Leslie Charteris - Trust The Saint

Major Bastion had come to a complete halt by that time.

“You unmitigated bounder,” he said shakily. “Are you going to have the impertinence to suggest that I’m trying to murder my wife, to come into her money and run off with a farmer’s daughter? Let me tell you that I’m the one who has the private income, and—”

“You poor feeble egotist,” Simon retorted harshly, “I didn’t suspect that for one second after she made herself rather cutely available to me, a guest in your house. She obviously wasn’t stupid, and no girl who wasn’t would have gambled a solid understanding with you against a transient flirtation. But didn’t you ever read Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Or the Kinsey Report? And hasn’t it dawned on you that a forceful woman like Eleanor, just because she isn’t a glamor girl, couldn’t be bored to frenzy with a husband who only cares about the campaigns of Wellington?”

Noel Bastion opened his mouth, and his fists clenched, but whatever was intended to come from either never materialized. For at that moment came the scream.

Shrill with unearthly terror and agony, it split the darkening haze with an eldritch intensity that seemed to turn every hair on the Saint’s nape into an individual icicle. And it did not stop, but ululated again and again in weird cadences of hysteria.

For an immeasurable span they were both petrified, and then Bastion turned and began to run wildly across the meadow, towards the sound.

“Eleanor!” he yelled, insanely, in a voice almost as piercing as the screams.

He ran so frantically that the Saint had to call on all his reserves to make up for Bastion’s split-second start. But he did close the gap as Bastion stumbled and almost fell over something that lay squarely across their path. Simon had seen it an instant sooner, and swerved, mechanically identifying the steely glint that had caught his eye as a reflection from a long gun-barrel.

And then, looking ahead and upwards, he saw through the blue fogginess something for which he would never completely believe his eyes, yet which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Something gray-black and scaly-slimy, an immense amorphous mass from which a reptilian neck and head with strange protuberances reared and swayed far up over him. And in the hideous dripping jaws something of human shape from which the screams came, that writhed and flailed ineffectually with a peculiar-looking club...

With a sort of incoherent sob, Bastion scooped up the rifle at his feet and fired it. The horrendous mass convulsed, and into Simon’s eardrums, still buzzing from the heavy blast, came a sickening crunch that cut off the last shriek in the middle of a note.

The towering neck corkscrewed with frightful power, and the thing that had been human was flung dreadfully towards them. It fell with a kind of soggy limpness almost at their feet, as whatever had spat it out lurched backwards and was blotted out by the vaporous dimness with the sound of a gigantic splash while Bastion was still firing against the place where it had been...

As Bastion finally dropped the gun and sank slowly to his knees beside the body of his wife, Simon also looked down and saw that her hand was still spastically locked around the thinner end of the crude bludgeon in which had been set a row of shark’s teeth. Now that he saw it better, he saw that it was no home-made affair, but probably a souvenir of some expedition to the South Pacific. But you couldn’t be right all the time, about every last detail. Just as a few seconds ago, and until he saw Bastion with his head bowed like that over the woman who had plotted to murder him, he had never expected to be restrained in his comment by the irrational compassion that finally moved him.

“By God,” he thought, “now I know I’m aging.”

But aloud he said, “She worked awful hard to sell everyone on the Monster. If you like, we can leave it that way. Luckily I’m a witness to what happened just now. But I don’t have to say anything about — this.”

He released the club gently from the grip of the dead fingers, and carried it away with him as he went to telephone Mackenzie.