Abarat. Clive Barker
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Название: Abarat
Автор: Clive Barker
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780007301690
isbn:
The sight gave her courage. Instead of advancing up the stairs tentatively, as she’d been doing, she picked up her speed. With every step she took, the whole structure rocked and groaned, but she reached the top of the flight without incident and found herself in a round room, perhaps eight or nine feet across.
She’d reached the top of the lighthouse. But now that she was actually up here, where was the light? It was just as she’d feared. If there’d ever been a light up here (which she strongly doubted: this place was more folly than functional), then it had been stolen long ago, leaving just one strange item in the middle of the room: an inverted pyramid, perhaps three feet high and carefully balanced on its tip, its three sides decorated with a number of designs, like hieroglyphics. On the top of the pyramid (or rather on what had been its base) was a small, simple bowl. The purpose to which any of this obscure arrangement might have been put escaped Candy entirely.
Then she recalled what Mischief had said, when she’d remarked that she couldn’t even see a lamp up at the top of the tower. What was it exactly? He’d said something about light being the oldest game in the world? Perhaps this odd creation represented some kind of game, she thought. The problem was that she had no idea how to play it.
And now, as if matters weren’t bad enough, she heard the din of Shape beating down the lighthouse door; smashing it to smithereens in his fury. The noise reached a chaotic climax, followed by a few seconds of silence.
Then came the limping footfall of the monster himself, as he climbed the lighthouse stairs to find her.
“WHERE ARE YOU, CHILD?” Shape growled as he ascended.
The sound of his voice, and the thump and drag of his limping step, froze Candy for a moment. This was like something from a nightmare: being hunted down by some hellish beast; some vile creature that wanted to eat her alive, limb by limb, finger by finger.
No!
She shook herself from her trance of terror. She wasn’t going to let this abomination take her!
She looked around the room for a door that led out onto the narrow balcony that encircled the room. The door in question was directly behind her. She went over to it and turned the handle. It was locked, but that presented no problem to her, not in her present panicked state. She put her shoulder to the rotted wood and forced it open quite easily. Then she stepped out onto the balcony. The boards had been more exposed to the extremes of Minnesota’s summers and winters than the interior floors—and they instantly gave way beneath her weight. She threw herself forward and grabbed hold of the rusted iron railing. Her speed probably saved her life, because two heartbeats later the whole patch of floorboards beneath her right foot crumbled away. Had she not had the support of the railing, she would have surely fallen through the hole and probably dropped to her death.
Very gingerly, she hauled her foot out of the hole and sought out a more reliable place to stand. She could still hear Shape in the tower behind her, calling out singsong threats to her as he climbed. It was some horrible little nursery song he was singing. The kind only a monster like Shape would have had sung to him in his cradle.
“O little one,
My little one,
Come with me,
Your life is done.
Forget the future,
Forget the past.
Life is over:
Breathe your last.”
Doing her best to blot out the sound of Shape’s obscene little lullaby, she scanned the landscape around the lighthouse.
“Mischief!” she yelled. “Where did you go?”
She only had to call once. Then he was there, racing toward the tower through the grass. There was blood on his hands, she saw. Had he wounded Shape? She dared hope so.
“Lady Candy? Are you all right?”
“I can’t find any light up here, Mischief! I’m sorry.”
“He’s coming, lady!”
“I know, Mischief. Believe me: I know. But there’s no light—”
“There should be a cup and ball up there. Isn’t there a cup and ball?”
“What?”
“The oldest game, Candy. Light is the oldest game —”
Candy glanced back inside. Yes, there was a cup, of sorts, sitting on top of the inverted pyramid.
“Yes! There’s a cup!” she yelled back down to the brothers.
“Put the ball in it!” Mischief replied.
“What ball? There isn’t any ball.”
“There should be a ball.”
“Well there isn’t one!”
“So look!” yelled John Serpent.
Candy didn’t waste time telling Serpent to be more polite. She had only seconds to spare before Shape made an entrance into the round room, she knew. So she stopped talking and did as Mischief suggested, stepping over the hole she’d made in the platform and returning to look for the ball.
She listened as she scoured the room. To judge by the sound of his feet, Shape was close to the top of the stairs. Then—just as she was certain he was about to open the door—she heard the welcome sound of splintering timber, and her pursuer loosed a shout of alarm. His weight had apparently been too much for the staircase. She heard a series of crashes as broken portions of the steps fell away into the stairwell. A moment of silence followed, when she dared hope that perhaps Shape had fallen down the stairwell along with the broken stairs and was lying at the bottom of the flight. But instead of the distant moans she’d hoped to hear, there came an outburst of words in a language she had never heard before. She didn’t need a translator to recognize them as curses.
She crossed to the door and glanced down, just to see what had happened. A large portion of the staircase —five or six stairs—had indeed collapsed under Mendelson Shape’s weight. But he had somehow managed to avoid the full fall by jumping back down the stairs before they had collapsed beneath him. This left a sizeable gap for him to get across before he could continue his ascent. She was disappointed that he wasn’t dead or comatose СКАЧАТЬ