"House On Parchment Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

to see the girl."
"And nobody else saw him until Carol came? Nobody knew he was there but you? You never told anyone?"
"No." He took a stack of books out of the box. He shrugged slightly. "I thoughtЧI didn't know what to think. Then Carol came and she saw him, too, and then finally we saw the girl, and things began to fall into place. And now you've seen her."
"And she's seen me."
"It looked like it."
"I think," Carol said, "she's like you. She doesn't trust older people."
Bruce took the last book out of the box. He got a penknife out of his pocket and began to cut down the corners. "It's hard to know," he said finally. He lifted his head. "Rot. The drilling stopped. I wanted to get that stone out today."
Alexander went to the wall. He probed at the mortar with a file. "It's cracked, I think, but it's still holding the stone. Maybe they'll start drilling again." He cleared a space on Mrs. Brewster's table and sat on it, watching Bruce flatten the box. "All that time we were terrorizing the peaceful country town of Middleton on our bicycles, you were sneaking off on the sly seeing ghosts and drawing flowers. It's amazing, what you don't know about people. Е I wonder what Sandy Sparks does when he's not being generally ugly. Or Roger Simmons, when he's not crying. Do you suppose Sandy ever buys flowers for his mother?"
Bruce grinned. "Not bloody likely." He turned the box and started on another comer.
"Or Carol," Alexander said. "What do you suppose she does when nobody's looking?"
Bruce glanced at her. "She goes to bed with antique bed-warmers. And she hangs about a lot in trees. And she worries."
"How do you know?" Carol asked.
"You bite your fingernails. I notice. You have nice hands. They have good bones. You should try worrying without biting your nails."
She looked down at them doubtfully. "It's hard."
Bruce cut down the last corner. "What do you do when nobody's looking, Alexander? Write poetry?"
There was a small silence. "Me? The only sane member of the Middleton street gang?" He shifted on the table, and fragile glassware clinked together. There was a rich note of laughter in his voice. Bruce looked up at him. Alexander's face was scarlet.
Bruce slipped back on his heels. Alexander shifted again under his amazed stare, and a stack of saucers rattled warningly.
"You don't really. Do you, really?" "ItЧit comes to that, when you likeЧthe way words sound. Please, if you're going to laugh, get it over with so I can decide whether to throw a plate or just leave in dignity."
Bruce drew a deep breath. "I'm not going to laugh," he said dazedly.
"I don't think it's funny," Carol said. "I wish I could do that instead of hanging in trees."
"You mean," Bruce said, "when nobody's looking, you sit down with a pen and put words together and make a poem? What do you write about?"
"The same things you draw, I expect." The flush was dying away from his face, but his voice was still unsteady. He picked up a china cat and examined it minutely. "That's whyЧI expected you to know I wouldn't ever have teased you about drawing. I don't know why I expected you to know. Sometimes you expect people to read your mind. I thought perhaps your dad might have said something, but when I think about it, I know he wouldn't."
"WaitЧWhat has Dad got to do with it?"
"He reads my poems."
"Dad?"
"Yes."
"He's neverЧhe never saidЧ"
"Of course not. I asked him not to tell anyone. I was afraid you'd laugh." The corners of his mouth went up. "That's why it's so funny Е your dad's a good critic."
"I didn't even know he liked poetry. It's notЧ"
"Factual." He shrugged. "Perhaps he doesn't. But he reads mine, when I've got something I think is good. Е I did an essay for one of his classes in a hurry. I wrote it on the back of one of my poems. He said the essay was terrible, but he liked the poem. So
I've been sneaking poems to him ever since. It's good to have someone else's opinion."
Bruce pushed the sides of the box flat. Above him, the study floor creaked; he glanced up as though he could see Uncle Harold through the floorboards. Then he looked at Alexander again, sitting big and loose-limbed among Mrs. Brewster's fragile glassware. "Poetry. Can IЧcan I read some?" "If you want." He looked toward the window. "I think they've stopped for the day. We'd better get the cardboard under the stone and clear out." "Right."
The knuckles stood out white in Alexander's hands as he shifted the stone upward. Bruce slid the cardboard underneath it and it settled again, gently tilted. "Let's put some boxes in front of it to hide it," Alexander said. "Oh. Your mother thinks we've gone fossil-hunting, in case she asks."
Bruce stared at him over a box of books. "Fossil-hunting? In Middleton? Why would she think that?"
"I don't know." He took a box from Carol's arms and added it to the stack in front of their work. "Perhaps it was something I said."
They drew the stone out the next morning after breaking through the rest of the mortar. They pulled the cardboard until the stone balanced delicately half-in, half-out of its place, and Bruce said, "Carol, move back in case we drop it."
She stepped back.
"SteadyЧ" Alexander breathed. They shifted it, breaking the balance, their hands splayed beneath the cardboard. The unexpected weight of it broke through their hands. They jerked away. The stone hit the floor with a dull, ponderous thud and cracked.
Alexander closed his eyes. "How many toes have we got left among us?"
Bruce stared upward. There was no sound from the study. Carol uncurled her bare toes. She looked at the hole they had made, and something in the unbroken darkness behind it drew her forward. She stepped on the stone and pushed her arm through the hole.
"Bruce!"
"Half a minuteЧHere's the lightЧ"
She drew back; he flicked it on over her shoulder. They were silent as the light melted through the darkness, traced an arch across it. Then Bruce's voice came, with a contentment she had never heard before in it, "Vaulted."
Alexander's breath whispered slow next to Carol's ear. An arch of stones ran before them into darkness over an earth floor.
"It's there," Carol whispered. "It's there. It was there all the time. It wasn't a legend. It was really there."
"I wonder if it still goes to the church."
"Shouldn't wonder," Alexander murmured. "I feel small inside. Humble. You've answered a riddle no-
body else could answer. I wish we could squeeze through the hole. I say, BruceЧ"
"What?"
He hesitated, staring into the tunnel. "WhenЧAre you going to tell your Dad, now? He'll have to know, sometime."