Mr. X. Peter Straub
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Название: Mr. X
Автор: Peter Straub
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9780007387977
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A small, fair-haired boy with gleeful blue eyes took in my approach from a stroller. His T-shirt bore the image of a pink dinosaur. Babies and small children charm me right out of my socks. I can’t help it, I love that moment when they look inside you and spot a fellow spirit. I waggled my fingers and pulled an idiotic face that had been a big hit with the toddler set on previous occasions. The little boy whooped with delight. The tall, sturdy-looking woman beside him glanced down, looked up at me, then back to the child, who was crying ‘Bill! Bill!’ and trying to propel himself out of the stroller. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘this isn’t Bill.’
My first impression, that she looked like the female half of a local anchor team, vanished before the acknowledgment of the intelligence that irradiated her striking, even strikingly beautiful, presence. Her beauty and her intelligence were inextricable, and my second impression, standing before her lithe, tawny gaze and smiling at the efforts of her son to escape the stroller and hurl himself at me, was that if she resembled anything at all, it was a blond, particularly conscious female panther. Some quick recognition flashed in her eyes, and I thought she had seen everything that had just passed through my mind.
I would probably have blushed – my admiration was that naked – if she had not almost deliberately released me by attending to her son, allowing me the psychic space to register the perfection with which her dark blond hair had been cut to fall like a veil across her face and the expensive simplicity of her blue silk blouse and white linen skirt. Lined up before the information desk with a dozen shapeless Edgertonians in T-shirts and shorts, she seemed unreasonably exotic. She smiled up at me, and again I saw that at least half of her smooth, shieldlike beauty was the intelligence that flowed through it.
‘He’s a beautiful boy,’ I said, unable to avoid the word.
The beautiful boy was struggling to pull his feet through the straps of the stroller, in the process levering off a blue sneaker with a Velcro strap. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This man is very nice, Cobbie, but he isn’t Bill.’
I put my hands on my knees, and the boy swiveled and stared at my face. His eyes darkened in confusion, then cleared again. He chortled.
She said, ‘Good, this line is finally starting to move.’
I straightened up and waved goodbye. Cobbie ecstatically waved back, and she met my eyes with a glance that warmed me all across the lobby and outside into the sunlight. Beyond the low stone wall at the far end of the parking lot, the land dropped away to the bank of the slow, brown-gray Mississippi. It struck me that the river crawled along the city’s western flank like an unhappy secret. I wondered if the aunts had old stories from the days when Edgerton had been a river town. Then, foolishly, I started to wonder if I would see the woman I had met in the lobby ever again. What was supposed to happen if I did? She had a child, therefore a husband, and what she represented to me was no more than a convenient distraction from my fears for my mother. It was enough to have been reminded that such people actually existed.
Thinking of the nights ahead, I ducked into the gift shop and picked up a couple of paperback mystery novels and some candy. The white-haired volunteer behind the cash register searched the books’ covers for the prices and dowsed a finger over the keys.
Behind me, a childish voice said, ‘You’re – not – Bill,’ and burst into giggles. I turned around to see a familiar pair of dancing blue eyes. He was holding a sneaker in one hand and a new teddy bear in the other.
‘I’m not?’ I smiled at his mother. Her attractiveness seemed more than ever like a shield behind which she could come to her private conclusions about the responses it evoked.
‘We meet again,’ she said.
‘The way this hospital is designed, sooner or later you see everybody twice.’
‘Do you know how to find the intensive care unit? I’ve never been here before.’
‘Third floor,’ I said. ‘Follow me.’
The woman behind the counter counted out my change and slid the paperbacks and the candy into a bag. I moved aside, and the boy’s mother came up to the counter. ‘How much are the teddy bears?’
The woman peered at the child. In high hilarity, the child peered back. ‘Our ICU patients can’t receive gifts or flowers.’
‘It’s for him.’ She groped into her bag. ‘A reward for behaving himself. Or maybe a bribe, I don’t know. Our otherwise completely adorable baby-sitter abandoned us this afternoon.’
The boy pointed at me and said, ‘You’re – not – not – not – Bill!’
‘I am too,’ I said.
The boy clapped the sneaker and the teddy bear to his chest and roared with laughter. Ah, appreciation. I tried to remember his name but could not. He fixed his eyes on mine and said, ‘Bill rides a lawn mower!’
‘No, you ride a lawn mower,’ I said, contradiction being the first principle of four-year-old humor. We left the shop and turned toward the elevators.
‘Your new best friend is my son Cobbie, and I’m Laurie Hatch,’ she said. ‘My cleaning woman had an operation yesterday, and I wanted to say hello. You’re seeing someone in intensive care, too?’
‘My mother.’ We came to the rank of closed doors, and I pushed the button. ‘Ned Dunstan. Hello.’
‘Hello, Ned Dunstan,’ she said with a feathery brush of irony, and then looked at me more thoughtfully, almost impersonally. ‘I’ve heard that name before. Do you live here in town?’
‘No, I’m from New York.’ I looked up at the illuminated numbers above the doors.
‘I hope your mother is doing all right.’
Cobbie glanced back and forth between us.
‘She had a stroke,’ I said. For a moment both of us regarded the yellow glow of the UP button. ‘Your cleaning woman must be Mrs Loome.’
She gave me an astonished smile. ‘Do you know her?’
‘No, but my aunts do,’ I said.
People had been trickling in from the lobby as we talked. Everybody watched the number above the elevator on the left change from 3 to 2. When it flashed to 1, the crowd pushed to the left. The doors opened on a dense, compressed mob, which began pouring out as the waiting crowd pushed forward. Laurie Hatch moved back, pulling the stroller with her.
Cobbie said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Ned.’ I watched the light above the elevator on our right flash 2 and change to 1.
The doors of the laden car closed. A second or two later, the others opened to release a cart pushed by a workman. He stared at Laurie, glanced at Cobbie, and gave me a meaningful smirk as I followed them in. I said, ‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’
‘I ain’t СКАЧАТЬ