"Lavene, Joyce & Jim - Mask of the Stranger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lavene Joyce)

Usually she could lose herself walking through the forest of ferns. Hanging from the ceiling, growing from the floor, some as tall as she was herself, Kelsey found a certain solace in their company.

They didn't ask questions. They only asked to be kept alive. She didn't have to pretend that everything was fine with them. Usually, their vitality and quiet was a comfort. That day, all she could think about was the blankness in her life.

Like a black hole devouring whatever was left, it fed on her dreams and aspirations. A plant adapted finally after several hundred tries but her triumph was blighted by the emptiness she struggled with each day.

Sometimes, in the past few months, she had been tempted to just let it overcome her. To sink back into the oblivion it promised.

"Kelsey?"

The voice made her jump, although the word was spoken quietly enough.

"Dr. Abrahms!" She glanced at her watch, stunned to find that it was nearly six P.M.. "I'm sorry. I got -- "

" -- caught up in your work?" He nodded, looking around himself at the plants. "I thought as much. Caught up in some bad dreams, too, the way your face looked just then."

"A few." She smiled and pushed her hair away from her face only to remember an instant later and bring it back across her cheek.

"Worried about the past, no doubt?" he speculated kindly. His quick, assessing eyes didn't miss the telling gesture.

"I don't have a past to worry about," she answered, her voice catching on the words a little as she held her clipboard closer to her.

"I have some good news for you on that front." He smiled and put his arm around her shoulder. "Come and have dinner with me. I know you won't eat unless you do." She started to protest and he waved her words away. "I won't take 'no' for an answer and you'll want to hear what I have to say."

Kelsey looked into his thin, sallow face. It was a tired face. Lined with years of disappointments and the tragedy of his young wife's death. His eyes were a brown tinged with gray that reflected the sadness in his soul.

To her, he had been kindness itself for the past two months. He had seen to her every need in the hospital, had found her the right place to stay. He had been there on more than one occasion when she had dissolved into tears of futility and regret. He had kept her living when she'd wanted to die.

"All right." She owed him much more than she could ever repay. She put down her clipboard with the day's progress on it and found that she could move her mouth into at least the semblance of a smile.

"Good." He patted her shoulder. "Come down when you're finished. The food's come in, so hurry."

"I'll be there in five minutes," she promised him.

"I'll be waiting," he responded patiently.

Over Chinese food in cardboard boxes, they talked about the day's results on her plants, comparing data. She ate with the chopsticks that came with the dinner. He, with a fork he kept in his desk.

"The strange thing is the growth rate." She explained a disturbing pattern that she was beginning to notice. "Some of the plants, the ones that thrive on the most toxic poison, grow much faster than the control plants on oxygen."

"Why do you think that is?" he wondered.

"I'm not sure." She shrugged. "But it's like they've mutated. Their DNA is very specific and it's changing rapidly." She looked up at him when he didn't reply and found him staring at her with an expression she couldn't readily identify on his long face.

He blinked and it was gone as quickly. She wondered if she'd imagined it. But for just a brief time, it was the face she saw in the mirror each day. The face of a stranger.

Or rather the way she looked when she pondered her own image. As though he had been looking at a stranger. There was a haunting presence of fear in his eyes.

"Are you all right?" she asked.