"Cooper, Susan - Dark is Rising 02 - The Dark is Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

There were no handles on the doors. Will stretched his arms forward, with the palm of each hand flat against the wood, and he pushed. As the doors swung open beneath his hands, he thought that he caught a phrase of the fleeting bell-like music again; but then it was gone, into the misty gap between memory and imagining. And he was through the doorway, and without a murmur of sound the two huge doors swung shut behind him, and the light and the day and the world changed so that he forgot utterly what they had been.

He stood now in a great hall. There was no sunlight here. Indeed there were no real windows in the lofty stone walls, but only a series of thin slits. Between these, on both sides, hung a series of tapestries so strange and beautiful that they seemed to glow in the half-light. Will was dazzled by the brilliant animals and flowers and birds, woven or embroidered there in rich colours like sunlit stained glass.

Images leapt at him; he saw a silver unicorn, a field of red roses, a glowing golden sun. Above his head the high vaulted beams of the roof arched up into shadow; other shadows masked the far end of the room. He moved dreamily a few paces forward, his feet making no sound on the sheepskin rugs that covered the stone floor, and he peered ahead. All at once sparks leapt and fire flared in the darkness, lighting up an enormous fireplace in the far wall, and he saw doors and high-backed chairs and a heavy carved table. On either side of the fireplace two figures stood waiting for him: an old lady leaning on a stick, and a tall man.

'Welcome, Will,' the old lady said, in a voice that was soft and gentle, yet rang through the vaulted hall like a treble bell. She put out one thin hand towards him, and the firelight glinted on a huge ring that rose round as a marble above her finger. She was very small, fragile as a bird, and though she was upright and alert, Will, looking at her, had an impression of immense age.

He could not see her face. He paused where he stood, and unconsciously his hand crept to his belt. Then the tall figure on the other side of the fireplace moved, bent, and lighted a long taper at the fire, and coming forward to the table, began putting the taper to a ring of tall candles there. Light from the smoking yellow flame played on his face. Will saw a strong, bony head, with deep-set eyes and an arched nose fierce as a hawk's beak; a sweep of wiry white hair springing back from the high forehead; bristling brows and a jutting chin. And though he did not know why, as he stared at the fierce, secret lines of that face, the world he had inhabited since he was born seemed to whirl and break and come down again in a pattern that was not the same as before.

Straightening, the tall man looked at him, across the circle of lighted candles that stood on the table in a frame like the rim of a flat-resting wheel. He smiled slightly, the grim mouth slanting up at its edges, and a sudden fan of lines wrinkling each side of the deep-set eyes. He blew out the burning taper with a quick breath.

'Come in, Will Stanton,' he said, and the deep voice too seemed to leap in Will's memory. 'Come and learn. And bring that candle with you.'

Puzzled, Will glanced around him. Close to his right hand, he found a black wrought-iron stand as tall as himself, rising to three points; two of the points were tipped by a five-pointed iron star and the third by a candlestick holding a thick white candle. He lifted out the candle, which was heavy enough to need both hands, and crossed the hall to the two figures waiting at the other end. Blinking through the light, he saw as he approached them that the circle of candles on the table was not a complete circle after all; one holder in the ring was empty. He leaned across the table, gripping the hard smooth sides of the candle, lighted it from one of the others, and fitted it carefully into the empty socket. It was identical with the rest. They were very strange candles, uneven in width but cold and hard as white marble; they burned with a long bright flame and no smoke, and smelled faintly resinous, like pine trees.

It was only as he leaned back to stand upright that Will noticed the two crossed arms of iron inside the candlestick ring. Here again, as everywhere, was the sign: the cross within the circle, the quartered sphere. There were other sockets for candles within the frame, he saw now: two along each arm of the cross, and one at the central point where they met. But these were still empty.

The old lady relaxed, and sat down in the high-backed chair beside the hearth. 'Very good,' she said comfortably in that same musical voice. 'Thank you, Will.'

She smiled, her face folding into a cobweb of wrinkles, and Will grinned whole-heartedly back. He had no idea why he was suddenly so happy; it seemed too natural to be questioned. He sat down on a stool which was clearly waiting for him in front of the fire, between the two chairs.

'The doors,' he said, 'the great doors I came through. How do they just stand there on their own?'

'The doors?' the lady said.

Something in her voice made Will look back over his shoulder at the far wall from which he had just come: the wall with the two high doors, and the holder from which he had taken the candle. He stared; there was something wrong. The great wooden doors had vanished. The grey wall stretched blank, its massive square stones quite featureless except for one round golden shield, alone, hanging high up and glinting dully in the light from the fire.

The tall man laughed softly. 'Nothing is what it seems, boy. Expect nothing and fear nothing, here or anywhere. There's your first lesson. And here's your first exercise. We have before us Will Stanton - tell us what has been happening to him, this last day or two.'

Will looked into the urgent flames, warm and welcome on his face in the chill room. It took much effort to wrench his mind back to the moment when he and James had left home for Dawsons' Farm to collect hay - hay! - the previous afternoon. He thought, bemused, about everything that stood between that moment and his present self. After a while he said: 'The sign. The circle with the cross. Yesterday Mr Dawson gave me the sign. Then the Walker came after me, or tried to, and afterwards they - whoever they are - they tried to get me.' He swallowed, cold at the memory of his night's fear. 'To get the sign. They want it, that's what everything is about. That's what today is about too, even though it's so much more complicated because now isn't now, it's some other time, I don't know when. With everything like a dream, but real ... They're still after it. I don't know who they are, except for the Rider and the Walker. I don't know you either, only I know you are against them. You and Mr Dawson and John Wayland Smith.'

He stopped.

'Go on,' said the deep voice.

'Wayland?' Will said, perplexed. 'That's an odd name. That's not part of John's name. What made me say that?'

'Minds hold more than they know,' the tall man said. 'Particularly yours. And what else have you to say?'

'I don't know,' Will said. He looked down and ran a finger along the edge of his stool; it was carved in gentle regular waves, like a peaceful sea. 'Well, yes I do. Two things. One is that there's something funny about the Walker. I don't really think he's one of them, because he was scared stiff of the Rider when he saw him, and ran away.'

'And the other thing?' the big man said.

Somewhere in the shadows of the great room a clock struck, with a deep note like a muffled bell: a single note, a half-hour.

'The Rider,' Will said. 'When the Rider saw the sign, he said: "So you have one of them already." He didn't know I had it. But he had come after me. Chasing me. Why?'

'Yes,' said the old lady. She was looking at him rather sadly. 'He was chasing you. I'm afraid the guess that is in your mind is right, Will. It isn't the sign they want most of all. It's you.'