"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)

`Nothing.' But keeping it to herself wouldn't help her nerves. `I had a nightmare,' she said reluctantly. `It was like a dream I had once, not long after I'd had my first period. I came down with a fever and had to stay in bed for a week.'

Her words were steadying. `I dreamed that someone was looking for me - I don't know who, someone frightening. So I just drifted out of my body so that they wouldn't be able to find me. I remember floating downstairs and listening to my parents talking. The strangest part was, I seemed to leave all the sensations of fever behind.'

Diana sat forward like a reporter. `Did you ever ask your folks whether they'd said what you heard them saying?'

`No, of course not. It was only fever. Besides, I could have overheard them from my room.' The memory was blurred and oppressive; she wished she hadn't mentioned it. `I've had all kinds of strange incidents, Diana. There's no point in making too much of them. Why, when I was studying for my finals I used to stand back from the kerb for buses - I really used to see them, even though buses never came along our road.'

The tip of the cigarette reddened Diana's face, which looked dissatisfied. `You know what your dream sounds like?'

`Yes, of course.' The phrase hovered over her, on a shelf. `Astral projection.'

`Right, only we usually call it an out-of-the-body experience.'

`Yes, well, I'd rather not talk about it just now, Diana. I'll try and get back to sleep.' Still, their talk had helped her realize why she'd had the nightmare just now: Diana's attempts to persuade her that she had psychic powers, perhaps together with a sly effect of the cannabis.

But she couldn't sleep. She managed to relax a little, and lay hoping for Bill's return. She needed more reassurance than Diana could give. She had never before had a nightmare which stayed so vivid in her mind, refusing to blur or grow confused - as though it was not a dream but a memory.

PART TWO

Initiation

Five

Halfway down Fulwood Park, Rose halted, gazing at the beech tree. It was more like a handful of trees, sprouting from the immense bole. All winter it had stood dormant, a great arrested explosion of wood, silver against the chill sky. Winter had held the explosion in check. Now its tips flamed green; countless wooden filaments were multiplied by leaves, unfurled by the spring.

Spring had overwhelmed the pavement, which was a palette of grasses and ferns. In gardens, gorse shone yellow, illuminating its prickles. Opposite the postbox, the blonde grass of the field regained its green; wild flowers expressed the yellow tinges of their stalks. Even the postbox looked to have sprouted roots of grass. In the residents' garden beyond the bollards, birds flew up like resurrected leaves. Everything made her eager to hurry home and write.

Before she reached the postbox, Miss Prince emerged from a drive. Tight waves of hair, frostily white, capped her head like a wig. She was tearing small flowers out of her driveway with her stick. Her right leg was lame, and appeared to snag that side of her face with a perpetual grimace of pain. `Good morning,' she said idly, as though Rose were a stray tradeswoman.

She had been the Tierneys' first visitor in Fulwood Park - canvassing for the election. `You do realize,' she'd said in a tone which had dared Rose to try her patience further, `that this is a Conservative area?'

'Well,' Rose had said, amused rather than offended but anxious to be rid of her, `we're rather in the middle.'

'But that's worse than nothing.' Since then she had

hardly spoken to Rose, even when Rose had had to leave her the house-key before going to New York. `Good morning,' Rose said now, glancing at the woman as if she might 6e the new gardener, and walked on.

But how stupid, how petty! She tried to shrug off the incident, to think of her book. All of a sudden the road resembled a graveyard of stucco; the villas were elaborate boxes carved out of bone, so delicately carved that they were too fragile to be disturbed in any way. She had very seldom seen anyone emerge from them. Packs of watchdog cars sat in the drives.

Still, she was home. Dew or rain glittered, pinpoint rainbows, on the lawn within the curving drive. Because she had yet to see the new people, her home felt incomplete, a twin whose counterpart was ailing. She knew nothing at all about them, except that they owned a crimson Fiat, which stood gleaming like a commercial in the drive.

She filed the meat in the refrigerator, then she searched for the notebook. In the living-room an advance copy of Shared Nightmares lounged on a chair; Victorian idylls, Orientally delicate, were embroidered on the suite. In the dining-room, wine bottles lazed in racks.

Oh, surely Bill hadn't taken the notebook absentmindedly with him to the University! She trudged upstairs, growing oppressively hot. When Mrs. Winter had lived next door, she and Bill had often wandered around the house naked; trees screened them from the road.

Her blurred face skimmed over the black tiles of the bathroom. She found the notebook in the bedroom, on the floor at Bill's side of the bed. Damn - he'd written one of the passages she had looked forward to writing, for it was crossed out in the notebook: `Directing films, Clint Eastwood seems frozen by the mirror of his lens . . .

She sat in their workroom and strained at a paragraph. Her words seemed stiff and cumbersome, obstacles that hindered her thoughts. Of course this was only a rough draft, to help her and Bill write The Meanings of Stardom quickly once term was over, so that they could move on to Rediscoveries in Film.