"Child Of The Stones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Child of the Stones
By Paul McAuley

* * * *

PAUL MCAULEY LIVES IN North London. He is a winner of the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, Sidewise and British Fantasy Awards for his novels and short stories.

A former university researcher and lecturer in biology, his most recent novel is the biotech thriller White Devils. His Doctor Who novella, The Eye of the Tyger, was published by Telos Books in November 2003, exactly forty years after the author was scared behind the sofa by William HartnellТs minatory Time Lord, and a new short-story collection, Little Machines, is available from PS Publishing.

УChild of the StonesФ is the most recent in a series of stories featuring McAuleyТs enigmatic occult investigator Mr Carlyle. Previous tales have appeared in Best New Horror Volumes Eleven, Twelve and Fourteen.

УMany of my own walks through London follow in the footsteps of Mr Carlyle,Ф reveals the author. УWhile researching this story, I took a long walk up the River Thames, past Cheyne Walk, where there are possibly more blue plaques attached to houses in commemoration of famous former residents than in any other street in London. But thereТs still one notable resident who isnТt acknowledged: isnТt it time that Bram Stoker, father of Dracula, got his own plaque?Ф

* * * *

AT NIGHT, THE PAST has a stronger hold on London than the present. The urgent beat of daily business stalls and drifts backwards. The cityТs inhabitants lock themselves in the prisons of their homes and the vacant streets stretch away in every direction under the thin orange glow cast by long, regular lines of street lamps, their silence haunted by echoes of the dramas of past generations. But some of LondonТs streets are never quiet. Queensway; Hyde Park Corner; Old Compton Street in Soho; the streets around Victoria Station; the Embankment; Upper Street in Islington: people are drawn to these places at night, and it is to these unsleeping streets that many of the dead are also drawn, by habit, hunger, and forlorn curiosity. Lately, it was where I spent most of my nights, too, walking amongst the living and the dead. Although the matter of the dead has been my business for as long as I have lived in London, during those nocturnal rambles I was interested not in the ghosts, imps, and other ordinary revenants I encountered, but in what they might attract. Six months previously, I had discovered that there were new and terrible things awakening into the world. Things that preyed on the dead, and drew strength from them; things that were beginning to prey on the living. Lions and tigers and bears. The unsleeping streets where the cities of the living and the dead intersected were beginning to draw the attention of these new predators, just as a watering hole in the African veldt draws the big cats that prey on the buffalo and zebra and gazelles that come there to drink. It was while I was mapping this strange new bestiary that I discovered that not only monsters were awakening in these strange times. And a door onto my past opened and an old enemy stepped through it.
* * * *
Islington, Upper Street, summer, two hours past midnight:

A bare-chested young man with a bright green Mohican haircut, his arms ropy with tattoos and track marks, was sitting in the doorway of an estate agentТs office and sharing a can of lager with a young woman in a ragged black dress and army boots. Imps clustered around their eyes like tiny scorpions, pale, articulated, and fat with the venom of heroin dreams.

In another doorway, a man slept jackknifed under a filthy blanket, guarded by a starveling mongrel who looked at me calmly when I dropped a couple of pound coins beside his masterТs head. The man, an old acquaintance, stirred and without waking mumbled, УMr Carlyle. Take care.Ф

It was good advice, and I should have taken it. For the past three nights, I had been intercepted by a pair of men in an immaculately restored blood-red Mark 1 Jaguar. Each night, the big car had purred up to me as I was making my way home, and the man in the passenger seat had leaned at the open window and spoken to me about a book in my possession, a rare volume that his employer wished to buy. Each night he had offered more money for the book, and each night I had refused his offer. I knew that sooner or later he would try another tactic - most probably some kind of violence. I had not yet seen the Jaguar that night, but I was certain it would appear before I gained the safety of my house, and anticipation of that encounter was like an electric itch at the back of my neck.

A club was closing a little way down the street. People stumbled past two black-suited bouncers into the night. A woman in a short white dress hunched on the kerb, crying. Another woman in an even shorter white dress had an arm around her shoulder and was trying to comfort her, unaware of imps clustered in her friendТs hair, thick as fleas on a sick cat. A woman pulled away from a man in a grey suit, tried and failed to hail a passing taxi, and walked away unsteadily while he shouted insults at her, angry black sparks jumping around his face. Three men in football shirts, arms linked around each otherТs waists, walked past me with the mechanical stagger of the very drunk. When I stepped aside to let them pass, the outermost gave me a flat stare that suddenly clouded with confusion when I pinched out the jagged little thing that had prompted his hostility.

Even as I completed the gesture, something caught my eye on the other side of the road. A small, scant figure slouched in the doorway of a restaurant, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a grey top, its hood drawn over a baseball cap. An imp as fat and sleek as a graveyard rat crouched on his shoulder, the end of its long tail knotted around his wrist.

