"Warrington, Freda - A Taste of Blood Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Warrington Freda)
David glanced at him, mildly alarmed. He had hoped that Edward's delusion had been momentary. "Steady onЧ"
"No." Edward's voice was tight but calm. "You know I have these feelings about people sometimes. I don't want them, I can't explain them, but haven't they always proved right? I'm not hysterical. Look." He lifted a hand off his knee and held it level. "Trembling a bit but I'm as normal as I'll ever be, in the cold light of day. I will say it again. It's nothing to do with the War or myЧmy troubles. Karl von Wultendorf isЧ" He gave a shake of his head. "It does sound too crazy, doesn't it? But I'm deadly serious, old man. Whatever he is, he's dangerous. Please watch out for your family, David, before it's too late."
Chapter Five
Touching the Light
Karl could step into a dimension that lay aslant from the corporeal world and move through a whirling landscape in which light seemed solid and rock ran like liquid. Through the Crystal Ring he travelled to distant parts of the countryЧto a different place each timeЧto step out of nothingness and feed on some stranger whose face and life meant nothing to him. Then he would vanish again and return to Cambridge, to masquerade as a human being before the kindly, unsuspecting Nevilles. He had not anticipated the pleasure he found in working with them and talking with them, absorbing knowledge and ideas with a thirst almost as great as the need for blood. Another kind of vampirism. And they gave so much, so willingly.
Soon after Karl arrived in Cambridge, Dr Neville showed him round the city, and Karl drank in its grandeur and beauty with a delight that felt like love. It was almost like being human again. Neville took him into Trinity College Chapel, and there Karl stood gazing at the great statues of Newton and Tennyson and Bacon, timeless in the sombre grey light.
You are dead, but in your effigies you are preserved forever, larger than life, he thought. My flesh is as unyielding as your marble, but I still move and see and thinkЕ Different kinds of immortality. Yet acid would eat you, cold would crack your substanceЕ
"We come to chapel regularly," Dr Neville was saying. "You are welcome to come with us, naturally."
"Thank you, but I would rather not," Karl replied. "I am not a church-goer."
Dr Neville looked shocked, but recovered himself quickly. "Oh. Well, no obligation to come if you don't want to."
"Do scientists still believe in God, in these days?"
"I can't speak for the others, but I've no time for this intellectual fashion of questioning His existence. There is more in this universe than science can account for, believe me."
"That is certainly true," said Karl.
"The very fact that nature works according to the laws of pure mathematics, and that our brains are capable of understanding those laws, indicates that there must be a mind behind everything. As Einstein puts it, the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
"But perhaps we comprehend the world as it is, because if it were any different we would not be here to see it."
Dr Neville gave Karl a shrewd look, amused but sharp. "Not a blasted atheist, are you?"
"I was brought up as a Catholic," said Karl, "but now I could only describe myself as an agnostic."
"Can't make your mind up, eh?"
"Let us say I prefer to keep an open mind." Karl smiled. "And do you also believe in the Devil, sir?"
George Neville snorted. "Not the sort with horns and a tail. But yes, I definitely believe in the power of evil."
Karl moved away from him, looking through the screens into the main body of the chapel. It was stately and hushed, seeming in its simple dignity more spiritual than any cathedral.
They went out into Trinity's Great Court, where sunlight gleamed on golden-beige stone and moisture glittered on the wide expanses of grass.
"Even if science finds all the answers," Dr Neville went on as they walked, "it would not prove that God does not exist. On the contrary, if we ever achieve the ultimate object of our search, the grand unifying principle of nature, it might prove that He does. But we are very far from it. I hold that the chief achievement of physics in this century is not the theory of relativity or quantum theory, but the recognition that we are still not in touch with ultimate reality. Ah, to find one sweeping theory that encompasses everythingЕ "
Karl was thoughtful, reflecting on how vast Dr Neville's ambition wasЕ and yet how blinkered. There is a whole dimension and layer of existence of which you know nothing! He said, "How could there ever be a grand unifying principle, when there exist creatures in this world that defy the laws of nature?"
"What creatures?"
Karl knew he should not have broached the subject, but the physicist's complacency goaded him. "I speak hypothetically, of course; but suppose there were beings that could see things that are meant to be invisible. The wind, and the magnetic fields of the earth."
Dr Neville looked puzzled, but rose to the challenge. "First I would question what it is that they think they can actually see. We may think we can see the wind, but in fact we are only seeing certain indicators; clouds moving, trees leaning in a certain direction, debris flying through the air. An artists knows all the tricks to use to paint the invisible, so we can look at a landscape and say, 'Can't you just see the wind?' Likewise, if you scatter iron filings in the field of a magnet, the patterns you see are not the actual lines of force but only the indicator of where they are."
