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

The big man stood up, and crossed behind Will so that he stood with one hand on the back of the old lady's chair and the other in the pocket of the dark, high-necked jacket he wore. 'Look at me, Will,' he said. Light from the burning ring of candles on the table glinted on his springing white hair, and put his strange, shadowed eyes into even deeper shadows, pools of darkness in the bony face. 'My name is Merriman Lyon,' he said. 'I greet you, Will Stanton. We have been waiting for you for a long time.'

'I know you,' Will said. 'I mean ... you look ... I felt ... don't I know you?'

'In a sense,' Merriman said. 'You and I are, shall we say, similar. We were born with the same gift, and for the same high purpose. And you are in this place at this moment, Will, to begin to understand what that purpose is. But first you must be taught about the gift.'

Everything seemed to be running too far, too fast. 'I don't understand,' Will said, looking at the strong, intent face in alarm. 'I haven't any gift, really I haven't. I mean there's nothing special about me.' He looked from one to the other of them, figures alternately lit and shadowed by the dancing flames of candles and fire, and he began to feel a rising fear, a sense of being trapped. He said, 'It's just the things that have been happening to me, that's all.'

'Think back, and remember some of those things,' the old lady said. 'Today is your birthday. Midwinter Day, your eleventh Midwinter's Day. Think back to yesterday, your tenth Midwinter's Eve, before you first saw the sign. Was there nothing special at all, then? Nothing new?'

Will thought. 'The animals were scared of me,' he said reluctantly. 'And the birds perhaps. But it didn't seem to mean anything at the time.'

'And if you had a radio or a television set switched on in the house,' Merriman said, 'it behaved oddly whenever you went near it.'

Will stared at him. 'The radio did keep making noises. How did you know that? I thought it was sunspots or something.'

Merriman smiled. 'In a way. In a way.' Then he was sombre again. 'Listen now. The gift I speak of, it is a power, that I will show you. It is the power of the Old Ones, who are as old as this land and older even than that. You were born to inherit it, Will, when you came to the end of your tenth year. On the night before your birthday, it was beginning to wake, and now on the day of your birth it is free, flowering, fully grown. But it is still confused and unchannelled because you are not in proper control of it yet. You must be trained to handle it, before it can fall into its true pattern and accomplish the quest for which you are here. Don't look so prickly, boy. Stand up. I'll show you what it can do.'

Will stood up, and the old lady smiled encouragingly at him. He said to her suddenly, 'Who are you?'

'The lady - ' Merriman began.

'The lady is very old,' she said in her clear young voice, 'and has in her time had many, many names. Perhaps it would be best for now, Will, if you were to go on thinking of me as - the old lady.'

'Yes, ma'am,' Will said, and at the sound of her voice his happiness came flooding back, the rising alarm dropped away, and he stood up erect and eager, peering into the shadow behind her chair where Merriman had moved a few paces back. He could see the glint of white hair on the tall figure, but no more.

Merriman's deep voice came out of the shadow. 'Stand still. Look at whatever you like, but not hard, concentrate on nothing. Let your mind wander, pretend you are in a boring class at school.'

Will laughed, and stood there relaxed, tilting his head back. He squinted up, idly trying to distinguish between the dark criss-crossing beams in the high roof and the black lines that were their shadows. Merriman said casually, 'I am putting a picture into your mind. Tell me what you see.'

The image formed itself in Will's mind as naturally as if he had decided to paint an imaginary landscape and were making up the look of it before putting it on paper. He said, describing the details as they came to him: 'There's a grassy hillside, over the sea, like a sort of gentle cliff. Lots of blue sky, and the sea a darker blue underneath. A long way down, right down there where the sea meets the land, there's a strip of sand, lovely glowing golden sand. And inland from the grassy headland - you can't really see it from here except out of the corner of your eye - hills, misty hills. They're a sort of soft purple, and their edges dissolve into a blue mist, the way the colours in a painting dissolve into one another if you keep it wet. And' - he came out of his half-trance of seeing and looked hard at Merriman, peering into the shadow with inquisitive interest - 'and it's a sad picture. You miss it, you're homesick for wherever it is. Where is it?'

'Enough,' Merriman said hastily, but he sounded pleased. 'You do well. Now it is your turn. Give me a picture, Will. Just choose some ordinary scene, anything, and think of the way it looks, as if you were standing looking at it.'

Will thought of the first image that came into his head. It was one which he realised now had been worrying away at the back of his thoughts all this while: the picture of the two great doors, isolated on the snowy hillside, with all their intricate carving, and the strange blue at their edges.

Merriman said at once: 'Not the doors. Nothing so close. Somewhere from your life before this winter came.'

For a second Will stared at him disconcerted; then he swallowed hard, closed his eyes and thought of the jeweller's shop his father ran in the little town of Eton.

Merriman said, slowly, 'The door-handle is of the lever kind, like a round bar, to be pushed downward perhaps ten degrees on opening. A small hanging-bell rings as the door moves. You step down a few inches to reach the floor, and the jolt of the drop is startling without being dangerous. There are glass showcases all round the walls, and beneath the glass counter - of course, this must be your father's shop. With some beautiful things inside it. A grandfather clock, very old, in the back corner, with a painted face and a deep, slow tick. A turquoise necklet in the central showcase with a setting of silver serpents: Zuni work, I think, a very long way from home. An emerald pendant like a great green tear. A small enchanting model of a Crusader castle, in gold - perhaps a salt-cellar - that you have loved, I think, since you were a small boy. And that man behind the counter, short and content and gentle, must be your father, Roger Stanton. Interesting to see him clearly at last, free of the mist ... He has a jeweller's glass in his eye, and he is looking at a ring: an old gold ring with nine tiny stones set in three rows, three diamond chips in the centre and three rubies at either side, and some curious runic lines edging those that I think I must look at more closely one day soon - '

'You even got the ring!' Will said, fascinated. 'That's mother's ring, Dad was looking at it last time I was in the shop. She thought one of the stones was loose, but he said it was an optical illusion ... However do you do it?'

'Do what?' There was an ominous softness in the deep voice.

'Well - that. Put a picture in my head. And then see the one I had there myself. Telepathy, isn't it called? It's tremendous.' But an uneasiness was beginning in his mind.

'Very well,' Merriman said patiently. 'I will show you in another way. There is a circle of candle flames beside you there on the table, Will Stanton. Now - do you know of any possible way of putting out one of those flames, other than blowing it out or quenching it with water or snuffer or hand?'