"A. E. Merritt - Creep, Shadow!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

"That's the chap."

I said: "I'll be there. I'd like to meet him."

"Good," said Bill. "Dinner's at 7:30. Wear your dinner jacket. And come an hour ahead of time. There's a
girl who wants to talk to you before the company comes, as we used to say."

"A girl?" I asked, astonished.

"Helen," said Bill with a chuckle. "And don't you disappoint her. You're her hero." He hung up.

Helen was Bill's sister. About ten years younger than I. I hadn't seen her for fifteen years. An impish sort
of kid, I recalled. Eyes sort of slanting and yellow brown. Hair a red torch. Gawky when I saw her last
and inclined to be fat. Used to follow me around when I was visiting Bill during college vacations, and sit
and stare at me without speaking until it made me so nervous I stuttered. Never could tell whether it was
silent adoration or sheer deviltry. That was when she was about twelve. Nor could I forget how she had
led me, apparently innocently, to sit on a subterranean nest of hornets; nor the time when, going to bed, I
had found it shared by a family of garter snakes. The first might have been an accident, although I had my
doubts, but the second wasn't. I had dumped the snakes out the window and never by word, look, or
gesture referred to it, having my reward in the child's bafflement at my reticence and her avid but
necessarily mute curiosity. I knew she had gone through Smith and had been studying art in Florence. I
wondered what she had grown to be.

I read over some of de Keradel's papers at the Academy of Medicine Library next day. He was a queer
bird without doubt, with some extraordinarily arresting theories. I didn't wonder that the Salpetriere had
eased him out. Stripped of their scientific verbiage, the framework of his main idea was startlingly like that
expounded to me by the Many-Times-Born Abbot of the Lamasery at Gyang-tse, in Tibet. A holy man
and an accomplished wonder-worker, a seeker of knowledge along strange paths, what would be
loosely called by the superstitious--a sorcerer. Also by a Greek priest near Delphi whose Christian cloak
covered a pure case of pagan atavism. He offered to demonstrate his hypothesis, and did. He nearly
convinced me. Indeed, visualizing again what he had made me see, I was not sure that he hadn't
convinced me.

I began to feel a strong interest in this Dr. de Keradel. The name was Breton, like my own, and as
unusual. Another recollection flitted through my mind. There was a reference to the de Keradels in the
chronicles of the de Carnacs, as we were once named. I looked it up. There had been no love lost
between the two families, to put it mildly. Altogether, what I read blew my desire to meet Dr. de Keradel
up to fever point.

I was half an hour late getting to Dr. Lowell's. The butler showed me into the library. A girl got up from a
big chair and came toward me with hand outstretched.

"Hello, Alan," she said.

I blinked at her. She wasn't so tall, but her body had all the lovely contours the sculptors of Athens'
Golden Age gave their dancing girls. The provocative dress of filmy black she wore hid none of them.
Her hair was burnished copper and helmeted her small head. The heavy chignon at the nape of her neck
showed she had resisted the bob. Her eyes were golden amber, and tilted delicately. Her nose was small
and straight and her chin rounded. Her skin was not the creamy white that so often goes with red heads,
but a delicate golden. It was a head and face that might have served as the model for one of Alexander's