"Sean McMullen - Slow Famine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

"Why yes. I'm not as young as I look and besides, I-- I'm American. I was brought up on the Western
Plains. Sir, I shot two outlaws and five wolves before I was fifteen. When my parents died of cholera I
decided to make a clean break and start a new life on the other side of the world."
If you are going to lie, be magnificent. Dobson assigned me a room and gave me a key just as the
constables returned. Hooper was gone, they reported, but Mr. Maynard's room was open and the key
was in the door. If Hooper had used Maynard's key, how did he come by it and what had been
Maynard's fate? I said that where I came from we would just hunt down a varmint like Hooper and shoot
him, then I retired to my new room before anyone realised that I had but a single bag for my luggage.
***


Thus did I end my second day in Melbourne Town, yet I was not to leave there for another twenty
three years. In that time I first became the successful licensee of my own hotel, then made a fortune
during the gold rush of the 1850s. I established a charity for the town's harlots, helping the living find
other work and managing the business of the dead-- including Ang├йlique as Mother Newberry. Thus did
I watch and wait, killing all raptors who arrived and asked after her. By this year of 1865 I have the
argentor daggers of five raptors in a lead lined casket in my bedchamber safe. One raptor even arrived
with two vampyres in crates lined with argentor metal... and the folk of Melbourne Town marvelled at
how I suddenly seemed ten years younger.
For all this, I am not happy. The guards have betrayed the guarded. Some raptors had betrayed
humanity to preserve their own kind of immortality, yet if raptors should die out while a few vampyres
linger, then who would stop their spread in the years that followed? Was Ang├йlique right to do what she
did? Should I do the same, am I making lame excuses to cling to immortality? Every year I ask those
questions at her graveside, and her own death is always her reply. As each new grey hair appears amid
my auburn curls, that reply becomes more convincing. While I was Maynard I grew old for the first time
in 900 years, and I did not like it at all.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. ( http://www.alexlit.com/ )

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