"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

support their own weight, they collapsed upon themselves, bringing down entire
floors as they fell. By the time September arrived, the Fortress was open to the
elements. The ward where the brothers had optimistically laid out rows of beds now
had a ceiling of cloud. When the first rains of autumn came the mattresses were
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
soaked; fungus and mildew sprouted where the sick would have lain. The place stank
of rot from end to end.
And finally, somewhere in the middle of the second winter in its empty
state, the floorboards cracked and opened up, and the lowest level of the Fortress,
the level where Father Sandru had brought Zeffer to show him the tiled chamber,
became available to sky and storm. If anyone had ventured into the Fortress that
winter they would have witnessed the most delicate of spectacles. Through the eight
vaults above the once-tiled roomуwhich were now all cracked like eggsуsnow came
spiraling down. It fell into a room denuded. The workmen Zeffer had hired to do the
work of removing the tiles had first been obliged to empty the room of all the monks
had left in there. Some of the furniture had subsequently been stolen, some broken
up for firewood, and the restуperhaps a quarter of the bountyуsimply left to decay
where it had been piled up. The snow, spiraling down, settled in little patches on
the floor; patches which would not melt for the next four months, but only get wider
and deeper as the winter's storms got worse, the snow heavier.
Just before the thaw, in the middle of the following April, the weight of
snow and ice finally brought the vaults down, in one calamitous descent. There was
nobody there to witness it, nor anyone within earshot to hear it. The room which had
contained the Hunt was buried in the debris of all the vaults, plaster and wood and
stone filling the chamber to the middle of the walls. Nobody who visited the
Fortress in subsequent yearsуand there were a few explorers who came there every
summer, usually imagining they'd stumbled on something darkly marvelousуa Fortress,
perhaps, belonging to Vlad the Impaler, whose legendary territories lay only a few
hundred miles off to the west, in Transylvaniaуnone of these visitors dug through
the overgrown ruins with any great enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves
what function the half-buried room might have once served. Nor, should it be said,
would they have been able to guess, even the cleverest of them. The mystery of the
ruined chamber had been removed to another continent, where it was presently
unfolding its dubious raptures for the delectation of a new and vulnerable audience.
Men and women whoуlike the tilesуhad in many cases lately left their homelands; and
in their haste to be famous left behind them such talismans as hearth and altar
might have offered by way of protection against the guileful Hunt.
PART TWO
THE HEART-THROB
ONE
There's a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The
Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, but of course the crowds were much
larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands,
would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment.
Tonight's event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists' will
massage the numbers for tomorrow's Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a
crowd of four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of
the star of tonight's movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than
half that.