"Gwyneth Jones - A North Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Gwyneth)

dressing-gown. "I thought I heardтАж Ough, Camilla what is it?"
Camilla was weeping, stifling her sobs with fists clenched against her teeth.
She was beside herself. It was some time before she could be persuaded to talk.
In choked, half sentences, covering her face, she told the story.
Her suspicions. Her certainty. The terrible burden.
"I can't prove it," she explained. "But I know, more surely every time it happens.
He steals something from themтАж How can I say it? They surrender to him."
"Jesus God. Ye're saying he interferes with them?"
"No!" wailed Camilla. "That's nothing. I'm saying he takes the life out of them."
"But, Camilla, nobody's died!"
"No! He doesn't kill them, he's too clever for that. They die later, of something
else, an accident, the flu; I've kept track. I know it happens. But he never gets the
blame. What's worse is when they live, but it would be better if they didn't, because
they're like him. I've known that happen, too."
The harshly furnished room listened in shock. The big TV screen gazed
sombrely.
Camilla showed Noreen the photographs. The young housewife trembled. She
babbled of "the polis". Camilla said, then he'd kill me. Oh, God, I don't want to die!
"I had to tell you," she wept. "I just had to tell. Oh, Noreen, the things I knowтАФ"
And then the broken whispers, the breath coming fast. The last protests, the
surrender. Noreen agrees abjectly that she will not raise the alarm. Shivering,
sickened, she is deflowered, degraded, made complicit in something monstrousтАж
and she loves it.
For Camilla too, the experience was deeply satisfying.
 She left the room, and crept back to number four.
A flash caught her as she opened the door, her lips still wet, features softened and
eyes blind with afterglow. "Gotcha!" cried Sheridan, brandishing the camera,
grinning; and she laughed. It was almost as if he'd kissed her. He turned away, and
checked the preview screen. "Hmm." He sounded disappointed; or maybe puzzled.
"What is it?"
"Oh, nothing."


They left the big, stark yellow house early in the morning. Camilla found the
moment of departure oddly disappointing. She would have liked to see Noreen
again. She would have liked to see some consciousness, a touch of pallor; some
shamed disquiet in the young housewife's eyes. But it's time to make a clean
getaway. Noreen will wake up unsure that anything really happened in the night (she'll
probably never miss what Camilla took from her): and that's the way it's supposed to
be. In and out without a trace, love them and leave them.
She went into the kitchen for a moment, and stood looking around. The smells of
kippers, blood-pudding, and laundry that's been dried indoors mingled sickeningly.
Camilla felt suddenly, deeply disoriented. The taste of Noreen's life was in her
throat; she had a horrible, momentary vision of somehow staying here, being
trapped here, with the slab of a husband, the indifferent children, the sonorous
Americans chewing overcooked bacon in that drear, meagre dining-room. She felt
she had become transparent, suffocatedтАФ
Sheridan tooted on the Bentley's horn.
"Sssh!" muttered Camilla, and hurried out to join him.
The big car drove away.