"Smith, Clark Ashton - Tales of Averoigne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

dark as Moors, and their eyes were red slits of flame beneath oblique
brows with animal-like bristles. There was something very peculiar in
the shape of their feet; but Gerard did not realize the exact nature of
the peculiarity till long afterwards. Then he remembered that all of
them were seemingly club-footed, though they were able to move with
surpassing agility. Somehow, he could never recall what sort of clothing
they had worn.
The woman turned a beseeching gaze upon Gerard as he sprang
forth from amid the boughs. The men, however, did not seem to heed
his coming; though one of them caught in a hairy clutch the hands
which the woman sought to reach toward her rescuer.
Lifting his staff, Gerard rushed upon the ruffians. He struck a
tremendous blow at the head of the nearest one a blow that should have
levelled the fellow to earth. But the staff came down on unresisting air,
and Gerard staggered and almost fell headlong in trying to recover his
equilibrium. Dazed and uncomprehending, he saw that the knot of
struggling figures had vanished utterly. At least, the three men had
vanished; but from the middle branches of a tall pine beyond the open
space, the death-white features of the woman smiled upon him for a
moment with faint, inscrutable guile ere they melted among the
needles.
Gerard understood now; and he shivered as he crossed himself. He
had been deluded by phantoms or demons, doubtless for no good
purpose; he had been the gull of a questionable enchantment. Plainly
there was something after all in the legends he had heard, in the ill-
renown of the forest of Averoigne.
He retraced his way toward the path he had been following. But
when he thought to reach again the spot from which he had heard that
shrill unearthly scream, he saw that there was no longer a path; nor,
indeed, any feature of the forest which he could remember or
recognize. The foliage about him no longer displayed a brilliant
verdure; it was sad and funereal, and the trees themselves were either
cypress-like, or were already sere with autumn or decay. In lieu of the
purling brook there lay before him a tarn of waters that were dark and
dull as clotting blood, and which gave back no reflection of the brown
autumnal sedges that trailed therein like the hair of suicides, and the
skeletons of rotting osiers that writhed above them.
Now, beyond all question, Gerard knew that he was the victim of an
evil enchantment. In answering that beguileful cry for succor, he had
exposed himself to the spell, had been lured within the circle of its
power. He could not know what forces of wizardry or demonry had. _€
willed to draw him thus; but he knew that his situation was fraught with
supernatural menace. He gripped the hornbeam staff more tightly in
his hand, and prayed to all the saints he could remember, as he peered
about for some tangible bodily presence of ill.
The scene was utterly desolate and lifeless, like a place where
cadavers might keep their tryst with demons. Nothing stirred, not even
a dead leaf; and there was no whisper of dry grass or foliage, no song of
birds nor murmuring of bees, no sigh nor chuckle of water. The
corpse-grey heavens above seemed never to have held a sun; and the