"Kim Wilkins - The Autumn Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilkins Kim)

Not human bones?

No. The thought is as repulsive to me as it was to the British journalist. As is the thought of animal bones;
I bear no grudge against our four-legged companions. Not human bones, not animal bones. A rarer
medium: faery bones. The bones of faeries I have killed.

Because, you see, I have a measureless loathing for faeries. And I am the Faery Hunter.

PART ONE
There is nobody at home. Autumn fills the rooms, Moonbright sonata.

And the awakening at the edge of the twilit forest. "Hohenburg," Georg Trakl



The water started to boil, and the flesh fell away from the bones, so he took the bones out and put them
on the slab; he knew not, however, in which order they should go, and arranged everything in a big
muddle.

"Brother Lustig," Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

CHAPTER ONE



Please don't make me remember, please don't make me remember. Inevitable, however. Christine
had known from the moment the man had glanced at her business card, his eyebrows shooting up.

"Starlight. That's an unusual surname."

"Mm-hm."

"You're not any relation to Alfa and Finn Starlight? The seventies pop stars?"

Pop stars! Her parents had considered themselves musicians, poets, artists. "Yeah, I'm their daughter."
Amazingly, her voice came out smooth, almost casual. She didn't need this today; she was already feeling
unaccountably melancholy.

"Oh. Oh, I'm soтАж"

"Sorry?"
"Yes. Yes, I'm very sorry."

Because he knew, as most people did, that Alfa and Finn Starlight had died in a horrific car accident
from which their teenage daughter had been the only survivor. Suddenly there was no point in resisting
anymore: she was back there. The English Bookshop on Ludwigkirchplatz, its long shelves and neat
carpet squares, spun down to nothing in her perception; it was all blood and metal and ground glass and
every horror that those evil, stubborn thirty-five seconds of consciousness had forced her to witness.

"I'm sorry too," she said. Her lower back twinged in sympathy with the remembrance. She wouldn't meet