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

anyone he knew, and it seemed to be in a good state of preservation. The corpse's utter
stillness was quietly unnerving, inhuman; like some machine waiting for instructions. People
weren't supposed to look like that. Leo moved on, giving the dead man a wide berth.
Defensive spells formed on the air before him like static snowdrops, intricate and elegant,
shimmering with unearthly colours; magical anti-personnel mines. Invisible to ordinary eyes,
there were change spells and death spells, and a whole bunch of curses Leo didn't even
recognise. He slipped cautiously between them, bending at awkward angles to avoid touching
and activating them. He had no doubt that there were other, subtler defences too, so complex
even he couldn't hope to sense them in time, but he trusted to his dual nature to protect him,
and pressed on. He'd come too far to turn back now. Leo had few positive qualities, but
stubbornness was definitely one of them.
At last the dark trees fell away to reveal a great open clearing, with the farmhouse standing
at its centre, like the bait in a trap. It was a long two-storey building, in the old half-timbered
style, its mottled exterior filthy and corrupted, the victim of nature's relentless working and
long neglect. Leo crouched at the edge of the clearing, and just looking at the farmhouse
made him feel sick. There was a disturbing wrongness to it, as though it was both more and
less than just a house. The gaping black windows were like eyes, and the great front door a
mouth with concealed teeth. It wasn't a sane place, where sane and normal people might live.
The angles were all wrong, and the decaying features played tricks of perspective on him, as
though parts were rushing towards and retreating from him, at the same time. It was a
structure from another time and another place, where they did things differently. An alien
place, perhaps neither real nor magical, but something . . . worse.
The slumping rotten heart of Blackacre stood all alone, with no obvious defences. No dead
men on guard, no attack spells floating on the air, nobody watching from the empty windows.
It had to be a trap. Leo crouched where he was, considering his options, and then almost
jumped out of his skin as Reed walked out of the woods some ten feet away, and headed
straight for the farmhouse. Leo seized his chance. He padded quietly across the open clearing,
keeping close behind Reed, following in his footsteps. No one challenged him. Reed pushed
open the front door and went in, while Leo dropped to the ground beside it, struggling to
control his breathing and his heartbeat.
He pressed his back against the wall, and the moist surface gave disturbingly under the
pressure. The dead woods were still and quiet. Leo swallowed hard. Now that he'd got this
far, he wasn't absolutely sure what to do next. Just walking in the front door like Reed did not
strike him as a good idea, and he didn't even know if there was a back door. A light suddenly
appeared at one of the downstairs windows; a calm, golden light quite at odds with the rest of
the farmhouse. Leo slid along the wall, as quiet as a mouse in carpet slippers, until he was
right underneath the lit window. All he had to do now was rise up and peek in, but somehow
that didn't appeal to him at all. For all his stubbornness and curiosity, that last step seemed so
big as to be almost overwhelming. He didn't want to look in, for fear of what might look back
at him.
There were monsters in Mysterie. Things much nastier than a little half-breed like Leo
Morn.
And then he thought of Reed, his friend Reed, his dead friend Reed, walking helplessly
into this house at the call of whoever or whatever had summoned him up out of his grave, and
the chill in Leo's veins was driven out by a hot flush of anger. It wasn't courage, but it would
do to get him moving. He sucked in a deep breath, held it, turned slowly and carefully rose up
to look in at the glowing window.
At first, the glass was so filthy he couldn't see a damn thing. But as his eyes adjusted to the
glare of the light and the smeared fog on the window, his preternaturally keen gaze was able
to make out two distinct figures sitting at their ease in what had once been a parlour. Nicholas