"Ardath Mayhar - The Clarrington Heritage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mayhar Ardath)

block. Those tall narrow windows, protected in the upper stories by grillwork
shutters, were intact and secretive.
The house looked as if it had been caught in some eddy in time,
unchanging and unchangeable.
The man had watched for over a week. Not once had he seen any sign of
life inside the house, though once a boy came with a lawnmower, let himself in
at the iron gate leading into the rear gardens, and spent a day mowing that
invisible lawn. He had been the only living being visible in all those days.
No face looked from any of the heavily curtained windows. No hand
reached out of the front door to explore the mailbox for letters.
 No eyes, he was certain, had detected his presence. He sighed. He was
going to have to do this the hard way.
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CHAPTER 1: THE ENTRY
The hallway was dark, but Marise found her way down the stair with
practiced ease. A decade of prowling about the twilit house had trained her
eyes to see in darkness. Though she knew it was eccentric (and she constantly
scanned her consciousness for signs of madness), she felt somehow more secure
when she was half hidden in shadows.
The entry hall loomed about her, a cavern of dimness and shadowy
shapes. The grandfather clock tocked heavily and she caught her breath, her
hand at her throat, feeling her heart pounding in time with its strokes.
No matter how often she stopped that pendulum, it always managed,
perhaps because of the vibration of passing traffic, to swing enough to begin
its ponderous ticking again. The mechanism was a mystery to her for it was
certainly not the weight-driven kind she understood. It was never wound, yet
it continued to run, year after year, no matter how often she tried to stay
the pendulum.
Nevertheless, she polished the finely carved wooden case and turned
away, dustcloth in hand, to begin shining the panels of the front door. That
deep tick had greeted her the first time she entered this house. The door
itself had confronted her with its dark African wood, carved with monkeys and
lions peering from a stiff-leafed forest.
Her first glimpse of it, as she mounted the steps beside Ben, had
shocked her. Rightly or wrongly, she felt that a fortune built on slave
trading should have avoided any reminder of Africa.
She remembered looking up at Ben inquiringly. He was staring down with
such an eager expression that she forgot her objection to the door. Instead of
speaking, she reached up to kiss him, just once, before entering the house
where she would become one of his family, the Clarringtons.
She had stood there, waiting for the massive door to open, for the
family to greet the bride and bridegroom, but that had not happened. At last
Ben used his key.
There was nobody in the hall. The vaulted space above the entry was
filled with shadows, the stair curving upward into dimness. Only the clock
spoke, and its voice was not reassuring. There seemed to be no living soul at
home.
Ben was pale, livid in the varicolored light coming through the stained
glass panels on either side of the door. His lips thinned against his teeth
and he looked, for a moment, quite unlike the man she had just married. He