"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

She loved me. Loved me.
With a cry, I snatched my hand from the touch of her fingers, turned, walked
away, coat flapping behind me, heels ringing like shots. Faster. Faster. I broke
into a run. Her calls pursued me through the tunnels, come back come back, I
love you, why did you go, I love you....
I rode the underground into the take-away-curry-and-tins-of-lager hours. We are
not human, my mother told me from every poster and advertisement, we cannot
afford the luxuries of human morality. Saint Semillia of the Mercies smiled upon
me. I rode the trains until the lights went out, one by one, in the stations
behind me, and came home at last to Shantallow Mews.
The house looked and smelled normal. There was nothing to see. From the outside.
He had broken in through a rear window and trashed a path through the rooms
where we entertained the goi. Finding the locked door, he had kicked his way
into Cassiopia's room.
The pimp had done a thorough and professional job of terror. Empty glasses and
cups of cold tea shattered, a half-completed jigsaw of the Royal Family a
thousand die-cut pieces scattered across the floor, magazines torn in two, the
radio-cassette smashed in by a heel. Shredded cassette tape hung in swaths from
the lights and stirred in the draft from the open door where I stood. The metal
stand by the bedside was overturned; the blood, my blood, was splashed and
daubed across the walls.
Cassiopia was in the corner by the window, shivering and dangerously pale from
shock. Under the duvet he clutched the icons of the five hahndahvi and a kitchen
knife. Bruises purpled down the side of his face, he flinched from my gentlest
touch.
"He said he'd be back," my sister whispered. "He said unless we worked for him,
he'd be back again. And again. And again. Until we got wise."
I made him comfortable on the sofa, cleaned the blood from the walls, made good
the damage. Then I went to the never-quite-forgotten place under the floorboards
and un-earthed the hru-tesh.
Saint Semillia, the price of your mercies!



20 November, 10:30 P.M.
But for the insistence of my perfumes urging him through the door at the top of
the stairs, I think he would run in terror from what he is about to do. Often
they do. But they are always drawn back to this door, by the sign of the
yin-yang drawn in spilled vodka on a table top, by addresses on matchbooks or
slipped under toilet partitions. They come back because nothing else can satisfy
them.
The hahndahvi placed at their five cardinal points about the room fascinate him.
He turns the icon of File Legbe over and over in his hands.
"This is old," he says.
"Early medieval," I say, offering him a drink from the cocktail bar. He takes a
tequila in one nervous swallow. "The hahndahvi. The Five Lords of the tesh. We
have our own private religion; a kind of urban witchcraft, you could call it.
Our own gods and demons and magics. They've taken a bit of a theological bashing
with the advent of molecular biology, when we realized that we weren't the
demonic lovers, the incubi and succubi of medieval legend. Just a variant of