"Simon R. Green - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

Leo was sitting with the arty set, local writers, musicians and artists who liked to get
together of a morning, to exchange hard-luck stories about how harshly today's commercial
world treated the suffering artist, steal each other's ideas and indulge in as much mean-spirited
gossip as possible. The company was always good, and the conversation could be sparkling
and acerbic by turns. Coffee was usually the order of the day, in all its more dramatic forms,
dispensed by a loud shuddering thing of steel and steam that squatted darkly at the end of the
long wooden bar. Leo didn't actually care much for coffee, with or without whipped foam or
chocolate sprinkles. He much preferred Dry Blackthorn, a locally produced cider that would
bite your head right off if you weren't careful.
Leo considered his half-empty glass, but he couldn't blame the booze this time. He knew a
walking dead man when he saw one. Not least because he'd been to this one's funeral only
two weeks before. Reed Smith had been one of his few friends. A fortnight underground
hadn't affected Reed much. He was still wearing the good suit he'd been buried in, and his
slack face was pale under the last remnants of the undertaker's make-up. He held his head at
an angle, where the motorcycle crash had broken his neck. His eyes were open, but barely
focused, and his mouth was still held closed by the tiny stitches the undertaker had put in, so
that there wouldn't be any unfortunate expressions on the dead man's face during the viewing.
His hands hung limply at his sides, as though he'd forgotten they were there. Leo had a brief
vision of those hands scrabbling at the underside of a closed coffin lid, and quickly pushed
the thought aside. There was a lot to be said for cremation, especially in a town like this. Reed
stood very still, just inside the swing doors of the pub, looking slowly about him as though
trying to remember why he'd come in.
There was no disputing Reed was dead. One look was all it took. He didn't breathe, his
chest didn't move and he had no body language at all. Everything about him shouted his
unnatural condition to all the world. In Mysterie, everyone would have known what he was
the moment he walked in. But this was the real world, where such things just didn't happen;
so no one noticed anything.
Leo always drank with the arty crowd on a Saturday morning. So had Reed. They were
currently tucked away in their favourite corner, where the table was set right next to the big
bay window looking out onto Market Street. It was semi-private, a comfortable distance away
from the damned jukebox and its fixation with minor seventies hits, and the window meant
that when the conversation flagged, they could always look out at the world going by. People
and traffic were always going up and down, back and forth, as they had for centuries past.
Though the traffic these days moved a hell of a lot faster. Familiar faces were forever passing
by the window, to be greeted with a wave and a smile, and perhaps a pointed comment it was
just as well they couldn't hear. And there was always the primitive drama of Church Street, as
motorists tried to squeeze cars into parking spaces manifestly too small for them. There was a
lot of lurching back and forth, revving of engines and jockeying for position. Conflicts here
started with road rage and then escalated to open hysteria and bloodlust, happily viewed by
those around. The arty set were currently ignoring the dead man in favour of laying bets on
whether the poor fool in the Rover Rio Grande was going to be able to back his car into the
space he'd chosen without first cutting a few inches off both ends. He was on his twelfth
attempt now, and a small crowd had gathered, sensing trouble. The arty set were fascinated.
'He'll never get that in there.'
'Or if he does, he'll never get it out again.'
'Not without a crowbar.'
'Maybe we should just go down and offer to smear his bumpers with Vaseline.'
'It always comes back to sex with you, doesn't it?'
'Not nearly as often as I'd like.'
There was general laughter, and mouths and nose tips acquired layers of foam as everyone