"Terry Dowling - Clownette" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

Then there was the face.

Beyond the old queen-sized bed I knew so well, left of the same curtained triple windows, it blossomed
against the load-bearing wall that somehow kept bringing damp up from the core of the old building, one
and a half meters above the floor on the only wall not papered over, never papered over.

The Motley. Seven main blotches, enough of a man-in-the-moon soot-smudge face, but nothing that
definite, just a grey-scale glitch in the latest color field.

They'd tried covering it with paintings, mirrors, other decorative features, but that's where things became
truly wacky. It wasn't that screws and bolts gave, nothing as simple and conclusive as that, or that the
damp leached out to create penicillin fields. It wasn't that furnishings placed in front soon had sprung
backs and internal mold. This was dry stainingтАФdry to the touch, no damp smell at all.

The Motley moved.

Put something in front, a painting, a cupboard, and within the week, sometimes overnight, Bozo would be
starting to peer over the top or around the sides. A few more days and it was out of hiding altogether.
Remove the obstacle and gradually, over days, nights, a week or two, back it went to its original
positionтАФbut without any sign of a relocation trail. That was the real wonder of the thing for me.

Experts spoke of microclimates, of internal convection variables in the space between the stain and
whatever fronted it, rerouting the damp-track, some central-core problem, whatever. No rising damp
anywhere else in the building. No explaining the lack of residual staining left behind when it did relocate.
It justтАФmoved.

Make it a discount room, they said, or a freebie. Not a storeroom. Keep it open and airy. Count your
losses. One room out of nearly sixty wasn't bad, considering.

Which is what Macklin's was given in lieu of any kind of adequate scientific explanation.

There'd been a fleeting Indian summer of notoriety: a month or two of minor tabloid features, even a
guest spot on Ross Haslan's Mysterious Houses. But that kind of publicity drew the weirdos,
management quickly discovered. They issued a press statement saying that modern damp-proofing
techniques had fixed the problem. When journos phoned and the weirdos enquired, they were told the
face was gone.

But here it was in all its dusky, smudgy, chimney-soot glory. And, oddly enough, management had found
a winner with the latest color scheme. They'd painted the wall a soft tan, quite a nice contrast to the three
papered walls with their familiar, muted yellow-and-white pattern. The blotches were less intense, less
ominous somehow. I'd been here for olive, russet, even for an overkill chocolate brown. But darker
colors had made the blemish seem more intenseтАФanother trick of the staining, the lighting, Room 516's
Turin Effect, as if the Motley was determined to secure its place in the world.

My thoughts were definitely elsewhere, so the knock at the door startled me.
I hurried to answer it, first peering through the spy hole to see who it was. When no one was visible, I
just assumed there would be fresh towels left on the floor, or a fruit bowl, something that hadn't needed
personal attention.

But when I opened the door, there was nothing. Seemed to be nothing, for when I glanced down the hall