"Charles de Lint - Make a Joyiful Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

pieces of cake. We ate those on the nights we came by, but we didn’t help her with her cleaning. That
would make us bad fairies, I suppose, except for the fact that we weren’t fairies at all.

After awhile the old woman holding my hand stopped talking and laid back down again. I let go of her
hand and tucked it under the covers.

It was a funny room that she slept in. It was full of memories, but none of them were new, or very happy.
They made the room feel musty and empty, even though she used it every day. It made me wonder why
people hung on to memories if they just made them sad.

I leaned over and kissed her brow, then got off the bed.
When I came back to the living room, there was the ghost of a boy around fifteen or sixteen sitting on the
sofa where I’d been looking through the old lady’s scrapbook earlier. He was still gawky, all arms and
legs, with features that seemed too large at the moment, but would become handsome when he grew into
them. Except, being a ghost, he never would.

Under his watchful gaze, I stepped up onto the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of him.

“Who are you?” I asked.

He seemed surprised that I could see him, but made a quick recovery.

“Nobody important,” he said. “I’m just the other child.”

“The other…”

“Oh, don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything. I’m the one that’s not in the scrapbooks.”

There didn’t seem much I could add to that, so I simply said, “I don’t usually talk to ghosts.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “You’re not usually substantial enough, for one thing.”

“That’s true. Normally, people can’t even see me, never mind talk to me.”

“And for another,” I went on, “you’re usually way too focused on past wrongs and the like to be any
fun.”

He didn’t argue the point.

“Well, I know why I’m here,” he said, “haunting the place I died and all that. But what are you doing
here?”

“I like visiting in other people’s houses. I like looking at their lives and seeing how they might fit if they
were mine.”

I looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.

“So you were brother and sister?” I asked.