"Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

venomously hissing, "he's too wrapped up in himself to see beyond his nose half the time. We can
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Jones, Diana Wynne - Howl's Moving Castle.txt
deceive him- as long as you'll agree to stay."
"Very well," Sophie said. "I'll stay. Now find an excuse."
She settled herself comfortably in the chair while the demon thought. It thought aloud, in a
little crackling, flickering murmur, which reminded Sophie rather of the way she had talked to her stick
when she walked here. And it blazed while it thought with such a glad powerful roaring that she dozed
again. She thought the demon did make a few suggestions. She remembered shaking her head to the
notion that she should pretend to be Howl's long- lost great- aunt, and to two other ones even more far-
fetched, but she did not remember very clearly. The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering
little song. It was not in any language Sophie knew- or she thought not, until she distinctly heard the
word "saucepan" in it several times- and it was very sleepy- sounding. Sophie fell into a deep sleep,
with a slight suspicion that she was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother her
particularly. She would be free of the spell soon.....
4: in which Sophie discovers several strange things
When Sophie woke up, daylight was streaming across her. Since Sophie remembered no
windows a t all in the castle, her first notion was that she had fallen asleep trimming hats and dreamed
of leaving home. The fire in front of her had sunk to rosy charcoal and white ash, which convinced her
that she had certainly dreamed there was a fire demon. But her very first movements told her that there
were some things she had not dreamed. There were sharp cracks from all over her body.
"Ow!" she exclaimed. "I ache all over!" The voice that exclaimed was a weak, cracked
piping. She put her knobby hands to her face and felt wrinkles. At that, she discovered she had been in
a state of shock all yesterday. She was very angry indeed with the Witch of the Waste for doing this to
her, hugely, enormously angry. "Sailing into shops and turning people old!" she exclaimed. "Oh, what I
won't do to her!"
Her anger made her jump up in a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over to the
unexpected window. It was above the workbench. To her utter astonishment, the view from it was a
view of a dockside town. She could see a sloping, unpaved street, lined with small, rather poor-looking
houses, and masts sticking up beyond the roofs. Beyond the masts she caught a glimmer of the sea,
which was something she had never seen in her life before.
"Wherever am I?" Sophie asked the skull standing on the bench. "I don't expect you to
answer that, my friend," she added hastily, remembering this was a wizard's castle, and she turned
round to take a look at the room.
It was quite a small room, with heavy black beams in the ceiling. By daylight it was
amazingly dirty. The stones of the floor were stained and greasy, ash was piled within the fender, and
cobwebs hung in dusty droops from the beams. There was a layer of dust on the skull. Sophie absently
wiped it off as she went to peer into the sink beside the workbench. She shuddered at the pink-and-gray
slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it. Howl obviously did not care what
squalor his servants lived in.
The rest of the castle seemed to be beyond one or the other of the four low black doors
around the room. Sophie opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench. There was a large
bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might find normally only in a palace, full of
luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on
every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Sophie winced form the toilet, flinched at the
color of the bath, recoiled form the green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking
at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless
substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath.
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