"Shaun Hutson - Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutson Shaun)

he was frightened of the blood and the smell. That's another thing they never
tell you on the TV. Blood smells. It smells like copper. When there's lots of
it.
'Well, I just dropped the baby on its head. It didn't move after that so I
thought it was dead. I picked it up again and took it back to the bedroom and
put it on the bed beside my wife.
'I'd left the hacksaw under the bed earlier so I ... I only had to decide
which one to start with. I cut up the baby first. The left arm to start with.
I cut it off just below the shoulder but as I started cutting it screamed. I
think the bang on the head only stunned it. The arm was almost off when it
started to scream but it didn't move again after that. I cut off its right leg
at the hip. It was easy, I suppose it's because the bones are still soft with
babies. It wasn't even a year old you see. There was more blood, more than I'd
expected. Especially when I cut the head off. It's funny isn't it? You
wouldn't think a body that small could hold that much blood.
'I left the pieces on the bed then I started on my wife. It was harder cutting
her leg off, sawing through the bone was like cutting wood but the noise was
different, a kind of squeaking and all this brown stuff dribbled out of the
bone. Was that the marrow? I suppose it was. Well, it took me nearly an hour
to cut them both up and I was sweating when I'd finished. Butchers must be
really fit, I mean, they cut up meat every day don't they? I was tired when
I'd finished and I noticed that there was some ... mess ... well excrement.
You know ... faeces on the bed. I didn't know that happened when someone died.
That they shтАФ that they messed themselves.
i cut one of my wife's breasts off. I don't know why. Just to see what it was
like I suppose. I expected it to puncture like a balloon, you would wouldn't
you? But it didn't. I just cut most of it away and left it with the other
pieces. So much blood though. So much blood. Funny really.'
Kelly Hunt reached forward and switched off the tape recorder.
She had heard that particular tape half a dozen times in the
last week. This had been the first time she'd managed to sit through it
without feeling sick. She pressed the 'rewind' button and the recorder
squealed as the spools spun in reverse. She stopped it, pressed 'play".
'... So much blood. Funny really.'
She heard her own voice.
'And the dream is always the same?'
'Always. It never varies. Every detail's the same.'
She switched it off again and ran a hand through her shoulder length brown
hair.
Beside the tape recorder on the desk in front of her there was a manilla file
and Kelly flicked it open. It contained details of the voice which she'd been
hearing on the recording, facts and figures which made that voice a human
being. To be precise, Maurice Grant, aged thirty-two. An unemployed lathe
operator by trade. Married for ten years to a woman four years younger than
himself named Julie. They had a ten-month-old baby, Mark.
Kelly had been working with Grant, or rather studying him, for the last seven
days. The recording was one of many which she and her colleagues had made.
She scanned the rest of the file which contained further personal details
about Grant.
He'd been unemployed for the last six months and, during that time, relations