"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

virtually unblemished. Barely a brush-down would have been needed and they could have walked out the
door, climbed back in their hire car, and driven on up the road. Perhaps in some better reality that was
allowed to happen, and Mark found the Goldberg Variations by happy chance at a town up the way,
and they drove the rest of the day along a long straight road between trees with leaves that seemed lit
from within: riding the crests and dips of the highway as it took them into afternoon and then evening,
never noticing that they rode alone.
In this world they merely saved the life of another human being, as Pete Harris lay frozen beneath
them, stunned into immobility by the contact of his head with the tiled floor. All around him were limbs,
and all he could see was chaos and death: all he could feel was the whistling of his cuts and a cold ache in
his head that developed into a concussion so severe that some days he felt as if it never went away. A
young staff nurse, who seemed to regard him with superstitious awe because he had survived when
almost everyone else had died, spent the night in the hospital in Pipersville keeping him awake, when he
would have much preferred to have slept.
But that was later, as was the heart attack in 1995 that achieved what the bullets had not. He never
tried to find out if the Victorian house was for sale. He just worked until he dropped.


тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ

Above the measured snap of gunfire and the coughs and screams of the dying, the distant sound of
approaching sirens became evident. The gunmen fired for perhaps another twenty seconds, clearing a
small pocket by the counter where the mother and her girls had found temporary respite. Then they
stopped.
They looked around the room, faces betraying no reaction to what they'd done. The younger of the
two тАФ the boy called Billy тАФ took a step back, and shut his eyes. The other man shot him point-blank
in the face. While Billy's body still languidly spasmed on the floor, the man squatted to wash his hands in
the blood. He stood again to write something on the glass door, working calmly, in big dripping letters,
then surveyed the room once more, calmly, at his ease. He didn't even glance at the cop cars hurtling up
Main, far too late to influence an event that would finally put Palmerston back on the map.
Then, when he was good and ready, the man jumped through the shattered window behind the
Campbells' bodies and disappeared: escaping, it was believed, along the track of the old railroad line. He
was never apprehended. No one was ever able to give a clear description of his face, and in time it was
as if he slipped out of the event and into shadow. The blame ended up being wholly Billy's: a young boy
who had only been doing what he was told, by a man he'd thought was a new friend.
When he heard the sound of the police cars pulling up outside, Pete Harris tried to sit up, tried to
gather the strength to push the Campbells' bodies off. He failed, but succeeded in raising his head far
enough to see what had been written in blood on the doors.
The letters had dripped, and his eyesight was clouded by a white light in his head, but the words were
clear enough. They said 'The Straw Men.'
Eleven years passed.


Part 1
Of the hill, not on the hillтАж
Frank Lloyd Wright, on the architecture of Taliesin

1
The funeral was a nice affair, in that it was well-attended and people dressed appropriately and nobody
stood up at any point and said 'You realize this means they're dead.' It was held in a church on the edge
of town. I had no idea what denomination it might be, still less why it should have been stipulated in the