"Mervyn Peake - Danse Macabre" - читать интересную книгу автора (Peake Mervyn)

revolve, without a sound.
I cannot recall with any exactness what thoughts possessed me during the
interminable turning of that brass knob. All I know is that what febrile thoughts
I had were soaked in fear, so that my brain began to sweat no less than my
body. But I could not turn my eyes away, nor close them. I could only watch as
the cupboard door itself began to sway slowly open with hideous deliberation
until it lay wide to the moon-filled room.
And then it happened ... happened in the stillness when not so much as the
call of a little owl from the nearby woods or a sigh in the leaves, disturbed the
small hours of that summer night, when my dress clothes on their hanger sailed
slowly out of the depths of the wardrobe and with infinite smoothness came to a
rest in mid-air immediately before my dressing table.
So unexpected, so ludicrous was this, that it was a wonder I did not lose my
nerve and scream. But the terror was caught in my throat and I made no sound
but continued to watch as the trousers slid from the cross-bar of the hanger until
their extremities were no more than a couple of inches from the floor, in which
position they remained, loose and empty. No sooner had this happened than an
agitation at the shoulders made it plain that the white waistcoat and the long
black tailcoat were trying to dislodge themselves from the hanger and then, all
at once they were free, and the hanger, leaving behind it in the room a headless,
handless, footless spectre, floated into the depths of the cupboard and the door
closed upon it.
By now the limp arms, for all their lack of hands, appeared in dumbshow to
be knotting a white tie about a white collar, and then, most strange of all, the
empty figure at the next moment was leaning forward in mid-air at an angle of
thirty degrees from the floor flinging the limp sleeves forward as though about
to dive and with a whisk of the "tails" it floated across the room and out of the
window.
Before I knew what I was doing I had reached the window and was just in
time to see far away beyond the lawn, my dress clothes skimming their way
towards the oak wood where they disappeared into the darkness beneath the
trees.
How long I stood staring down across the lawn to the long dense margin of
the oak wood I do not know, nor yet, when at last I returned across the room,
how long I stared at the knob on the wardrobe door, before I had the courage to
grip it and turn it and fling it open. I only know that at last I did so and saw the
naked wooden hanger suspended there.
At last I slammed the door upon them and turned my back upon the
cupboard. I began to pace the room in a fever of fearful foreboding. At last I
fell exhausted upon my bed. It was only when dawn broke that I fell into a
clammy sleep.
When I awoke it was past mid-day. The countryside was alive with familiar
sounds; the squabbling of sparrows in the ivy outside the window; a dog
barking and the drone of a tractor several fields across and listening
half-asleep, it was a full minute before I recollected the nightmare I had
suffered. Of course it was a nightmare! What else could it have been? With a
short laugh I flung the bedclothes from me and got to my feet and began to dress.
It was only when I was about to open the wardrobe door that I paused for a
moment. The dream had been too vivid to be entirely disregarded even in the
same light of a summer day but again 1 laughed, and the sound of my own