"Barker, Clive - The Hellbound Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

The furniture was smoldering charcoal; the ash that she'd glimpsed was a foul-smelling carpet. And there, in the middle of this domestic wasteland, sat a bride.
By some extraordinary act of will, Julia had managed to put her wedding dress on, and secure her veil upon her head. Now she sat in the dirt, the dress besmirched. But she looked radiant nevertheless, more beautiful, indeed, for the fact of the ruin that surrounded her.
"Help me," she said, and only now did Kirsty realize that the voice she heard was not coming from beneath the lush veil, but from the bride's lap.
And now the copious folds of the dress were parting, and there was Julia's head-set on a pillow of scarlet silk and framed with a fall of auburn hair. Bereft of lungs, how could it speak? It spoke nevertheless-
"Kirsty..." it said, it begged-and sighed, and rolled back and forth in the bride's lap as if it hoped to unlodge its reason.
Kirsty might have aided it-might have snatched the head up and dashed out its brains-but that the bride's veil had started to twitch, and was rising now, as if plucked at by invisible fingers. Beneath it, a light flickered and grew brighter, and brighter yet, and with the light, a voice.
"I am the Engineer, " it sighed. No more than that.
Then the fluted folds rose higher, and the head beneath gained the brilliance of a minor sun.
She did not wait for the blaze to blind her. Instead she backed out into the hallway-the birds almost solid now, the wolves insane-and flung herself at the front door even as the hallway ceiling began to give way.
The night came to meet her-a clean darkness. She breathed it in greedy gulps as she departed the house at a run. It was her second such departure. God help her, her sanity that there ever be a third.
At the corner of Lodovico Street, she looked back. The house had not capitulated to the forces unleashed within. It stood now as quiet as a grave. No, quieter.
As she turned away somebody collided with her. She yelped with surprise, but the huddled pedestrian was already hurrying away into the anxious murk that preceded morning. As the figure hovered on the outskirts of solidity, it glanced back, and its head flared in the gloom, a cone of white fire. It was the Engineer. She had no time to look away; it was gone again in one instant, leaving its glamour in her eye.
Only then did she realize the purpose of the collision. Lemarchand's box had been passed back to her, and sat in her hand.
Its surfaces had been immaculately resealed, and polished to a high gloss. Though she did not examine it, she was certain there would be no clue to its solution left. The next discoverer would voyage its faces without a chart. And until such time, was she elected its keeper? Apparently so.
She turned it over in her hand. For the frailest of moments she seemed to see ghosts in the lacquer. Julia's face, and that of Frank. She turned it over again, looking to see if Rory was held here: but no. Wherever he was, it wasn't here. There were other puzzles, perhaps, that if solved gave access to the place where he lodged. A crossword maybe, whose solution would lift the latch of the paradise garden, or a jigsaw in the completion of which lay access to Wonderland.
She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.