"Kate Wilhelm - Dark Door" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

He scrolled the list and went on to something else, then stopped. Camden, he
thought. He had seen something about Camden, Ohio, in the papers recently, and
there was one of the abandoned hotels in Camden. He went back to that list and
found it. Dwyer House, built 1897, closed 1936. Forty-two rooms. Used as an
office building from 1938 to 1944. In litigation from 1944 to 1954. Owned by
Gerstein and Winters Realty Company. Insured for forty thousand. It sounded
almost exactly like the inn that Carson Danvers had been looking for. Wrong
place, but right building. In his mindk eye he saw the wide back porch, Elly
body sprawled, the bloody prints that led up the handsome, curved staircase.'
And he felt again the unseen presence that had swarmed all around him. Saw
again the vacant, mad look on Gary face, the look of homicidal insanity.... He
turned off the computer and went out for a long walk in the city. The next day
he looked up Camden in the library newspaper files. He was no longer shaking,
but instead felt as cold and hard and brittle as an icicle. He found the story
that had caught his eye, the match his mind had made. Mildred Hewlitt had gone
mad and slaughtered several patients in a nursing home on Hanover Street,
where she worked. She had vanished, and so had one of the victims. The hotel,
Dwyer House, was also on Hanover Street. That was what had stopped him. He
walked home and looked up the computer listing for the claim that had first
sent the hairs rising on his arms and neck. Two weeks earlier, a college boy
had gone mad and run his car through a pedestrian mall; he had fled on foot
and vanished. One of the victims had filed a claim; the mainframe had recorded
it. That day Carson Danvers packed a suitcase and left for Camden. He stole an
Ohio license plate from a parked car in a shopping mall, and put it on his car
the morning he reached Camden. He checked into a motel outside town, read the
local paper from the past two days, walked downtown. He chatted with a waiter,
the motel desk clerk, several others. He

did not go to the real estate office. He went to the shopping mall where the
clerks were all ready to talk about the terrible accident. "He came in over
there," a woman said, standing outside a Hallmark shop, pointing to a stretch
of pavement that was barricaded now. A row of wooden planters had been
smashed, store windows were boarded up. "He revved up and came in doing maybe
fifty, sixty miles an hour, screaming like a banshee. My God, people were
flying this way and that! Everyone screaming! Blood everywhere! And he got out
and ran. No one tried to stop him. No one had time to do anything, what with
all the screaming and the blood. He got clean away." Carson shook his head in
disbelief and walked on to a Sears store, where he bought a crowbar and heard
the same story, embellished a little because this time lhe salesman relating
it had not actually seen what happened. He put the crowbar in his car and went
to a K-Mart, where he bought a gas can and flashlight. Then he found his way
to Hanover Street. It started in town, went straight through a subdivision,
and then became a country road very quickly. The nursing home where Mildred
Hewlitt had worked was a few blocks from the subdivision; after that there was
a small store and gas station combined, and then farmland and sparse woods. A
four-lane highway had been built three miles to the south; business had
followed, and Hanover Street was left to the truck farmers. The same as River
House. He drove slowly until he reached the driveway to Dwyer House. There was
a chain across it. The hotel was not visible from the road. The woods had