"Tengu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

With four minutes left, she poured herself a cup of coffee. She sipped it and repeated her lines under her breath: "Is that really what you think of me? After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?"
There were three minutes left. One hundred eighty seconds of life. She crossed the living room with her coffee mug in one hand and her script in the other. The sun was shining through the loose-woven yellow drapes drawn across the French doors, and the whole room was suffused in daffodil-coldred light. Her bare toes curled into the
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white shag rug.
"Is that really what you think of me?" she repeated.
Two minutes. She switched on the Sony television which stood in the corner. On top of the television was a sprig of ' poinsettia in a glass carafe of water. She had picked it yesterday evening, before she went out with Dan. On the wall behind the television was an original studio sketch for the Jones family parlor, signed by the artist. In a concentrated whisper, Sherry said: "After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?"
A commercial for Santa Anita Dodge appeared on the television screen—a fast-talking man in a powder-blue suit \ and a Buddy Holly hairstyle. "When you bring the family down to Santa Anita Dodge, we'll give each of your children a free balloon, and your wife will be able to pick ! up a free voucher for hairstyling and a beauty treatment. , That's guaranteed, whether you buy a new Dodge or not."
"Is that really what you think of me?" ;
One minute left. Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. ; Sherry turned away from the television to set her mug down on the glass-and-bamboo coffee table in the middle of the living room. Her telephone rang, although nobody | ever found out who it was, calling her at 7:49:55 in the morning.
The noise was so shattering that she thought a bomb had gone off. Then she thought it must be an earthquake. But as she turned back toward the French windows, she saw both huge panes of glass bursting inward, so that the whole living room was filled with a blizzard of glittering, tumbling fragments. Next, the metal screens were ripped away, and the aluminum upright between the broken windows was smashed aside as if it were cardboard.
She didn't scream. She didn't even understand what was happening until it was too late. She raised her hands to protect her face from the flying glass, but the glass was nothing.
Through the wrecked windowframe stepped a short,
powerfully built man dressed in a strangely tied-up yellow robe. His skull was cropped down to a bristly black brush. His face was covered by a grotesque white mask, expressionless and evil.
Sherry tried to back away, tried to cover her nakedness, but a sharp triangle of glass sliced into the side of her foot, and her hesitation was fatal.
The man seized her left wrist in a grip so hard that it broke both her radius and her ulna. He twisted her fiercely around, and gripped her throat from behind. She gagged and choked, and tried to thrash against him with her legs, but he was impossibly strong.
Without a word, without even a grunt, he went down on one knee and pulled Sherry backward across his thigh. She felt a splitting pain in her spine that was so intense that she passed out. But she instantly regained consciousness and was drowned in scarlet waves of agony. The man was hurting her so much she couldn't even believe it was happening to her.
Her back broke. She felt it snap. She could see the combed-plaster ceiling of her bungalow, and the paper lantern with the flower patterns on it. She couldn't speak, couldn't cry out, couldn't move. It couldn't be real. Things like this didn't happen. She wasn't here at all. She must be someplace else. Asleep. Dreaming.
She could still hear the radio somewhere outside. It was playing "Samba Pa Ti."
Silently, the powerful man gripped the inside of her thighs. Her head was lying back on the rug now, and her hands were clenched in paralysis over her breasts. Her entire nervous system was dislocated, and she was already dying. The man let out a deep, suppressed hmph\ as he pulled her thighs further and further apart, stretching every muscle and sinew. Through a haze of pain and disbelief, Sherry heard something crack in her groin, although she could no longer feel anything below her waist.
The man let her tumble from his upraised knee onto the
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rug. He stood up, keeping a hold on the ankle and the thigh of her right leg. With deliberate care, he planted his black silk slipper on Sherry's pubic bone, to give him balance and leverage, and then he twisted her leg around as if he were trying to tear the leg off a chicken.
She was lucky she couldn't feel it. The ball of her thighbone was wrenched out of its socket. Then the skin and flesh were screwed around so tightly that they tore apart, in a grisly welter of burst arteries. The man gave Sherry's leg one more turn, and ripped it right away from her body.
He stepped back, and looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow with shock, and her face was already blue. Her eyes were clouded over. The man wiped his hands, first on his robes, then on the drapes. He didn't seem to know what to do next.
Sherry realized she was dying. She didn't know why. She could see the man looking down at her, and she tried to think how she could ask him. It didn't really matter, of course. Nothing mattered when you were dead.
Her last thought was that she wished she could see her home in Indiana just one more time.
The man in the yellow robe watched her die, his mask impassive. Then he walked back out the broken French window, and stood in the morning sunlight, still and thoughtful, as if he had just returned from a long and unexpected journey.
Tengu CHAPTER TWO
21
! As Sherry was dying, Mrs. Eva Crowley was parking her
| slate-colored Seville Elegante on a red line close to the twin
towers of Century Park East. She switched off the motor
and sat in the driver's seat for a while, watching her pale
blue eyes in the rearview mirror. Well, she thought, this is
' it. This is where my life is pasted back together again, or
lost for good.
' She climbed out of the car and locked it. Normally she
! never bothered, but this morning she felt the need for as
many mundane rituals as possible—not only to keep
herself from trembling with fear, but to delay the moment
when she was going to have to stand face to face with
i Gerard and tell him: "Choose."
Gerard hadn't come home now for three nights in suc-j cession, and Eva Crowley had had enough. She had sworn j to herself in the small hours of the morning, as she lay hugging her husband's crumpled pillow, that she was going to finish for good all the pain and humiliation of being a cheated wife. No more evenings with only Dan Rather, a bottle of Jack Daniel's, and her sleeping twin daughters for company. No more false sympathy when Gerard called from the office to say that work had snowed him under again, and I'm sorry, Evie, I just have to keep at it all through the night.
Today, Gerard Crowley, the self-made president of Crowley Tobacco Imports, was going to be forced to make up his mind.
As Eva walked across the plaza toward the entrance of Century Park East, her footsteps echoed on the concrete paving, and she could see a distant and severe image of herself in the glass doors, approaching with all the inevitability of her own fate.
She was a petite, slender woman, with ash-blonde hair drawn back in a bun. Her face was pale and perfectly oval, like a blanched almond. For the frightening and solemn