"Christopher Evans - The Rites Of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Christopher)

The Rites of Winter
a short story by Christopher Evans

'And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night'
A. E. Housman

There were heavy snows that November, and by the turn of the year Stella's
supplies of fuel were running low. She was forced to collect brushwood
from the countryside surrounding the village, and celebrated her
twenty-second birthday with mild frostbite of the hands. She kept a fire
burning in the main room throughout the day, banking it up at night so
that a residual warmth and even an ember remained when she rose the
following morning. It was just as well that the inn was empty of guests
and she did not have to provide extra fires; it would be difficult enough
to survive the winter as it was.
The bleak, bitter weather reflected her inner state of mind. Her husband,
Thomas, had died that autumn, a withered, exhausted man who looked twice
his thirty-six years. He had expired in her arms without a word, as if he
was glad to give up the ghost of his life. Their last guest of the season,
a woman called Marguerite, had left the previous day. With her had gone
Thomas's last hope of survival. Marguerite: pale and blonde, with a smile
that enchanted and blue eyes as deep and ancient as an ocean; she had
stolen Thomas away, bewitched him then sucked the life from him.
The doctor who had come reluctantly from the village had told her that a
wasting disease had killed him. Stella knew better, for only weeks before
her husband had been a vigorous man in the prime of his life and no
disease could act so quickly. But she said nothing, aware that the
villagers had never liked her or her husband. The inn lay on the outskirts
of the village, but it might as well have been on the moon for all the
contact they had had with it. When she and Thomas had taken over the inn
two years before, the previous owner had warned them that the villagers
mistrusted anyone who sheltered travellers bound to or from the city. They
believed the city to be a source of evil; its inhabitants possessed
demonic powers, they claimed, and could conjure spirits from shadows,
invade the minds of others, turn their enemies to ash with their gaze, and
much more.
She and Thomas had dismissed these stories as superstition born of
drudgery; they had never visited the city, but came from a town in the
west where all shades of opinion were tolerated but none blindly accepted.
Now Stella regretted their dismissiveness; Marguerite was no ordinary
woman but a succubus who thrived by draining the lives of those she
seduced.
The doctor had departed saying that he would send someone from the village
to bury Thomas. But that night the temperature had dropped sharply and
there were heavy snowstorms. Thomas was lying in the wine cellar where she
had found him dying. The tiny window high in its wall had blown open
during the night, and the next morning his body was covered with a layer
of snow. Stella bolted the window but did not disturb the body; winter had
arrived, the earth would soon be frozen, and there would be no burial for