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

Too many people with talents went bad.
Look at Marcus Squiers. Obviously, the fellow had some raw abilities, or he'd never have been able to co-opt
the arcana to a criminal venture. He could have used the influence of The Northern Barstows over the viewing
public for good. Or he could have left well enough alone and concentrated on making better TV programmes.
"I wonder if he hit on this by accident," Barbara said on Monday morning as they sat on the studio lawn. They
watched Leslie and Gaye, who had grown close over the last fortnight, console each other before the taping of
the worst-concealed surprise twist in Barstows historyтАФtheir deaths. "I keep thinking of Brenda's black baby.
The way apparently the whole audience changed opinion when Mavis did. That might have been when it
started."
"There was Karen Finch," said Richard.
"She must have been the first victim. The Bogus Brenda was her doll. What happened to BB on the
programme happened to her in life. Not killed, but certainly her options were limited."
"Barbara?" he held her hand.
"Yes?"
"I won't let him murder us. What we did this weekend will work. In the end, Squiers is an amateur and I am a
professional."
From the corner of his eye, he saw Leslie and Gaye embracing, in tears.
He kissed Barbara and thought, for a moment, he knew how she felt.
Then it was gone again, and he found himself looking at her face and wondering.
"You know," she said. "I can never tell what you're thinking."
"Good. I'd hate to spoil any more surprises."
She laughed, like the sun coming out.
"So, do you want to watch our heads getting chopped off?"
"Why not?"
He took her arm, and they walked across the lawn, toward the stage. As they passed, Leslie and Gaye were
brushing grass strands off their costumes and getting it together to undergo their career-ending ordeal.
"Cheer up," Richard told them, "it might never happen."
"Easy for you to say," snarled Leslie Veneer, with more feeling than any of his line-readings. "You're not the
Bloody God of Bleeds."
They arrived on the stage before Leslie and Gaye, andтАФas had become tediously predictableтАФan assistant
director was hustling them onto the set when the real actors arrived. Everyone's identities got sorted out.
Gerard Loss was nowhere to be seen. Marcus Squiers was directing this scene himself, wearing his rarely
seen director's hatтАФa baseball cap. He sat on a high chair like a tennis umpire and wielded the sort of
megaphone Cecil B. DeMille had been fond of until talking pictures came in.
Squiers was surprised to see Richard and Barbara but nodded at them with the kind of magnanimous
admiration only someone who thought he'd long since won could show for an already mortally wounded foe he
was about to decapitate. Richard waved cheerily back.
Almost all the episode had been taped on Friday. Roget and Canberra were shown up as yet more
confidence tricksters (a habitual Barstows plot tic). It turned out they were in with Ben Barstow and had been
faking the haunting in order to extort a fortune from MavisтАФbut this had raised the real angry spirit of Da
Barstow, who was about to get his revenge.
Clarence "Gore" Gurney, a special effects man who usually worked on cinema films about Satanic accidents,
was hired in at great expenseтАФand with resentful grumbling from the O'D-S makeup peopleтАФto supervise the
Decapitation of Roget Masterman and, to vary things, the Exploding Head of Canberra Laurinz. Realistic
dummies, faces contorted in frozen screams, were held in waiting, tubes and wires fed into slit holes in the
backs of their clothes. Richard assumed the dummies now wore the clothes filched from his and Barbara's
closets. At last, here were proper voodoo dolls, with hairs stolen from brushes applied to the heads. Tara,
exceeding her wardrobe job, was helping Gurney set up the effects.
Barbara kept looking at the dummies, struck by the terror on her own faked face.
Leslie and Gaye only had to flounder screaming around the set while Dudley-as-Ben begged Da for