"Hal Duncan - Vellum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Hal)

I wiped away some of the blood that ran down from my forehead and opened the book again, to its first
page.

The Book of All Hours

The Book of All Hours, the Benedictines called it, in the Middle Ages, believing it to be the Deus's own
version of some grand duke's book of hours ┬п those hour-by-hour and day-by-day, week-by-week and
month-by-month tomes of ceremony and meditation inked by monks in lamplight, drawn in brilliant
colours on vellum, pale but rich in tone, not bleached pure white but yellowed, brown, the colour of skin,
of earth, of wood, old bone, of things that were all once alive. Princes and kings would commission these
books and they'd take years of hunched backs and cramped hands and fading eyesight to produce by
hand. It was said by the Benedictines that God himself commissioned such a tome from the one angel
allowed to step beyond the veil and see his face and listen to his words, and write them down. The
patriarch Enoch, who walked with God and rose to Heaven to become the angel Metatron, had made
this book at his master's command, they said, and it held God's own word on every instant of eternity,
the ultimate instruction manual for he who dared to live what He commanded, fully, abso-lutely. But no
man was perfect enough to live in such devotion; so they denied the Book existed in this world at all; said
it could be found only in Eternity, where the spirit was freed of the weakness of the flesh.


┬п The Book of All Hours, my father had said. Your grandfather went looking for it, but he never found it.
He couldn't find it; it's a myth, a pipe-dream. It doesn't exist.
I remember the quiet smile on his face, the look all parents have at some time, I suspect, when they see
their children repeating their own folly, a look that says, yes, we all think like that when we're your age,
but when you're older, believe me, you'll understand, the world doesn't work that way. I'd come to ask
him about these fanciful stories I'd been told, about the Carter family having ancient secrets, not just
skeletons in the closet, but skeletons with bones engraved with mystic runes, in closets with false walls
that hid dark tunnels leading deep, deep underground.
┬п But Uncle Reynard said that when grandfather was in the Middle East-
┬п Uncle Reynard is an incorrigible old fox, said my father. He tells a good tale, but you really have to ...
take what he says with a pinch of salt.
I remember being shocked, confused; I was young, still young enough that it had never occurred to me
that two adults whom I trusted absolutely might believe entirely different things. My father and his
brother, Reynard ┬п my namesake uncle ┬п they knew everything after all, didn't they? They were
grown-ups. It had never occurred to me that the answers they gave to my questions might be entirely
incompatible.
-Of course, you should listen to your father, Uncle Reynard had said. Honestly, you shouldn't believe a
word I say. I am utterly untrustworthy when it comes to the Book.
And he held my gaze with complete sincerity... and winked.
┬п Almost as bad as the Cistercians, he said.

The Cistercians called the Benedictines fools. They were quite con-vinced that the Book existed in this
world, but they feared it as they feared the Devil himself. They damned the manuscript as the most
diabolical of grimoires, a Book of the Names of the Dead, of every being that had ever lived or ever
would live ┬п human, angel, devil. They made reference to the Bible, to the Torah and the Koran, to
Christian apocrypha and Jewish and Islamic legend ... Didn't the Revelations of St John talk of a book
made by God's scribe, a Book of Life containing names that were no mere christenings but the true and
secret names, names which the owners could not refuse to answer when called before the Throne of
God? But if this was to be carried out into the world only in the End Days, where then did Solomon learn