"George Allen England - Darkness and Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (England George Allen)

“My typewriter? Is—canthatbe my typewriter? Great Heavens! What's the matter here, with
everything? Am I mad?”

There before her lay a somewhat larger pile of dust mixed with soft and punky splinters of rotten wood.
Amid all this decay she saw some bits of rust, a corroded type-bar or two—even a few rubber
key-caps, still recognizable, though with the letters quite obliterated.

All about her, veiling her completely in a mantle of wondrous gloss and beauty, her lustrous hair fell, as
she stooped to see this strange, incomprehensible phenomenon. She tried to pick up one of the rubber
caps. At her merest touch it crumbled to an impalpable white powder.

Back with a shuddering cry the girl sprang, terrified.

“Merciful Heavens!” she supplicated. “What—what does all this mean?”

For a moment she stood there, her every power of thought, of motion, numbed. Breathing not, she only
stared in a wild kind of cringing amazement, as perhaps you might do if you should see a dead man
move.

Then to the door she ran. Out into the hall she peered, this way and that, down the dismantled corridor,
up the wreckage of the stairs all cumbered, like the office itself, with dust and webs and vermin.

Aloud she hailed: “Oh! Help, help,help!” No answer. Even the echoes flung back only dull, vacuous
sounds that deepened her sense of awful and incredible isolation.

What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar hum of the metropolis now
rose from what, when she had fallen asleep, had been swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.

Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the musty, choking atmosphere—a
silence that weighed down on Beatrice like funeral-palls.

Dumfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering,
back into the office. There in the dust her foot struck something hard.
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She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.

“My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?”

No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe, incredibly vast, some disaster
cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had desolated the world.

“Oh, my mother!” cried she. “My mother—dead?Dead, now, how long?”

She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her. All at once her teeth
began to chatter, her body to shake as with an ague.