The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ he was. He had no fear of the outside world. From an early age he had been forced to make his way in it, to help himself. But he liked his interior spaces to be just so.

      His face was smooth and unlined, the result of assiduous use of moisturizer and other skin foods. His eyes were sharp and clear. His hands were lightly tanned, the nails trimmed. He was entirely naked. The chair was at a slight angle to the polished floorboards that traversed the room in orderly rows. A very hot cup of black coffee sat on a small table beside the chair, next to a saucer filled with tiny glass beads. A thin publication lay nearby. The cup was placed so that just less than half of its base protruded past the edge of the surface. The chair was old, covered in battered leather. By rights it should have a copy of The New York Times folded on one of the arms, and a flunky hovering just behind, ready to dispense sandwiches with the crusts cut off. One entire bookcase he had decorated by crosshatching it with green, blue and red pens, each stroke of the pen no longer than three millimetres, until an overall effect of subtly mottled black had been achieved. It had required seventeen pens, and taken several weeks. A fine Arts and Crafts bureau on the other side of the room was entirely covered by very small glued-on photographs of Madonna, all cut from magazines and none later than her Material Girl incarnation, after which the man had lost interest in her. He had covered the result with a number of coats of dark varnish, until it looked as though the piece was covered in nothing more than an unusual walnut veneer. As with the bookcase, only very close inspection would reveal how the effect was obtained.

      His current project involved the small occasional table by his chair, which he was covering with the glass beads. The beads were about one millimetre in diameter, and came in four colours: red, blue, yellow, and green. Genetic colours. Gluing them in position took a great deal of care, not least because they were not placed at random but in a long and complex pattern, which was at least partly speculative. When the table was done he was going to cover it with several coats of thick black lacquer, until all but the faintest hint of texture was removed. It would occur to no one to wonder what was beneath the surface, in the same way that no one would realize that one, and only one, of the floorboards in the house had been constructed from a very large number of wooden matchsticks and then sanded and varnished until it exactly resembled the others. The collecting of the matches had taken the man over six months. Each had, so far as he had been able to ensure, been struck by a different person. He believed deeply in individuality, in its crucial importance to humanity. These days everyone watched the same television shows, read the same glossy magazines, and was press-ganged by the media into dutifully lining up to watch the same ludicrous movies. They stopped smoking because they were told to by people who meanwhile crammed themselves with fat. For the comfort and convenience of others. They lived their lives by rules designed by these others, by people they had never even met. They lived on the surface, in an MTV and CNN world of the last five minutes. Now was all. They had no understanding of ‘then’, but wallowed in a perpetual present.

      The publication on the table was a recent academic paper, which had arrived in the mail that morning. He had seen a synopsis of it online and ordered a copy of the full text for closer inspection. Though its subject was quite specialized, he was more than capable of comprehending it fully. He had spent many years reading carefully in the subjects that interested him: genetics, anthropology, prehistoric culture. Although his schooling had finished very early, he was intelligent, and he had learned a lot from life. His life, and other people’s. The things they said, in extremis. There was often a lot of truth to be found there, once you got beyond the pleading, and the body spoke without interference from the mind.

      Before reading it he stood up, walked a short distance from the chair, and did three sets of push-ups. One set with his palms flat on the floor and hands shoulder-distance apart. One set with palms flat again, but hands wide apart. A final set with hands back close together, but closed like fists, knuckles on the floor. A hundred of each, with a short break in between.

      He barely broke a sweat. He was pleased.

      Sarah Becker heard the muffled sound of the man’s measured exertions below her, but spent no time trying to work out what the noise might mean. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t know what time it was, and wasn’t inclined to know that either. Her internal clock told her it was probably day, maybe afternoon. In some ways that was worse than it being night. Bad things happened at night. It was to be expected. People were scared of the dark because when it was dark it was night, and when it was night things sometimes came to get you. That was the way of the world. Daytime was supposed to be better. Daytime was when you went to school, and had lunch, and the sky was blue and everything was pretty much safe so long as you stayed out of places where people were poor. If daytime wasn’t going to be safe, then she didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to know.

      If she craned her neck upward, she could just touch her forehead against the top of the space she inhabited. It was utterly dark. She was lying on her back, and able to move her hands and feet about two inches in any direction. She had been in this position for a long time, which she estimated to be at least four days, maybe six. She remembered nothing from the period between being on 3rd Street Promenade and finding herself lying flat on her back, with a narrow window in front of her face. After a few moments she had realized she could see the ceiling of a room, and that the window was a hole in a floor, beneath which she lay in a space only very slightly larger than her own body. The window in the floor was approximately five inches tall by four wide, and reached from just above her eyebrows to just below her mouth.

      She had started screaming, and after a while someone had entered the room. He whispered some things to her. She had screamed a little more, and he had placed a small panel in the hole in the floor. She had heard the sound of his footsteps going away, and only one thing had happened since. Sarah had woken from a doze in what had felt like night to find that the panel above her face had been removed again. The room above was nearly dark, but she could make out the head of someone watching her. She tried to talk to the man, to plead, to offer, but he said nothing. After a while she stopped, and started crying instead. The man’s hand came into view, holding a beaker. He tipped water out of this onto her face. At first she tried to turn her head away but then, realizing how thirsty she was, she opened her mouth and swallowed as much as she could. Afterwards the man replaced the panel and went away.

      Some indeterminate period of time later he had returned, and they had their conversation about Ted Bundy. This time she drank the water.

      Over time she had found her mind becoming clearer, as whatever drug she had been given slowly worked its way out of her system. The downside of this was that her initial feeling of floating inconsequence was harder to maintain. She had tried to push up the panel with her nose and tongue, straining her neck up as far as it would go, but its position had been carefully judged and it was impossible to move in this manner. Like the space itself, it had been immaculately designed for someone of her size, almost as if it had been made in preparation for her and her alone. Sarah was physically fit, a good rollerblader, and stronger than most girls of her size. She had nevertheless been unable to make any impression on the space that held her, and had stopped trying. Her father often said that the problems in many people’s lives were caused by the energy they wasted trying to change that which couldn’t be changed. She was not yet old enough to understand exactly what he meant by that, but on a literal level she took the point. She hadn’t eaten in what seemed like for ever. Until it became clear that a source of additional energy was going to be provided, it made no sense to waste what she had. Struggling was stupid. So she lay still, and thought about Nokkon Wud.

      Mr Wud was something that she and her father had invented. At least, they thought they’d invented him. He had come about, indirectly, through Sarah’s mother. Zoë Becker believed in many things. Well, maybe not believed in, as such, but wasn’t going to take any chances where they were concerned. Astrology? Well, yes, of course it’s nonsense, but there’s no harm in knowing what it says and it’s surprising how often it seems to be very accurate. Feng shui? Just common sense, of course, but windchimes look pretty and make a nice sound so why not have them anyway? And if СКАЧАТЬ