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smile, "but I admire your spirit. And since it is forbidden to interfere
with your free will, I can't say any more. I wish you didn't feel this way
though. Would you consent, perhaps, to letting me go through the
manuscript with you? You could retain as much as you wished of the
expose and sensational material, but perhaps you would be willing to
delete, or perhaps garble, the material that it is dangerous to give out"
"Nothing doing."
"Mr. Melford, you know these people are not going to stop at threats."
MacLaren said hesitantly. "I don't want to frighten you, but   "
"Let them do their damnedest! Look, get one thing through your head;
your friends   "
"THEY ARE NOT MY FRIENDS!" MacLaren roared, so loud that he
actually rocked Jamie on his heels. Dropping his voice to normal, he
said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have been rude. But you are a stubborn
man, Mr. Melford, and I have a temper. I resent your constant
implication that I am a liar and somehow allied with these people who
have threatened you!"
Jamie felt his face reddening, but he persisted. "Do you think people
who tried to frighten Jock Cannon to death and terrorize his wife
and mine would stop at a lie or two?"
"When you put it that way, I suppose not," MacLaren said. He
sounded sad.
"Well then, these people, your friends or not, can't hurt me, because I
just plain don't believe in their hogwash! Jock had started believing it,
and it was getting to him and it might even have killed him. But it
can't get me that way, because 7 don't believe it!" Jamie was almost
yelling now himself, and MacLaren smiled, a sudden, wide,
irresistible smile.
"That's the spirit," he said approvingly. "If you're bound and
determined to take on these people singlet-handed, that's the only
way you have a prayer of coming out of it without being damaged& or
damned. And if you change your mind, call me. Any time. Any hour of
the day or night. And I'll be praying for you."
With no further valediction he walked out of the office, leaving Jamie
blinking and wondering if he had been on the level after all.
Chapter Six
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Barbara Melford opened her eyes, feeling the light pierce them with
dull spikes of pain. She sat up slowly, wondering at the silence in the
apartment.
Normally the morning was full of Jamie's news broadcast, the sounds
of Mother Melford making coffee in the kitchen, water running
somewhere. This morning it was completely silent except for the
heavy ticking of the clock. Barbara stared at the clock in disbelief:
eleven o'clock?
Good God, she thought, I've been sleeping Like the dead! Jamie's bed
was flung back hi disorder and quite empty. Then, slowly and like a
bad dream, she remembered the night before. Had she really flung
the Cannon manuscript into the fire in a sleepwalking brainstorm?
The last thing she remembered after that was Jamie f ailing asleep
with the reclaimed copy under his pillow. Then she, too, had drifted
off into sleep, uneasily wondering as she dropped off whether she
might not wake again to find out that she had perpetrated some new
horror.
Ill-tempered, she rose, drew on a bathrobe, and went out into the
living room. Mother Melford might well be out shopping by now;
maybe she would be lucky and Dana, too, would have taken herself off
somewhere.
The living room was empty, but pinned to the back of a chair near the
fire was a note; "Barbara, dear, you were sleeping so sweetly I hadn't
the heart to wake you, and Jamie said you had had a disturbed night,
so I left you to sleep. Get a good rest, dear. I'm helping Dana house-
hunt. Flora Melford."
Grimacing, Barbara tossed the note into the fireplace. I must be a
thoroughly unregenerate character, she thought. The more she tries
to be nice, the more phony it seems to me, and I'm sure that's a
jailing in me, not her.
Grimly, she remembered that she had two appointments this morning
for photography. She called her agent and asked her to cancel them: it
was too late now anyhow, thanks to Mother Melford's well-meaning
kindness. A long shower made her feel better; she climbed into old
jeans and a sweater, tied her damp hair up in a scarf, and padded out
into the kitchen hi search of some coffee to complete the cure. She
stretched out her hand to the coffee canister, touched something,
drew her hand back, and gasped in horror.
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Stretched on the counter before her was a rough wooden cross;
fastened to its surface with nails was the hideous dead body of a green
frog.
Shuddering with horror, she could only stare at it, almost disbelieving.
How had it come there? If it had been there this morning in the
kitchen, of all places! Mother Melford would have raised the roof
with her screams. Barbara had no horror of dead animals as such, but
the sadistic cruelty of this, and the implied blasphemy, made her feel
a shiver of nausea.
Could this be some filthy joke? Mother Melford had sneered last night
at her wish to bring her children up with a religious background&
Was this her further answer?
I know she doesn't like me. But she'd really have to hate me to do a
thing like that.
And would any sane person torture a poor defenseless animal, just for
a a dirty joke on me?
Barbara was not naive and she knew that animal torture was not
unheard-of, but finding it coming this close was unnerving. She
started to pick the thing up and put it into the incinerator, then
hesitated as it hit her like a ton of bricks: This is the sort of thing they
did to Jock Cannon.
Now they've started on me.
But why me? Why not Jamie? Had I better save this to show him?
No, it would only upset him worse&
But she found, when she stretched out her hand again to pick up the
thing, that her fingers would not receive it. After a moment she left it
there, made-herself a cup of instant coffee from the hot-water faucet,
and went into the living room to drink it so that she would not have to
see the damnable thing.
All right. So whoever tried to scare Jock silly has started their damned
war of nerves on us. But how did it get into the apartment? Has
someone been able to come in here while I slept? That would mean
someone has a duplicate key.
She had only glanced through Jock Cannon's earlier books, but now,
impelled by a vague half-memory, she went and found an old copy of
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The Devil in America and riffled through it quickly. Amid an account
of chicken sacrifices in New Orleans voodoo rites, she found the
following:
The late Aleister Crowley left an account of a bizarre ceremony in
which a toad, baptized Jesus, son of Joseph, was kept for three days
in an ark of cedar wood, with incense burnt before him, prayer, and
worship. Meanwhile, the magician would carve a cross and on the
third day crucify the animal,
But Jock's book gave no hint of why anyone would perform such a
pointless piece of nastiness and blasphemy. Barbara herself had
always supposed that such things were the acts of people who, having
for some good reason left the church, wished to kick and publicly
scorn what they had once worshiped. Seeing it at close hand, however,
she had a queasy sense of having touched lunacy.
She thought dully, I ought to get rid of it before Jamie comes home,
but she remained sitting in the chair as if paralyzed, the book fallen
laxly in her hand. In the ashes of last night's fire she saw undisturbed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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