[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.He did try the door beneath the stairs, however, but found it locked.Upstairs the house had many rooms, all thick with dust and sparsely furnished, with spots of mold on some of the walls and woodworm in much of the furniture.The place seemed as disused and decayed above as it was below, and Crow’s inspection was mainly perfunctory.Outside Carstairs’ study he paused, however, as a strange and shuddersome feeling took momentary possession of him.Suddenly he found himself trembling and breaking out in a cold sweat; and it seemed to him that half-remembered voices echoed sepulchrally and ominously in his mind.The feeling lasted for a moment only, but it left Crow weak and full of a vague nausea.Again angry with himself and not a little worried, he tried the study door and found it to be open.Inside—the place was different again from the rest of the house.Here there was no dust or disorder but a comparatively well-kept room of fair size, where table and chairs stood upon an eastern-styled carpet, with a great desk square and squat beneath a wall hung with six oil paintings in matching gilt frames.These paintings attracted Crow’s eyes and he moved forward the better to see them.Proceeding from right to left, the pictures bore small metallic plaques which gave dates but no names.The first was of a dark, hawk-faced, turbaned man in desert garb, an Arab by his looks.The dates were 1602-68.The second was also of a Middle-Eastern type, this time in the rich dress of a sheik or prince, and his dates were 1668-1734.The third was dated 1734-90 and was the picture of a statuesque, high-browed negro of forceful features and probably Ethiopian descent; while the fourth was of a stern-faced young man in periwig and smallclothes, dated 1790-1839.The fifth was of a bearded, dark-eyed man in a waistcoat and wearing a monocle—a man of unnatural pallor—dated 1839-88; and the sixth—The sixth was a picture of Carstairs himself, looking almost exactly as he looked now, dated 1888-1946!Crow stared at the dates again, wondering what they meant and why they were so perfectly consecutive.Could these men have been the previous leaders of Carstairs’ esoteric cult, each with dates which corresponded to the length of his reign? But 1888…yes, it made sense; for that could certainly not be Carstairs’ birth date.Why, he would be only fifty-seven years of age! He looked at least fifteen or twenty years older than that; certainly he gave the impression of advanced age, despite his peculiar vitality.And what of that final date, 1946? Was the man projecting his own death?—or was this to be the year of the next investiture?Then, sweeping his eyes back across the wall to the first picture, that of the hawk-faced Arab, something suddenly clicked into place in Crow’s mind.It had to do with the date 1602…and in another moment he remembered that this was the date scrawled in reddish ink in the margin of the old Atlas.1602, the date of birth of the supposed antichrist, in a place once known as Chorazin the Damned!Still, it made very little sense—or did it? There was a vague fuzziness in Crow’s mind, a void desperately trying to fill itself, like a mental jigsaw puzzle with so many missing pieces that the picture could not come together.Crow knew that somewhere deep inside he had the answers—and yet they refused to surface.As he left Carstairs’ study he cast one more half-fearful glance at the man’s sardonic picture.A pink crawling thing, previously unnoticed, dropped from the ledge of the frame and fell with a plop to the floor’s boukhara rug…Left almost entirely on his own now, Crow worked steadily through the rest of Tuesday, through Wednesday and Thursday morning; but after a light lunch on Thursday he decided he needed some fresh air.This coincided with his discovering another worm or maggot in the library, and he made a mental note that sooner or later he must speak to Carstairs about the possibility of a health hazard.Since the day outside was bright, he let himself out of the house and into the gardens, choosing one of the many overgrown paths rather than the wide, gravelly drive.In a very little while all dullness of the mind was dissipated and he found himself drinking gladly and deeply of the cold air.This was something he must do more often, for all work and no play was beginning to make Titus Crow a very dull boy indeed.He was not sure whether his employer was at home or away; but upon reaching the main gate by a circuitous route he decided that the latter case must apply.Either that or the man had not yet been down to collect the mail.There were several letters in the box, two of which were holding the metal flap partly open.Beginning to feel the chill, Crow carried the letters with him on a winding route back to the house.Out of sheer curiosity he scanned them as he went, noting that the address on one of them was all wrong.It was addressed to a “Mr.Castaigne, Solicitor,” at “The Burrows.” Alongside the postage stamps the envelope had been faintly franked with the name and crest of Somerset House in London.Somerset House, the central registry for births and deaths? Now what business could Carstairs have with—And again there swept over Titus Crow that feeling of nausea and faintness.All the cheeriness went out of him in a moment and his hand trembled where it held the suspect envelope.Suddenly his mind was in motion, desperately fighting to remember something, battling with itself against an invisible inner voice which insisted that it did not matter.But he now knew that it did.Hidden by a clump of bushes which stood between himself and the house, Crow removed the crested envelope from the bundle of letters and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]