"Ball, Margaret - Shadow Gate, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ball Margaret)

"We will call to Sybille directly," the leader decreed, "following the trail she left between the worlds." He too was tired; it was an exhausting game, this fishing for one soul in the teeming, confusing world where Sybille fled. For a moment he remembered his boyhood, lying on his stomach beside a clear cold stream and reaching one hand in with infinite care until the stupid fish swam right into his fingers. The water was deceptive, angles and distances were all wrong; all you could trust was the feel of the fins and scales against your hand.
"We will feel our way to her," he said, and smiled in grim amusement. "The elvenkind are already calling to the lady; let us join our voices to theirs. Think of it as an act of charity, to aid these our brothers in their quest."
The brothers of Saint Durand laughed obediently at the dry jest, stretched and drank water and knelt in prayer for a few moments, then re-formed the circle and sent forth the combined strength of their minds to bring the Lady Sybille home.
Through the afternoon Lisa's headache grew worse. She felt irrationally convinced that if only she could slip into Mahluli's bookstore for a moment, to spend a few quiet minutes leafing through the old book of fairytales with the Kay Nielsen illustrations, she would be able to regain her sense of balance. But somehow there never was a minute when she could get away. If it wasn't the telephone ringing with somebody
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who wanted to return her call and ask about the emergency meeting, it was Johnny Z. with a report of bad auras in the T-shirt store or the Chinese acupuncturist complaining that all his needles had mysteriously blunted themselves overnight.
"It's as if there were a curse on this house," Lisa told Ginevra when the fourth person in a row reported that the upstairs toilets were flushing themselves incessantly.
"Probably it's haunted," Ginevra said. "Did you get my sea salt yet?"
"No!" Lisa took a deep breath and told herself to be calm. It wasn't Ginevra's fault that her head was throbbing in time to the flushing of the toilets. "I'm sorry, but you see how it's been. I honestly haven't had a moment to get away."
"I know, honey. I was just thinking that I could do a crystal reading on the whole house. If sea salt absorbs the bad karma on crystals, maybe if we sprinkled it through the houseЧ" Ginevra paused and looked Lisa over carefully, her green eyes narrowing to slits in her concentration. "But I don't think that's it. Do you?"
"No," Lisa confessed. The phone rang again and she picked it up with one hand while continuing to jot down notes from the preceding call. "New Age Center forЧyes, Mrs. Harrison. I'm delighted to hear you'll be able to attend tonight. Yes, there's a threat to close down the Center; I'm sorry, but I'm not supposed to go into the details at this time. Dr. Templeton willЧGood. Eight-thirty. Yes, by all means bring your husband if you think his engineering expertise will be helpful; we'd be very happy to see him." She put down the telephone with a sigh. "Mr. Stringfellow Harrison," she reported, "has twenty years' experience building bridges for underdeveloped countries. Do you think we could use a good bridge-builder?"
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"Maybe he can fix the plumbing," Ginevra suggested. "But I think it would help more if you calmed down, Lisa, honey."
Lisa bit back a question as to just how Ginevra thought anybody could stay calm in this madhouse, and why it should be her fault they were having so many problems when everybody else was just as edgy. Ginevra might have a point. The assorted tenants-cum-partners of the New Age Center were sensitive souls, attuned to the subtle harmonies of the universe and easily upset by disturbances in the psychic fabricЧat least, that was how they saw themselves. She, Lisa, was supposed to be the sensible receptionist who didn't believe any of this psychic mumbo-jumbo and who kept calm through any emergency.
And her head hurt, and she was afraid of Cliff Simmmons, and everybody else in the Center had wandered through Mahluli's bookstore that afternoon to fondle the Nielsen book since Judith brought it backЧand she had been stuck at her desk for too long.
The telephone rang again.
"New Age Center for Psychic ResearchЧcan you hold?"
Calmly and sensibly, as if there were no other possible action, Lisa pushed the red hold button on the telephone, left the lights blinking and her notes for the meeting open on her desk, stood up and went through the swinging bead curtain into the smoky incense-scented darkness of Mahluli's bookstore.