I felt a prick of curiosity, and walked on for a little way before crossing the road, doubling back and finding a vantage point of my own in the doorway of another restaurant. An old woman drifted out of the wedge of darkness behind me. She wore an old-fashioned bonnet and a shawl over a ragged black dress, and was so thin I could see right through her. Cast off long ago by an out-of-work seamstress whoТd starved to death in some nearby attic or basement, this ghost was familiar, harmless, and occasionally useful to me. I asked her about the figure lurking in the doorway up the street, but she knew nothing about him, knew only that she was weak with hunger, if she could only get something to eat she would be as right as rain. I brushed her aside over and again, as an ordinary man might fan away smoke, and each time she forgot my dismissal and drifted back, hoping that I was the kind of gent who might oblige with a penny or two toward the necessary, it had been so very long since sheТd had so much as a crust to chew. At last, the hooded figure stepped out of his doorway and set off down the street. When I started after him, the poor little ghost trailed after me for only a few steps before retreating to her haunt.

The hooded fellow was following an unsteady couple who, with their arms around each other, wove south down Upper Street, pausing to embrace and kiss at the point of Islington GreenТs triangle before turning along Camden Passage. He slouched along with hands in his pockets, stopping whenever they stopped to kiss, pausing at each street corner to check the lie of the land before moving on. Anyone else would have thought him no more than an ordinary cutpurse or thug intent on robbery or some other mischief, for they could not have seen the fat imp squatting on his left shoulder. I wondered if this young cutpurse was possessed by it, or if it was a kind of pet or familiar. And if it was a familiar, how had he tamed it, and for what purpose?

With mounting curiosity and more than a little eagerness, I followed the cutpurse as he tracked the couple through a street of early Victorian houses that ran parallel to the Grand Union canal. (A man sat on the steps of one of the houses, sobbing over the bloody hammer in his lap; a woman stood at the window of another, her face a mask of triumph and despair as she cradled a babyТs skeleton to her breast.) The couple waltzed around the corner at the end of the street; the cutpurse paused for a moment before following them. I heard loud, angry voices disturb the profound quiet of the night, and hurried after him, pausing where he had paused, peeking around the corner. The road crossed the canal a few dozen yards ahead; the couple stood at the crown of the bridge, confronting their pursuer. A locked gate to one side of the bridge guarded an access ramp to the canal towpath, and something lurked in the shadows there. It was the revenant of something or someone very old and, once upon a time, very powerful. It was possessed by an appalling hunger, and its attention was fixed on the imp that squatted on the cutpurseТs shoulder.

The girl was telling him to leave her alone, her voice ringing shrill in the night. She was fifteen or sixteen, wearing a skimpy top and a short skirt that left her belly bare. Her fists shook on either side of her face. She was angry and afraid. УJust piss off, all right? It ainТt anything to do with you.Ф

Her companion, a shaven-headed, thuggish man in his thirties, took a step forward and threatened violence, but the cutpurse stood his ground. The imp on his shoulder vibrated with a sudden eager pulse, like a clockwork toy wound too tight. A nimbus of spiky black energies crackled around it, as a dog will bristle before it bites, while its master told the girl that she was making a mistake. УYou shouldnТt be going with him, Liz. It ainТt right.Ф His voice was high-pitched but steady and sincere, and it was exactly the wrong thing to say.

УLeave her alone, you little freak,Ф LizТs shaven-headed companion said. He took two quick steps and threw a punch.

The cutpurse dodged the blow and flung out his left arm, like a hawker loosing his bird of prey. For all its sleek bulk, the imp was quick and eager, and flew straight at the manТs face. But the thing behind the gate was quicker still. It had a long smooth pale neck and a small head with jaws that disarticulated like a snakeТs, stretching wide and snapping the fat imp from the air and gulping it down whole. The cutpurse, connected by the impТs tail to the revenant which had devoured it, yelped with shock; the girlТs companion saw his chance and hit him square in the face. The cutpurse sat down flat, his hood fell down and his baseball cap fell off, and I saw that he was a girl, with a thin pale face and blonde hair unevenly hacked short.

The revenantТs ghastly head quested towards her; she screamed and tried to pull away. The shaven-headed man, completely unaware of the apparition, kicked her in the side, and would have kicked her again if I had not stepped out, drawing my blade from my hollow cane.

УYou have to be fucking kidding,Ф the man said, staring at the yard of engraved steel in my right hand.

I stepped up and with a short stroke severed the umbilicus that linked the cutpurse to the revenant. It slurped up the cut end like a length of spaghetti and turned towards me. Whatever human qualities it might once have possessed had worn away long ago, leaving little more than a blind, bottomless appetite. For a moment, as I menaced it with my blade and tried and failed to dismiss it, it stood within my head, and I was jolted by a sudden, freezing headache. It reared back and stared at me; then its tiny, wide-mouthed head, like that of some species of deep-sea fish all maw and stomach, whipped sideways and snapped at the cutpurse.

УYour familiar,Ф I said, countering the revenantТs quick, sinuous moves with my blade. УIt wants whatТs left of your familiar.Ф