"Kim Newman - The Serial Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

Lloyd sitting among the cabbages and peas and Lillie Langtry snaring the Prince of Wales, but now
ephemera like this made Page One. Richard sensed another trend in the making, another step downstairs.
From now on, Coronation Street would get more newspaper coverage than coronations, Harold Steptoe would
be more newsworthy than Harold Wilson, and the doings of Barstow and Company would be followed more
intently than those of Barclay's Bank. Eventually, there would only be television. More and more of it,
expanding to fill the unused spaces in the general consciousness.
The Barstows weren't taping this afternoon, so before-cameras talent had time off. Squiers and the writing
pack were conjuring up the next script. June was in her caravan with a nervous ghostwriter, one of a string
employed on her much-delayed autobiography; it seems she ate them up, just as she consumed real ghosts.
Finn, suitably equipped with a dolly bird as "arm ornament," was opening a supermarket in Bradford; "Victoria
Plant" had turned down an offer of ┬г15 to play the lucky girl, diminishing her chances of getting ahead in the
business. Lionel was working on a futile press release to deny all these silly curse rumours.
Richard and Barbara met Vanessa in the Grand Old Duke of North.
Vanessa was perched on a barstool not designed with modern female fashions in mind. Unless she fixed her
tangerine-and-lemon minidress firmly over her hips, it rode up and turned into a vest. She looked down, with
an unjustly critical eye, at her officially lovely legs.
Richard sipped Earl Grey from one of the silver thermos cups in today's Fortnum's hamper and took a
psychic temperature reading. Vanessa and Barbara had hit it off at once, which was a positive. Otherwise,
the Grand Old Duke was a chill place.
The pub, another Barstows standing set, was in the studio's smallest stage. Here, many a "pint of Griddles"
had been called for and swallowed by a Barstow who needed a drink before spitting out the latest news,
usually some bombshell lobbed just before the adverts to keep viewers transfixed as they were
mind-controlled to hire-purchase fridge-freezers, terrorised by the catastrophe of hard-to-shift understains,
warned of things their best friends wouldn't tell them, and urged to buy the world a Coke. Here Ben Barstow
had enjoyed (or perhaps not) a liaison with Blodwyn, the Welsh barmaid who broke up his third marriage and
then died in a plane crash two episodes before his fourth wedding. Here, for weeks and weeks, Da's
kidnapped urn had been hidden in plain sight, in the display case along with clog-dancing, whippet-racing,
and brass-band trophies. There had been a nationwide contest to "spot the ashes," with viewers writing in to
suggest where they might be and newspapers running stories about urns seen in surprising real-life locales
from the Crown Jewel case in the Tower of London to an Olde Junke Shoppe in Margate. Some even sent in
ashes of their own, in homemade or shop-bought urns: most were just from the grates of open fires, but some
contained authentic human bone fragments. It was no wonder the show wound up cursed.
"I think the culprit is the Phantom Phoner," said Vanessa, breaking into his prophetic gloom.
"You think there's a culprit?" asked Barbara.
Vanessa deferred to Richard.
"Sometimes, a curseтАФby which I mean an infestation of malign extranormal phenomenaтАФis like weather or a
bad cold. No one's fault, but hard to do anything about except wait for it to blow over. This happens in more
cases than you hear of. Sometimes, it really is a ghost or a spiritтАФa discarnate, spiteful entity, making
mischief or bearing a grudge, acting on its own accord or directed by a houngan who has summoned or
tapped into a power and is using it for his or her own ends."
"A houngan?" quizzed Barbara.
"Voodoo sorcerer," shuddered Vanessa. "Like Mama Cartouche, remember?"
"It doesn't have to be voodoo," said Richard. "That's an Afro-Caribbean tradition. Europe has more than
enough witchery to go round. Australasia and the Americas too. Everywhere except Antarctica, and that's
only because the Sphinx of the Ice won't allow it. In this case, however, I think we are dealing with something
vaguely voodoo."
"So there is a culprit?"
"I definitely suspect a suspect," said Richard. "Someone is deliberately shaping events, channelling a force,
and, as it happens, charging money for it. What we have here is a hit man, as Fred suggested, but one with
an unusual m.o. Working with The Northern Barstows, through the psychic energy generated by the