The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

It surprised Frank to find that he was far from alone in embarking on this hare-brained enterprise. The whole area at the top of the run was teeming with wholesome chisel-jawed types who looked very much as if they knew what they were about. Frank wondered whether they shared anything even approaching a common motive. It seemed unlikely. They looked very much at peace with themselves and the world around them. But they had plainly tamed the Cresta Run already. They had steeled their nerves on the wall of ice. They had every reason to be at peace.

“They’ll call your name on the loudspeaker when you’re on,” the colonel explained. “Let’s go and enjoy the sun while we wait, old chap.”

He led Frank over to the run. The snow crunched affably beneath their feet, and the warmth of the sun’s rays came pleasantly packed in a crisp air that carried every sound with precious individual care. An atmosphere in stark contrast to the growing tension that had Frank’s heart already racing.

“As a novice, of course, you start down there at Junction.”

He pointed to a box some thirty metres down the run. Frank listened with growing trepidation for his name to be called. His pounding heart competed with the insistence of the loudspeaker so effectively he wondered whether he would even hear his name when it was called. He thought of Breitner. Pictured the rats in the cellar crawling over the decomposed bodies of Gertrude and her two little boys. Imagined the gun in his hand. But his heart almost lurched to a complete standstill when he heard an unexpected name over the loudspeaker. Crystal clear in the mountain air. It was unmistakable.

“Silverstone,” called the disembodied voice. “Silverstone.” The name seemed to boom down from every mountain peak around them. Frank craned his neck as the next toboggan appeared on the run.

“Is this really Silverstone?”

“What’s that, old chap? Do you know him?”

“No. Nothing. I was just thinking aloud.”

The colonel paid no further attention. Frank’s eyes meanwhile focused on the man on the toboggan as he slid past down the mountainside. It was impossible to identify him, just another figure lying prostrate on a slab of steel and looking a shade ridiculous.

But he had the build of the Silverstone he knew. And he started from the top – Silverstone could never be seen to start from a novice’s junction, no matter how uninitiated he was. He heard scattered cheers of “Hopp-Hopp!” as the tobogganist disappeared from view.

Was this really the Silverstone he now recalled trying vainly to hold on to the last remnants of his dignity in a public convenience?’

“You’d better get over to the box at Junction, old chap. Your name will be coming up before too long.” The colonel took the momentum out of his thoughts. “I’ll make my way down to the Kulm and have the drinks ready for you on the terrace. Good luck,” he added with a military wave as he turned to poke his way gingerly down the slope with his stick.

For once, the colonel was wrong. It was a good forty minutes before his name was called. Someone had apparently fallen badly at Shuttlecock, which was not the kind of news he needed to send him on his way. He tried consoling himself with the thought that maybe the victim was Silverstone. But any consolation he could find was short-lived – his time had come.

Flat on the tray, his face barely inches from the ice that moved away from under his chest, he began the descent – sedately to begin with – and for the first few seconds wondered what the colonel had been making all the fuss about. Then, as if from nowhere, it opened up before him like the mouth of a monster whale. And swallowed him whole. Down he plunged into the vortex. The weight of his frame opened up an ever-widening gap between the callous cruelty of the ice that blew its mocking breath against his face as it passed and his battered thoughts that lingered some thirty metres behind him. He wanted speed at all costs and kept his rakes contemptuously off the ice to let the steel underneath his belly throw him high around the banking. But where was Battledore? His line marker? All he could see was Breitner, his crimson carcass split open on the ice before him, laughing as a ghoulish raw head of a creature – tentacles rising from its blood-engorged skull – crawled out of his body to a roll of drums and dragged behind it Frank’s mother, white and drained of any life. She and Breitner buffeted their way endlessly past the steel bullet that shot Frank high around a bend so tight he was not sure whether he was clinging to his toboggan or the ice. It was only as he came out of the bend and the visions of sweet death were swept away that he realised Battledore was already well behind him and he had just come through Shuttlecock. A smile tried to break through his shaking jowls as he came onto what looked like the home straight.

But his smugness was premature. Lulled into the comfort of the straight and a self-satisfied disinterest in his gathering speed, he was already looking forward to the celebration of his survival on the terrace of the Kulm when the toboggan lost contact with the ground and he shot into the air. Visions of Patricia flashed through his mind, heavy chains around her slender ankles. He thought of Breitner. And as he crashed back onto the ice with a belly flop that punched the wind right out of him, he saw the bloodied carcass of Patricia’s tormentor once again buffeted along the track beside him, felt it dragging at his feet, slowly putting the brake on his steel bullet. The course lay crimson red like a carpet of blood rolled out before