"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

She sat beside the pretend cat, trying not to think at all. She
could hear the running and shouting again in the distance but it did
not seem very important.
For a moment, she thought she was crying. Drops were falling
heavily on the pretend cat and then splashing onto her leg. It was
only when more drops fell on her head that Hayley realised the
water must be coming from somewhere else. She looked up. The
ceiling above her sofa was covered in upside-down puddles, with big
dewy yellow drops forming in the middle of them and then plopping
down. At almost the moment when she turned her face up, the
puddles all became too big to hold together and water began coming
down in streams, nearly as hard as it was raining outside.
Hayley jumped up. “Oh dear,” she said, collecting cushions and
the pretend cat and dumping them into a dry chair. She tried to
push the sofa out from under the flood, but it was too heavy for her
to move. She simply got sprayed with water splattering up off the
carpet. “I think I’d better tell someone,” she said doubtfully.
She ran out into the hall. No one seemed to be down there, but
there was a lot of shouting and running about going on somewhere
upstairs. Hayley rather timidly climbed the stairs, past the small
safe room she had been given, and on up to the right.
A river of water met her near the top, coming down like a
waterfall from stair to stair. The landing, when she came to it, was
a small oblong lake, and the corridor off to the right, which must
have been above the lounge, was a dark tunnel filled with rain.
Someone screamed, “Turn off that light! It’s dangerous !” Footsteps
thundered and splashed somewhere out of sight, and voices from
unseen cousins and aunts yelled, “Tollie! Where are you? We need
you!” and “Bring that bucket here, quick !” and “Throw all the
towels down there!” and in between, everyone yelled for Tollie
again.
“I think they know,” Hayley said to herself. She stood to the side
of the waterfall at the top of the stairs, wondering what she ought
to do.
Aunt May and Troy, both of them soaking wet, burst out from
the rain in the dark corridor and splashed to a stop when they saw
Hayley.
“She’ll do!” Troy cried out. “She’s a lot smaller than Tollie.”
“Oh, so she will!” Aunt May gasped. Sheets of water sprayed
round her wet slippers as she dived on Hayley and took hold of her
arm. “ Do you mind helping us, dear? One of the gutters is blocked
and we’re all too big to get out of the window.”
Troy seized Hayley’s other arm and the two of them towed her
across the landing. The lake soaked Hayley’s shoes and socks
instantly. She was rather surprised to find that the water was not
really cold. But then the whole of Ireland was not really as cold as
London.
“Mercer’s tried getting to it from outside with a ladder,” Troy
explained, switching on the big electric torch he was carrying, “but
the wind blew him down, so it has to be unblocked by someone