"Kelly Link - The Specialist's Hat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Link Kelly)

along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to tour the grounds and the first
story; the third story belongs to Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play
explorers, and sometimes they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to
visitors. After a few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and they
mouth it along with him. They help him sell postcards and copies of Rash's
poetry to the tourist families who come into the little gift shop. When
the mothers smile at them, and say how sweet they are, they stare back and
don't say anything at all. The dim light in the house makes the mothers
look pale and flickery and tired. They leave Eight Chimneys, mothers and
families, looking not quite as real as they did before they paid their
admissions, and of course Claire and Samantha will never see them again,
so maybe they aren't real. Better to stay inside the house, they want to
tell the families, and if you must leave, then go straight to your cars.
The caretaker says the woods aren't safe.
Their father stays in the library on the second story all morning, typing,
and in the afternoon he takes long walks. He takes his pocket recorder
along with him, and a hip flask of Old Kentucky, but not Samantha and
Claire.
The caretaker of Eight Chimneys is Mr. Coeslak. His left leg is noticeably
shorter than his right. Short black hairs grow out of his ears and his
nostrils, and there is no hair at all on top of his head, but he's given
Samantha and Claire permission to explore the whole of the house. It was
Mr. Coeslak who told them that there are copperheads in the woods, and
that the house is haunted. He says they are all, ghosts and snakes, a
pretty bad-tempered lot, and Samantha and Claire should stick to the
marked trails, and stay out of the attic.
Mr. Coeslak can tell the twins apart, even if their father can't; Claire's
eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but Samantha's are gray, like
the ocean when it has been raining.
Samantha and Claire went walking in the woods on the second day that they
were at Eight Chimneys. They saw something. Samantha thought it was a
woman, but Claire said it was a snake. The staircase that goes up to the
attic has been locked. They peeked through the keyhole, but it was too
dark to see anything.

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty. There was
another man who wanted to go with her, and first she wouldn't,
because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did. Her husband
found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some of this
snake's blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had
learned this from an island man who had been on a ship with him. And
in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her
meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up
and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her
body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said he
saw it.

An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

Eight Chimneys is over two hundred years old. It is named for the eight