"Patricia A. McKillip - The House on Parchment Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

Carol drew a slow breath. They were climbing the last part of the stairway, that led to the rooms beneath
the roof. "My father gave me a silver dollar once that was made in 1887. That was old, to me."
Uncle Harold smiled. "You live in a young country." They reached the landing. There were two small
rooms, one on each side of the hall. "This is where the maid and the cook would sleep, if we had them.
Now they're Mrs. Brewster's storage rooms."
Carol went into one. She knelt down on the window-seat between the thick walls, and looked out. Uncle
Harold unlatched the window and opened it. The scent of cool grass mingled with his sweet pipe smoke.
A single star hung beyond the high dark tower of the church.
"It's so quietтАж ."
"Mm."
"At home, there's a freeway running near our house. I can hear trucks on it even late at night." She
looked down. "I wonder how Emily Raison can stand living in a graveyard."
"It doesn't seem to bother her. She doesn't like dogs, or cows in fields when she goes blackberry picking,
but she's not afraid of graves. There's no reason to be. The people in them lived in the same world you
and I live in, and often their thoughts about it were not very different from ours. Well. You've seen
everything except the cellar and the gardener's shed andтАФ" Carol turned. "There's a cellar? I've never
been in one."
"Good heavens. Come along, then. I should go
down anyway and get coal to feed the stove tonight."
"Do you leave it on all night?"
"Oh, yes. It would take hours to heat it up properly
every morning." He switched on the hall light as they
went downstairs, and said meditatively, "I can't decide
which Catherine hates most: the stove or the stone
floor in the hall. It is dreadfully cold during winter."
He stopped in the kitchen to get the coal bucket,
then led her to a little door behind the main staircase.
She smelted cold stones and damp earth as he opened it. He switched on the light, and she saw narrow,
worn stone steps leading to a great black mountain of coal at the bottom. She followed him down and

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looked around as he cracked coal bricks with the edge of the can. There were two rooms beyond the coal
room; in the first one she found a freezer and a water tank and a cat licking itself on a pile of rags.
Its eyes caught light from the coal room and blazed at her like cut amber. Then they vanished as the cat
turned and slipped silently into the third room. Carol followed it.
"I didn't know you had a cat." She crouched at the doorway and called it softly. "We don't."
"There's one down here."
"Is there? They slip in, sometimes, through the broken windows. Emily Raison's cat Geraldine had a
litter of six down here once. Is it calico?"
"No. It's black. It's male." She called it again, her voice high, coaxing, and it moved across a table of old
china and fragile figurines so smoothly it seemed only a shadow. It faded imperceptibly into the
shadows, and she blinked, suddenly finding nothing to call. She moved into the room, looking behind
stacks of boxes of books, old picture frames, more china. The grey cellar stones in the twilight were
thick and old as the stones of the outer wall of the house. She saw a movement out of the comer of her
eye, and turned toward the window. She saw beneath it the slow fading of a man walking into the wall.
The touch of Uncle Harold's hand on her shoulder jolted her. She shivered.
"I called you," he said gently. "You didn't hear me."
She looked up at him. His face was calm, familiar behind his pipe. The full coal bucket was in his hand.