot to the front door.
He switched on all the lamps in his pale-yellow decorated sitting-room, turned on the late-night movie with no volume, and put Mozart's string quartets oa the quad stereo. Only then did he permit his brain to start thinking about Lorie Semple. He splashed himself
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I
a large glass of Jack Daniels and lay back on the gold-upholstered couch with his injured foot oa the onyx coffee-table, turning over the night's events and trying to make something out of them that didn't seem ludicrous or bizarre.
There was no question that Lorie was a fascinating girl. In normal circumstances, he would have expected to be having dinner with her right now, with a promise of bed in her eyes and the orchestra playing seductive music. He would at least have expected to come away from it all with a date fixed for tomorrow. But she was stonewalling him cold, even though she claimed that she liked him, and she was even prepared to bite him to make herself understood.
He lit a cigarette, and suddenly realized how sore his tongue was. He went through to the small brown-and; black bathroom, with its serried ranks of expensive bottles of aftershave, and switched on the light over the wash-basin mirror. Then he stuck his tongue out and inspected it.
The strange thing was that the scarlet wounds were so few and far between. A normal human bite is even and crescent-shaped, but this one consisted of only four distinct marks. Gene touched them gently, and winced. It was almost as if he had been bitten on the tongue by a large dog.
He stood in front of the mirror a long time, and •when, the phone rang he jumped hi nervous surprise.
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