"EB - Mike Resnick + Martin H. Greenberg - Christmas GhostsUC - Compilation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenberg Martin H)

Well, I saw her at the windows of the house while we were eating. She was thin and scrawny, with sun-darkened skin and these wide, night eyes that seemed to open up forever. Her fingers were bony; I remember that because she lifted her hand and touched the glass as if she wanted to reach through it. I called out to her, but she was gone, and I grabbed my mother's hand and dragged her from the table to the window.

"It's nothing," my mother said, and drew me back. But I knew better.

"She's hungry," I said. "It's Christmas." As if those two words meant something, meant anything. I didn't understand the glance that my mother gave my father, but he shook his head: No.

They didn't have doorbells hi that huge, old house; they had something that you banged instead, hard. So I knew it was her at the door when I heard that grand brass gong start to hum. I slipped out from under my mother and ran toward the door. Because I knew she was hungry, you see, and it was Christmas, and of course we would feed her.

The servants didn't see it that way though. Neither did our host. To them, she was just another one of the countless beggars that came at inopportune moments. And I even understand it, sometimesЧyou don't see me giving away all my hard-earned money to every little street urchin with a hand held out.

But whether I understand it or not doesn't matter.

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Because I feel it with a five-year-old's shock and anger, after all these years. They drove her away. I didn't understand what she was saying, of course, because I didn't know any Spanish back then. But I know now, because I learned enough to try to speak to her later.

I'm hungry. Please. I'm hungry. Like a prayer or a litany. She had a thin, raspy voice: she coughed once or twice although it wasn't cold. I could see her ribs. I could see the manservant shove her, hard, from the open door. Well, I was five and I wasn't too smart then, so I picked up the nearest thing and started hitting him with it and hollering a lot. It was an umbrella, and a five-year-old can't damage more than pride.

And I just kept shouting, "It's Christmas! It's Christmas!" until my mother came to take me away. My father was furious. The host was embarrassed, and made a show of remonstrating the servants, who were only doing their job.

I went back to the table like a mutinous prisoner, and I was stubborn enough that I didn't eat a thing. Not that night, anyway. My mother was angry at my father, that much I remember. Dinner kind of lost its momentum that night because of the tantrum of one half-spoiled boy.

And Christmas lost its magic for that boy.

Maybe it wouldn't have, had she stayed away. Maybe the toys and the food and the lights on the trees would have sucked him right back into family comfort. Maybe Santa's lap and Santa's ear would have encouraged him to feel the exact same way he always had. I'll never know. Because in the winter of my sixth year, tucked under the covers and dreaming of Santa, I heard her tapping at my windows.

Back then, I had my own small room on the second story of our house, and when I heard the tapping at the window, well, I thought it was monsters or something. I gathered my blankets around me like a shield,

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yanked 'em off the bed, and then trundled, slowly, over to the window.

And I saw her standing there, with her gaunt, darkened cheeks and her wide, wide eyes. She was rapping the glass with her thin, bony fingers and she said the same words over and over again. I think I screamed, because I could see the northern stars bunking right through her, and I knew what that meant, back then.

My mother came firstЧshe always did, moving like a quiet shadow. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her, pointingЧand my mother looked at our reflection in my window and shook her head softly. You were having a nightmare, she said. Go back to sleep.

But it's her, I said. It's her, can't you see her? She's dead, Mom, and she's hungry. I don't want her to eat me.

She's not here, she's not dead. Hush. My mother held me in her arms as if she were a strong, old cradle. And I cried. Because over my mother's whispers, I could hear the voice of the hungry girl.

It didn't stop there, of course. Sometime in my teenage years, I stopped being afraid that she would eat me. Instead, I started being afraid I was mad, so I never talked about the dead, starving peasant, and my mom and dad were just as happy to let the matter drop. But she came every Christmas midnight, and stayed for a full twelve days, lingering at the window, begging me to feed her. I even left the table once and threw open the door, but all I got was snow and a gust of wind. She didn't come into the warmth.

She was there every year. Every day. She was there from the minute I went to college to the minute I graduated. She was there when I finally left home, found my wife, and settled down. It wasn't my parents she haunted although they wouldn't feed her. It was me. I even railed against the injustice of it allЧ/ was the only person who'd even cared about her that

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