"James Lovegrove - The House Of Lazarus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lovegrove James)

adult's coffin. Each stack began roughly six feet above the floor and rose
all the way to the roof. The wall, comprising a thousand of these stacks
all told, loomed like a sheer unscalable cliff, lit from above by
arc-lights that shot beams of pure white brightness down its face.
Sometimes it was hard to believe that each drawer contained a human being.

At the foot of the wall plush leather armchairs were arranged in rows,
ten-deep, all facing the same way like pews in a church. About a quarter
of them were occupied by people murmuring quietly, as if to themselves.
Every so often someone would nod or gesticulate, and silent pauses were
frequent. The human sibilance was echoed by the sound of machinery,
thousands of cryogenic units all whirring and whispering at once, fans
exhaling, unseen tubes pumping liquid nitrogen.
The orderly walked down the aisle between the chairs and the wall, with
Joey in tow. Some acoustical trick carried the clack of Joey's boot-heels
up to the metal rafters but kept the squelch of the orderly's crъpe soles
earthbound.
Arriving at Stack 339, the orderly gestured to Joey to take the nearest
seat, then began tapping commands into a portable console the size of a
large wallet. Without needing to be asked, Joey picked up the
mic-and-earphones headset that was wired into a panel in the armrest of
the chair and fitted the skeletal black device over his head. He took off
his sunglasses and folded them into his breast pocket. The orderly glanced
twice at the dark purple rings beneath Joey's eyes. Joey looked as if he
had been punched, but the rings were just very heavy bags of exhaustion,
packed with long days and late nights.
Realising he was staring, the orderly returned his gaze to his console.
"Right," he said. "I've given her a nudge. Can you hear anything?"
Joey shook his head.
"She may take a moment or two to wake up. Press the red button if you need
me and push the blue switch to 'Disconnect' when you're done. OK?"
Joey nodded.
"Pleasant chat," said the orderly, and left, squelching along to a door
set into the wall. The door was marked "STRICTLY PRIVATE" and could only
be opened by tapping a five-digit code-number into the keypad set into its
frame. It hissed slowly shut on a pneumatic spring.
Joey sat and waited, his gaze fixed somewhere near the top of the stack of
drawers, where his mother lay.
The first sounds came as if from deep underwater, where whales wail and
the mouths of drowned sailors gape and close with the come and go of the
currents. Up they surged in the earphones, these subaquatic groans,
bubbling up to the surface in waves. Indistinct syllables, tiny glottal
clucks and stutters, the gummy munches of a waking infant, the wet weaning
mewls of still-blind kittens нн up they came from the darkness, taking
form, taking strength, slowly evolving into things that resembled words,
white-noise dream-thoughts being tuned down to a signal of speech, babel
finding a single voice.
>wuhwhy the нн dear? is that нн huhhh нн nuhnnnno, nothing, no, no,
nothing нн on the table, you'll find them on the нн huhhhello? нн she
never said that to me нн hello? is there someone нн hrrrhhh нн dear, I'm