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

They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar
had a name. It was called DRYING POWER in crooked letters. Sophie was not sure whether there
should be a D in that or not. She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and she put
it back hurriedly. Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl. A tube stated FOR DECAY.
"It seems to work too," Sophie murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver. Water
ran into the basin when she turned a blue-green knob that might have been brass and washed some of
the decay away. Sophie rinsed her hands and face in the water without touching the basin, but she did
not have the courage to use DRYING POWER. She dried the water with her skirt and then set off to the
next black door.
That one opened onto a flight of rickety wooden stairs, Sophie heard someone move up there and shut
the door hurriedly. It seemed only to lead to a sort of loft anyway. She hobbled to the next door. By now
she was moving quite easily. She was a hale old woman, as she discovered yesterday.
The third door opened onto a poky backyard with high brick walls. It contained a big stack of logs, and
higgledy-piggledy heaps of what seemed to be scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire,
mounded almost to the tops of the walls. Sophie shut that door too, rather puzzled, because it did not
seem to match the castle at all. There was no castle to be seen above the brick walls. They ended at the
sky. Sophie could only think that this part was the round side where the invisible wall had stopped her
the night before.
She opened the fourth door and it was just a broom cupboard, with two fine but dusty velvet cloaks
hanging on the brooms. Sophie shut it again, slowly. The only other door was in the wall with the
window, and that was the door she had come in by last night. She hobbled over and cautiously opened
that.
She stood for a moment looking out at a slowly moving view of the hills, watching heather slide past
underneath the door, feeling the wind blow her wispy hair, and listening to the rumble and grind of the
big black stones as the castle moved. Then she shut the door and went to the window. And there was
the seaport town again. It was no picture. A woman had opened a door opposite and was sweeping dust
into the street. Behind that house a grayish canvas sail was going up a mast in brisk jerks, disturbing a
flock of seagulls into flying round and round against the glimmering sea.
"I don't understand," Sophie told the human skull. Then, because the fire looked almost out, she went
and put on a couple of logs and raked away some of the ash.
Green flames climbed between the logs, small and curly, and shot up into a long blue face with flaming
green hair. "Good morning," said the fire demon. "Don't forget we have a bargain."
So none of it was dream. Sophie was not much given to crying, but she said in the chair for quite a
while staring at a blurred and sliding fire demon, and did not pay much attention to the sounds of
Michael getting up, until she found him standing beside her, looking embarrassed and a little
exasperated.
"You're still here," he said. "Is something the matter?"
Sophie sniffed. "I'm old," she began.
But it was just as the Witch had said and the fire demon had guessed. Michael said cheerfully, "Well, it
comes to us all in time. Would you like some breakfast?"
Sophie discovered she was a very hale old woman indeed. After only bread and cheese at lunchtime
yesterday, she was ravenous. "Yes!" she said, and when Michael went to the closet in the wall, she
sprang up and peered over his shoulder to see what there was to eat.
"I'm afraid there's only bread and cheese," Michael said rather stiffly.
"But there's a whole basket of eggs in there!" Sophie said. "And isn't that bacon? What about a hot
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drink as well? Where's your kettle?"
"There isn't one," Michael said. "Howl's the only one who can cook."
"I can cook," said Sophie. "Unhook that frying pan and I'll show you."