"That is the viewpoint of human experience," said Karl. "Yet what if there were a being outside your experience, that could actually perceive the atmosphere as dense enough to touch? Suppose I could see shape and colour in it; that I could walk upon it, as a man walks across hills. And suppose the magnetism of the earth also became tangible to me so that I could navigate by it as I walked on the wind. How could the laws of physics explain such a change in nature?"
"Ah. If such a creature could be proved to exist, by theory or experiment, I would question whether it was the world that had changed, or your perception of it. An observer on the ground might notice that it was what had changedЧthat your body had become thinner and lighter than air, so much so that air seemed solid to you. And perhaps this ratified form is deflected by magnetism, as atomic particles are."
Karl was pleasantly surprised that Dr Neville had not dismissed his apparently bizarre question. "Yet I do not in turn see the observer as a proportionately dense and solid body, but rather as a gathering of light and heat. Of energy."
Dr Neville was filling his pipe as they walked. "Well, that is akin to the paradox of relativity. A pilot flying his plane at close to the speed of light, lying flat in the line of flight, would appear to observers on the ground to have become a dwarf. Yet if he looks in a mirror in the cockpit, he sees no change in his own appearance; to him, it's the folk on the ground who look flattened out."
Karl was amused. "So, perhaps this impossible situation could be explained by relativity after all."
"My dear fellow, everything is a question of relativity. There is nothing in the universe that is not happening or moving in relation to everything else." Dr Neville paused to light the pipe, puffing out haloes of smoke. "We are hanging by our feet from a globe that is falling around the sun at twenty miles a second. Meanwhile the sun is moving away from its fellow starsЧor are they moving away from us?Чwhile the entire solar system is rushing all of a piece through empty space. It's enough to make one reach for the brandyЕ Why are you smiling?"
"Because you answered my question without seeming to think it at all strange."
"I'm not sure if that is a virtue or a weakness," said Dr Neville. "The more bizarre a problem is, the more it engages my imagination. But I haven't answered it, by the way; doubtless the more I thought about it, the further I would be from an answer."
Karl said quietly, "My experience, exactly."
***
Within a few weeks of returning to Cambridge, Charlotte began to fear that she was going mad.
Whatever she believed about ghosts, she was not fey or gullible; she knew the presences she had sometimes sensed could be as much a product of her mind as of reality. There was no explanation for the apparition she saw in the middle of a bright October morning, except that the strain of her life was eroding her sanity.
She had delivered a message from her father to the Cavendish Laboratory, glad of a chance to escape the house. As she came out of the dark archway into Free School LaneЧthe laboratory standing sternly behind her and the grimy monasterial walls of Corpus Christi College in frontЧshe saw a man standing in the side gateway to the college. Something about him caught her attention, a quality of stillness that reminded her of Karl. But his eyes seemed too large, set too wide apart, and he was staring at her with a look of malevolent amusement that chilled her to the bone. She only looked back for a second or two and then he vanished. Literally vanished, flicked out of existence as if he had never been there.
Charlotte stared at the empty gateway then reeled away, half-running along the lane to King's Parade. There she slowed down and walked in a daze, surrounded by the hiss of bicycles and the flapping of black gowns, letting the bustle ease her back into reality. Opposite were the spires and arched windows of King's College, solid and enduring yet seeming light as honeycomb, only lightly tethered to the ground. Risking injury between the weaving bicycles she hurried across the road and into King's Chapel. There was no one inside. She sat down, folded her hands, and prayed.
She knew Corpus Christi was meant to be haunted, but by a ghost of the seventeenth century, not the twentieth. The modern, cruel-eyed young man was so vivid in her mind that she could recall the folds of his scarf and the tilt of his hatЕ yet he had disappeared. Why am I seeing things? Lord, please help meЕ
The chapel calmed her. The slender lines of stone soaring up to the intricately fanned ceiling, the windows crackled with jewel-bright colours, pierced her with their beauty. Was it God she felt here, or was it only the way the light and air gathered dawn-golden under the branching vault; the echo of all the thousands of souls who had filed in and out through the ages, the power of the kings who had built it? She didn't know. To sit in the silence and the light while she gathered her thoughts was enough.
She had envisioned her father's laboratory, her refuge no longer, becoming a cage of lions. In reality it had all been quite ordinary, externally at least, and she had fallen back into the pattern of work as if nothing had happened. Inside, though, the changes and the effort of suppressing her anxiety were wearing her thin.
Outwardly, Henry was still the same unthreatening figure; bulky, untidy, forever pushing his spectacles along the bridge of his nose as he worked. Yet the knowledge that he was to be her husband imbued his every movement with an intangible significance. It seemed so unreal. Previously she had been at ease with him, but now she felt as if she had wronged him, or owed him some enormous debt. Whatever this feeling was, it was not love.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |