"Patricia A. McKillip - The Gorgon in the Cupboard" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

"Please? Harry?"
"Well." He got to his feet again, dusted off his trousers, yawning now and forgetting why he had come up. "I'll
think about it. Good night."
"Good night, Harry."
He closed the cupboard door and went to bed.
The next morning, his ambition inflamed by what the gallery seemed to think worth hanging, he ate his breakfast
hastily and early. He would not come home without his Medusa, he was determined, even if he had to search the
ravaged streets and slums for her. No, he told Mrs. Grommet, she should not expect him home before evening. If then.
He would go as far as he must to find his inspiration, even as far, he admitted in his inmost heart, as the country, to see
if he might find that unexpected face in Aurora's shadow.
He got as far as the street. He paused to latch the garden gate behind him and was turned to stone.
A woman appeared out of nowhere, it seemed. She murmured something to him; he hardly knew what. He looked
at her and time stopped. The normal street noises of passing carriages, birds, doors opening, voices calling, simply
vanished. He heard the faint hum of his own blood in his ears and recognized it as a constant, unchanging sound out of
antiquity. The sound heard when all else is silent nothing moves.
Her face was all bone and shadow, full of stark paradoxes: young yet ancient with experience, beautiful yet
terrifying with knowledge, living yet somehow alive no longer. Whatever those great, wide-set eyes had seen had left a
haunting starkness in them that riveted him where he stood. She spoke again. She might have been speaking Etruscan,
for all the words made sense to Harry. Her mouth held the same contradictions: it was lovely, its grim line warned of
horror, it hungered, it would never eat again.
Sound washed over him again: a delivery wagon, a yowling cat, a young housemaid chasing after it down the
street. He heard his stammering voice. "WhereтАФwhere did you come from?"
She gestured. Out of a tree, out of the sky, her hand said. She was very poorly dressed, he realized: her thin, tight
jacket torn at both elbows, the hem of her skirt awash with dried mud, her shoes worn down and beginning to split.
She spoke again, very slowly, as if to a young child, or a man whose wits had badly strayed.
"I wondered if you had some work for me, sir. If maybe you could use me for your paintings. Anything will do.
Any amount of timeтАФ"
One of his hands closed convulsively above her elbow; his other hand pulled the gate open.
"Oh, yes," he said unsteadily. "Oh, yes. Miss. Whoever youтАФ"
"Jo, sir."
"Jo. Come in." He swept her down the walk, threw the door wide, and shouted, "Mrs. Grommet! Mrs. Grommet!
We need you!"


"YOU have lice," Mrs. Grommet said.
Jo, hearing her within a cascade of lukewarm water, thought her voice sounded simply matter-of-fact. The kitchen
maid stopped pouring water, began to pass a hard, lumpy bar of soap over Jo's wet hair. It took time to work up a
lather.
"I'm not surprised," Jo murmured. She knelt in her tattered chemise beside a huge tub, allowing Mrs. Grommet the
sight of her cracked, filthy feet. She could only hope that whatever vision had possessed Mr. Waterman to let her in the
house would not be washed down the drain. But, she told herself coldly, if that happens then I will be no worse than I
was before, and at least I will be clean.
"Go on, girl," the housekeeper said. "Give it a good scrub. Pretend you're doing the front steps."
"There's such a lot of it," the maid ventured. Jo closed her eyes, felt the blunt, vigorous fingers work away at her
until she imagined herself underwater, floating in some river god's grip, being flailed back and forth like water weed.
"Rinse now," Mrs. Grommet ordered, and the water flowed again, copious and mercilessly cold. "There," the
housekeeper said at last with satisfaction. "That should do it."
Freed, Jo straightened. The maid tossed a towel over her head and began to pummel her again.
"Go and boil some water," Mrs. Grommet told her. She added to Jo when the girl had gone, "Sometimes they work
and sometimes they don't, these new hot water pipes. He didn't recognize you, did he?"