"Colin Wilson - Spiderworld 05 - The Magician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

enemies were lying in wait; the building was deserted. Yet this deeper perception also
made him aware of another odor, musky and slightly sweet. It was familiar, yet its
significance escaped him.
He pushed the plywood violently; the nails that held it to the window frame tore
loose, and it fell into the building. Niall clambered inside. By now he was regretting that
he was not wearing warmer clothes; his hands and feet were frozen. But since he was
here, it seemed pointless not to explore. The light from the window gave him a clearer
view of the hallway. He observed rat droppings among the dust and plaster on the floor.
That indicated clearly that no spiders used the building; they regarded rats as particularly
appetizing delicacies, and would wait for hours in the hope of catching one.
As he expected, there were more bloodstains on the floor, and clear signs in the
dust and rubble that a wounded spider had dragged itself across the floor. The marks
continued across the hallway to an open door beyond a collapsing staircase; this admitted
light and a draft of air. Beyond this, a corridor led down to an open space that had once
been a garden; there were more bloodstains on the floor. The door at the end, which stood
half open, had obviously been forced; its lock had been smashed, and marks on the
outside woodwork made by a chisel or a crowbar looked fresh.
Niall peeped cautiously into the weed-grown garden, then looked upward at the
wall above the door; it rose vertical and windowless to the roof, where the guttering was
still intact. This disposed of his theory that the spider had been struck by some heavy
object -- perhaps a piece of masonry -- dropped from above. Yet when he brushed aside
the snow on the threshold, he saw signs of blood. This garden clearly held the secret of
the spider's death.
To Niall's untrained eye there were no obvious clues. The layer of snow on the
ground had covered any footprints. The garden, which extended as far as the rear wall of
the next building, was divided from the gardens to the right and left by high walls. A
dozen feet from the door stood a young palm tree; beyond this, there was a tangle of
weeds and shrubbery which offered a great deal of concealment. When Niall studied this
more closely, he observed a number of freshly broken twigs which indicated that
someone had been there recently. But the hard ground had retained no other indications.
He penetrated the shrubbery as far as the rear wall; here the overgrown grass
convinced him that no one else had been here for months. But as he was about to turn
back, he noticed something that made him pause. In a corner of the garden wall there lay
a heap of palm leaves, some of them spreading out from a common center. They looked
so natural in that setting that he almost failed to notice them. But why should there be
palm leaves lying in a corner? Then he looked up and saw that the young palm tree had
no leaves. In fact, someone had hacked off its top, leaving a bare trunk. And within a foot
of the top of the truncated palm, there was a length of rope.
Now at last he understood. The tree was about twice the height of a man --
precisely the distance from the foot of the tree to the rear door of the building. A further
search of the shrubbery revealed the stunted tree to whose base the other end of the rope
had been tied. The young palm had been bent backwards like a catapult. When the spider
had stepped out of the doorway, hesitating as it faced the dark garden, someone had cut
the rope, and the tree had snapped over like an immense spring. Skorbo had evidently
been standing slightly to one side, or had started to move at the last moment; the tree had
smashed his legs and battered him to the ground. . .
Niall returned to the doorway and looked down at the bloodstains. They showed
clearly that his reconstruction was correct. The blow had caused blood splashes which
were some distance from the original stain, and other splashes had struck the wall at an
angle so they were elongated, with tadpole-like tails. And a few feet away, half-buried in