"Blackwater - 01 - The Flood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDowell Michael)

"Good," said Elinor, "then I'll go down and bathe."
She got up immediately, and Sister would have shown her the way, but Elinor assured her that she would be able to find it without assistance. Elinor stepped quietly among the still-sleeping children and walked out the back door carrying her weathered black bag with her.
Manda Turk and Mary-Love and Caroline DeBordenave fell upon Sister.
"What'd she say?" demanded Manda, speaking for all.
"Nothing," said Sister, realizing in a sudden moment of shame that she had failed in what these
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three women evidently considered to be her duty. "I told her about the school and about Perdido. She was asking about the flood, you know, and the mills, and who everybody was and so forth."
"Yes, but what did you ask her?" demanded Caroline.
"I asked her if she thought she was gone drown."
"Drown?" said Mary-Love. "Sister, you are impossible!"
"Drown in the Osceola," said Sister defensively. She was sitting on the end of the bench, and the three women stood ranged before her. "She said she wasn't scared, not a bit—that she wasn't gone drown ever in her life."
"And that's all you found out?" cried Manda.
"That's all," said Sister, cringing. "What was I supposed to find out? Nobody told me—"
"You were supposed to find out everything," said her mother.
Caroline DeBordenave shook her head slowly. "Don't you see, Sister?"
"See what?"
"See that there's something peculiar."
"See that there's something wrong," Manda amended.
"I don't!"
"You must," said Mary-Love. "Just look at her hair! You ever see hair that was that color? Looks like she had it dyed in the Perdido—that's what it looks like to me!"
Annie Bell Driver knew what was going on. She had watched the three richest women in Perdido surround Bray and question him closely about the black bag he had carried; she had seen them turn their questions on poor meek Sister. She also knew where those questions tended. While Sister was vainly attempting to justify her failure to have found out anything of substance as a reluctance to pry, Annie Bell
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Driver slipped out the back door of the church, and with something in her head that wasn't as clearly defined a motive as "curiosity," she picked her way carefully down the slippery slope of pine needles, grabbing for balance at one resinous pine trunk after another. Steam rose here, too—in wisps from the ground, from the underbrush, from the green boughs of the pines, and almost in billows from the stream itself.
The branch was shallow, narrow, clear, and quick—quite unlike the dark, deep waters of the Blackwater and the Perdido. It made its way through the pine forest in a course that changed markedly every year, it seemed. It tore away the carpet of pine needles and left bare the soft shale beneath, hollowing out channels in the stone, throwing up diminutive islands of sand and pebbles.
Annie Bell Driver stood on the edge of the branch—it was too volatile a stream to have built up anything like a bank—and looked up and down what she could see of its length. There was a turn into the forest about a hundred feet up, and another turn in the opposite direction about fifty feet down. The woman with the muddy-red hair wasn't to be seen. Annie Bell wondered whether she should walk upstream or downstream or return to the church, leaving the woman to her privacy. After all, having remained four days in the top floor of a half-submerged hotel, she would not have had an opportunity for washing except in the floodwaters—and that was an expedient which was no expedient at all, for it left one only dirtier than before, and was decidedly unhealthful.
Annie Bell decided to walk around the downstream bend, and turned in that direction. It was only then she noticed Elinor Dammert's black bag resting at one end of a sandbar directly across the water from where she stood. She had not noticed it
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before because it blended in so well with the rank vegetation on the opposite side of the branch.
The thought passed suddenly through her mind that Elinor Dammert, having survived the flooding of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers, had drowned in this tiny unnamed branch, but then she realized that in order to drown, one must first find a spot deep enough to cover one's head completely, and such spots were rare in the length of this shallow course. It was, in fact, so notoriously safe a stream that Annie Bell had never warned even her youngest children against using it. It wasn't deep enough to drown them, and it was too quick-moving to breed moccasins and leeches.
But if her bag was here, and she couldn't possibly be drowned, then where was Elinor Dammert?
Annie Bell Driver took two steps downstream and was reaching for a pine branch to lift her over a patch of soggy ground when she stopped suddenly. Her foot dropped to the earth and sank in until the water seeped through the holes for her laces.
There, beneath the water in a narrow trench that seemed to have been specially carved for her body, lay Elinor Dammert, quite naked. She clutched a clump of water weeds with each hand, but was perfectly still.
"Good Lord above!" cried Annie Bell Driver aloud. "She has gone and drowned herself!"
She stared. Though the water was clear and only deep enough to cover the body, it had worked a kind of visual transformation: Miss Elinor's skin seen through that rapidly running water seemed leathery, greenish, tough—and Miss Elinor's skin, Miz Driver had noted, was of a pellucid whiteness. Moreover, even as the preacher stared, a distorting transformation seemed to come over the features of the other woman's submerged face. While before it had been handsome and narrow and fine-featured, now it seemed wide and flat and coarse. The mouth
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stretched to such an extent that the lips seemed to disappear altogether. The eyes beneath their closed lids grew into large, circular domes. The lids themselves became almost transparent, and the dark slit was set directly across the bulging eyeball like a pen-drawn Equator on a child's globe.
She wasn't dead.
The thin, stretched lids over those protuberant domes drew slowly apart and two immense eyes— the size of hen's eggs, Miz Driver thought wildly— stared up through the water and met the gaze of the Hard-Shell preacher.
Annie. Bell Driver fell back against a tree. The branch she had been holding on to above her head snapped.
Elinor rose in the water. The transformation she had undergone beneath the running water held, and Miz Driver found herself staring at a vast, misshapen grayish-green creature with a slack body and an enormous head with cold staring eyes. The pupils were vertical and thin as pencil lines. Then, as the water poured off, back into the branch, Elinor Dammert stood before her, smiling sheepishly and blushing prettily in her modesty at being so discovered without her clothing.
Miz Driver took a deep breath and said, very quietly, "I'm so dizzy..."
"Miz Driver!" cried Miss Elinor. "Are you all right?" The muddiness seemed to have been washed from her hair. It was now a dark, intense red—like nothing so much as a clay bank shining in the brilliant sun that follows a July rainstorm, and nobody in Perdido knew anything that was redder than that.
"I'm all right," said Annie Bell Driver weakly. "But, law, you scared me! What were you doing down in that water, girl?"
"Oh!" Elinor said in a light, smiling voice, "after going through a flood there's just no other way to get clean—I know it for a fact, Miz Driver!"
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She took a step upward and back onto the sandbar on which her bag had been placed, and if Miz Driver hadn't still been so dizzy she would have been more certain that when Miss Elinor lifted her other foot out of that branch, it was not white and slender as was the one already braced upon the sand, but instead looked altogether different—wide and flat and gray and webbed.
Oh, but that was just the water! thought Annie Bell Driver, shutting her eyes tightly.
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CHAPTER 2
The Waters Recede