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

drank their frothy coffee. Leo liked to hear them in full flow. He'd been there the day they
invented gut-barging, the English answer to sumo wrestling. He still couldn't believe it had
actually caught on.
Leo Morn was a tall, slender, almost Gothic figure, all pale and interesting, who looked as
if he should have been starring in a Tim Burton film. He wore black cords and a black T-shirt
under a black leather jacket, and was so thin a breath of fresh air might have blown him away.
In his early twenties, with a misleadingly amiable face under a permanent bad hair day, Leo
played bass guitar in a punk-folk band, whose name kept changing so that promoters would
book them more than once. He was currently resting between engagements. The band did a
lot of resting. Leo mostly kept himself busy giving guitar lessons to teenagers who had more
ambition than ability.
He was also prone to gambling with money he didn't have, making promises he had no
intention of keeping, and having brief but torrid affairs with married women whose husbands
understood them only too well. As a result, he had also become very proficient at pulling off a
disappearing act at very short notice when it all inevitably came crashing down around his
head. Leo had heard of responsibility, but wanted nothing to do with it. He did try to be a nice
guy, when he remembered, but mostly he just didn't have the knack.
Meanwhile, the arty set's conversation had moved on, to discussing the overnight
destruction of the railway station's waiting room. Theories were flying thick and fast. The
current official explanation, of a possible gas leak, had been dismissed out of hand, on the
unanswerable grounds of being both unlikely and boring. Much more exciting was the
possibility of a terrorist bomb. A lot of Ministry of Defence people lived in Bradford-on-
Avon, commuting in to the MOD centres at Bath and Bristol. As to which terrorists - take
your pick these days.
Leo listened, but kept his mouth firmly shut. He knew the Reality Express had been
running last night. He'd heard its unholy whistle sounding in the still of the night, and the roar
of silver wheels hammering down the steel tracks into town. Leo was a half-breed: a magical
father and a real mother, which meant he had a foot in both worlds and a home in neither. He
lived in the real world by choice, but sometimes his father's legacy sang in his veins, and the
secrets of Mysterie paraded themselves before him whether he wished it or not. He'd walked
by the railway station on his way to the town centre and paused a while to watch the police
studying the mess from a safe distance. There was so much magic hanging on the air that Leo
could smell it, even in Veritie. Some heavy hitters had clearly gone at it hammer and tongs
somewhen in the night, and not for the first time one of Mysterie's little wars had spilled over
into reality. Leo had sniffed loudly and moved on. He didn't approve of the Reality Express.
In his experience, Veritie and Mysterie worked best when they were kept strictly separate, an
opinion for which his own existence was one of the best arguments. Love might conquer all,
but it can be hell on the offspring.
He drank his cider, kept a watchful eye on the dead man and listened with half an ear as
Jason Grant, a local author, complained loudly to the rest of the arty set about his latest
project.
'Crop circles! Bloody crop circles! I ask you, who cares about that rubbish any more? Well,
all right, somebody must, or the publishers wouldn't be paying me good money to write the
bloody thing. It's a part-work; twenty-four monthly issues guaranteed to build up into an
unsightly mess in your living room, until you're so far behind you give up and throw the lot
out.'
'So why are you doing it?' said Malcolm Cragg, an artist who specialised in portraits of
people's pets, constructed from pressed flower petals.
'They found my weak spot/ Grant said glumly. 'They offered me money.'
'The unfeeling bastards!'