"Spirits Of The Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

He hesitated for a moment, and then he went into the bedroom. There was nobody there. But as he walked around the high-canopied bed, he saw that one side of the pale, embroidered bedspread had been rumpled, as if somebody had been sitting on it. On the bedhead hung a pocket for the Prince Consort's watch, and a posthumous portrait of him, which Victoria had kept in every residence, so that she could touch his dear dead face before she slept.

Michael straightened the bedcover. He didn't know why. He looked into the corridor outside the bedroom just to make sure that there was nobody there. He even went out into the stairwell, where two flights of marble stairs led down to the floor below. A distorted, echoing voice reached up to him, and footsteps, but when he looked over the cast-iron railings he saw that it was only one of the cleaners.

He walked to the main entrance to catch the bus. The fog was much thicker now, and all the myrtle and laurel bushes hunched in the gloom. The only sound was the crunch of his footsteps on the gravel path, and the mournful cry of foghorns from the Solent.

He was passing the red-brick wall around the kitchen garden when he thought he heard somebody else's footsteps. He stopped, and listened, but there was nothing but silence. It must have been the echo of his own footsteps against the wall.

He walked a little further, and he thought he heard the footsteps again, off to the right, toward the little octagonal summerhouse where Victoria's children sometimes used to have their supper. He glimpsed a triangular black shape disappearing behind the summerhouse, so quickly that he couldn't be sure what it was. A dog? A badger? Or somebody trailing a black sack behind them?

'Hallo?' he called, uncertainly. There was no reply, only the lost and distant moan of the Portsmouth ferry. 'Hallo?' he called again.

He circled around to the front of the summerhouse. It was so dark that at first he couldn't see if there was anyone there. He approached it cautiously, and saw that the doors were five or six inches ajar. He had never seen them open before: the public wasn't allowed inside. Maybe it was a squatter, or a drunk, or somebody who needed some shelter for the night.

He climbed the first two steps and then he stopped, his skin prickling like nettle-rash.

There was someone there. A small figure dressed in black, with a black hood over her head, and a face as pale as a lamp. Michael couldn't see her very well. She seemed to be blurry, like a figure seen through greasy glass. She didn't appear to be frightened of him, though. She stood still and silent, and he couldn't even tell if she was aware of his presence or not. But there was something about her that seriously unsettled him. Some coldness. But it was more than coldness. It was an aura of complete self-possession, as if she were unafraid of anything, or anybody.

'Are you - do you need some help?' he asked her. She didn't reply. It was hard for him to say how old she was. Pretty old, he guessed, by her small, stooped figure. But she could have been a dwarf; or a little child, or something else altogether.

'Are you lost? I can help you find your way out of here.'

'Not lost,' she said, in a small, dry voice. 'Lost.'

'This is off-season. They don't have visitors here till Easter.'

'Who has no visitors?'

'They. The English Heritage people.'

There was a long pause - so long that Michael wondered if she were ever going to speak again.

'Lost,' she repeated. 'I expected to find him here.'

'I'm sorry. You expected to find who here?'

'This is the year two thousand, isn't it?' she asked him.

'That's right. December 16, 2000.'

'And the world has made many great advances, in the past hundred years? In science, in medicine, in saving human lives?'

'I'm sorry,' said Michael. 'I don't understand.'

He could hear the little figure breathing, but no vapor came out of her nostrils, not like his. 'We have found a cure for the typhoid fever?' she asked.

'Well, yes, as far as I know.'

'And has the way been found to galvanize the dead?'