"David Langford - The Motivation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

decided doggedly as a post office caught his eye; then he gnawed his lip, recalling
countrywide directories filling long shelves in London. Still, here he was, after all.
"Bloody hell," said Peter with feeling, a few minutes later. The local directory
listed no Dr. Barry.
Asking after "the doctor" led him by stages to an ivied house whose brass
plate said. "Dr. Jonathan Sims." After ten years, was it too late to enquire? He
pushed through the door into a cool smothering gloom which felt almost
ecclesiastical, and groped blindly to a reception window. "I wanted to ask..." the
logical lie came to him in a burst of confidence, "about my uncle, Owen Walker,
used to live here... I wanted to find Dr. Barry and, er... you don't know?"
The dark-haired woman at the window gave him a tired smile, behind which
Peter read a hot flash of exasperation. "I'll ask Dr Sims," she said. And after a pause
of unintelligible intercom noises (did real reporters have tricks for coping with that?):
"Dr. Barry used to run this practice. Dr. Sims says she's been at a private nursing
home for some time. I don't know whether I should, but perhaps if I gave you the
address?"
"Please. It's a... an important family matter."
Amazed by this success, Peter took the slip of paper with effusive thanks, and
left. The moist heat was like a blow in the face as he closed the door behind him.
The address was in Surbiton.


Local color, he reminded himself. To the scene of the crime, yes, definitely.
He'd copied a sketch map from one of the papers; the streets seemed to have
randomly stretched, contracted, and tilted on hidden hinges to new angles with one
another, but eventually he saw the fatal stand of trees. When they first appeared,
peeping over a terrace of harsh new brick, they looked uncompromisingly ordinary.
Where was the atmosphere of doom? It was only a small patch of woodland (Peter
remembered it as larger -- so he had been here once), straggling up a slope just too
steep for cultivation. Another obscure thought surfaced: absurdly, he'd been
half-prepared to find some plaque or marker -- "The Atrocity of The Decade Took
Place On This Spot."
There was only unkempt grass. He sat with his back against a tree, and
watched the shadows lengthen. Local color: Today it may seem unremarkable, even
dull, but... Useless. He slid out the monstrous photograph and frowned; its repulsion
was dimmed a little by familiarity, but he didn't care to look too long.
On -- this -- spot, he thought fiercely, trying to make himself feel more, trying
to do the impossible and read a place. There must be some aura... some stain. Now
that he'd looked again at the picture, he could see how the landscape might be
considered in a different light, changing in the mind's eye, going bad. From under the
trees came a sweet-sour whiff of rotting leaves, and this no longer seemed quite
natural. The sluggish air pressed close. Puffy white clouds were wobbling overhead,
bulging down at him, disgusting in their nearness and intimacy. The sky, he realized,
was stretched tightly just above him; the constricted horizon barely allowed room to
breathe. He could not breathe. He could not move. On this spot...
The pulpy ground was ready to engulf him; something glistening and wet was
surely just behind, moving with exquisite delicacy and pain under the trees, coming
to him. Peter shivered in a cage of shadows. Here in this small, cramped, horrid
countryside he found his eyes fixed, frozen, on a tiny mess in the nearby grass
(perhaps a bird-dropping), which had become the oozing, lazily turning hub of all the