"Tad Williams - The Stanger's Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

Then Tobias vanished.

****

WHEN two days had passed with no sign of the boy, suspicion of course
fell on the two strangers living in SquireтАЩs Wood. When the man named
Fe-liks admitted that they had seen the child and spoken to him, the
shireward and several local fellows dragged them out of the forest and
chained them in wooden stocks beside the well in the center of the village,
where every-one could see them and marvel at their infamy. Feliks tearfully
continued to insist that they had done nothing to harm the boy, that they did
not know where he had goneтАФboth things true, as it turned outтАФbut even if
the two men had not been strangers and thus naturally suspect, the
villagers could see that the big one was plainly touched, perhaps even
demon-possessed, and almost no one felt anything for them but horror and
disgust.

The lone exception was Father Bannity, the village priest, who felt that
it was a troubling thing to imprison people simply because they were
strangers, although he dared not say so aloud. He himself had been a
stranger to the village when he had first arrived twenty years earlier (in fact,
older villagers still referred to him as тАЬthe new priestтАЭ), and so he had a
certain empathy for those who might find themselves judged harshly
sim-ply because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers were not buried
in the local churchyard. Also, since in his middle life he had experienced a
cri-sis of faith, leading him to doubt many of the most famous and popular
tenets of his own religion, he was doubly unwilling to assume the guilt of
someone else simply because they were not part of the familiar herd. So
Fa-ther Bannity took it on himself to make sure the two prisoners had
enough food and water to survive. It would be a long wait for the KingтАЩs
Prosecu-tor General to arriveтАФhis circuit covered at least a dozen villages
and lasted a full cycle of the moonтАФand even if the two were guilty of killing
the poor child and hiding his body, Father Bannity did not want them to die
before this could be discovered for certain.

As the small man, Feliks, grew to trust him, he at last told Bannity what
he swore was the true story of what had happened that day, that the boy
had touched big EliтАЩs hand and then disappeared like a soap bubble
popping. Father Bannity was not quite certain what to think, whether this was
a true mystery or only the precursor to a confession, a man easing
gradually into a guilty admission as into a scalding bath, but he stuck by his
resolution to treat them as innocent until they told him otherwise, or events
proved the worst to have happened.

One day, as he was holding a ladle of water to EliтАЩs dry lips, the big
man suddenly looked at him almost as if seeing him for the first time, a
flash of life in the dull, bestial eyes that Bannity had not seen before.
Star-tled, the priest dropped the ladle. The big man lifted his hand as far as
he could with his wrist restrained by the stocks and spread his long fingers
like some strange flower blooming.