The Sphinx Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 his left foot from between the spear-shafts, but because he was
off-balance it wouldn’t 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 on the quad
stereo. Only then did he permit his brain to start thinking about Lorie Semple.
He splashed himself a large glass of Jack Daniels and lay back on the
gold-upholstered couch with his injured foot on 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