Mahluli wasn't there; but the book was lying open on the round table just inside the curve of the bay window, with light from the window dappling the picture of the forest glade and the little running stream; just as if it had been waiting for her. Lisa stared down at the picture and felt the calm of the scene soothing her raging headache. She could dimly
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hear the telephone ringing, steps outside and someone calling her name. To hell with it, she thought. / don't have to go back. I can stay here as long as I want to. Even as she thought the words, she knew that there was nowhere else in the world she would rather be than right here, looking at a picture that with every breath she took grew brighter and more vivid and somehow more real, much more real than any of the dingy furnishings around it. Lisa stared into the picture until she felt a dizzy blackness swirling about her, as if she were going to feintЧno, as if she were being poured through a funnel, spiraling down and down in a black whirlpool, with nothing to cling to but the spot of brightness at the end of the funnel. She stared into the brightness, gripping her own hands so tightly that her fingernails cut into her palms, and gradually the point of light grew until it was the forest glade again; but with a difference. She was standing under the arch now, not looking through it; and when she took a step forward, the grass sighed under her feet; and when she knelt to drink at the stream, the water was as cool and clear and refreshing as she had always known it must be.
CHAPTER FIVE
They stole little Bridget For seven years long, When she came back again Her friends were all gone. They came and took her lightly back Between the night and morrow, They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead of sorrow.
ЧWilliam Allingham, "The Fairies"
Her face still wet with the water of the stream, Lisa stood and stretched lazily and took a deep breath of the resin-scented air. It felt fresh and cool, with a scent of early morning; she looked at the long shadow she cast on the grass and nodded. It was earlier here than in the world she had left. It's real, she told herself. I'm not imagining this. Water and grass,- sun and shade caressed her and made her welcome. She looked back over her shoulder at die arch through which she had passed to come to the stream. It was taller and more ornate than she remembered from the picture, a fantastic construction of springing shafts and up-curved keystones and pierced narrow walls.
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Beyond the arch she could just see a hint of Mahluli's dusty, shadowy bookshop, like a semi-transparent picture laid over the reality of grass and stones and wavering slightly in the breeze. Far clearer was the reality of this world: not the dark book-lined room where she had been standing, but a circle of great stones, weathered and worn and covered with moss, leaning towards one another like women with their arms outstretched to enclose and protect the clearing.
/ wonder if I can get back? But it didn't, just then, seem to matter very much. Her headache was gone, there were no ringing bells or complaining people waiting for her to attend to them, and she felt too lazily peaceful and relaxed to worry very much about anything. It must be right for her to be here, or the picture wouldn't have brought her. In a little while she would leave the clearing, perhaps to follow the path she saw beside the stream; there was no hurry about that or anything else.
A flicker of gray caught her eye; she turned, felt alarm too late, started to run far, far too late to evade the gray-robed man who sprang from the trees and gripped her wrist. Who was he? She had never seen him before, but his narrow face blazed with an intensely personal hatred.
Lisa jerked and twisted uselessly under his hand. "Let go" she panted. "You're hurting me!"
He laughed at that. It was a very unpleasant laugh, and Lisa knew that he didn't mind hurting her and that she'd been a fool to act as though he would.
"It's time you learned to fear mortal men, my fine elf-lady!" he said when he had finished laughing. "What ails youЧcannot you call up your spells while I keep you so busy? Shall I lay my knife-blade on you and see how that touch distracts you?"
"You're crazy," Lisa said. "Let me go."
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The man laughed unpleasantly. "What, catch an elf-queen and let her go again? I'm not such a fool!"
The language he spoke was not English, but a lilting tongue that reminded Lisa of French. Lisa found that she could understand him without difficulty. And although she was still thinking in English, the sounds that came out of her mouth sounded like the madman's language.
None of which did her any good. She might as well have been speaking EnglishЧor Greek, for that matterЧfor all he understood of what she was saying.
"I've done nothing to hurt you," Lisa appealed to him.
"No, nor shall you!"
He teas mad. He reached into his robe with his free hand. To get the knife, Lisa thought. I cant let him get the knife. The world around her seemed to freeze; she had time between heartbeats to think everything out very clearly. This madman wanted to hurt her, and he had a knife, and he was bigger than she was and arguing with him was going to do absolutely no good. She had just this moment while he was distracted and a little off balance, fumbling in his robes, to get away.
She could hear Nadine, the older of the two girls who had run the self-defense clinic in the basement, speaking as if she were there now. "I can't teach you to fight in a few free lessons after work. All I could teach you would just be enough to get you in trouble. But I can show you a couple of ways to break a man's hold when he's bothering you. After you've done that, you'd better run and scream bloody murderЧyou'll never be a fighter."
He was still reaching inside his robe when Lisa made her move. The fingers of the hand on her arm were splayed out; she grabbed the little finger and twisted backwards with all her might. There was a crunching noise that made her sick; the hooded man
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