"Paul J. McAuley - Child of the Stones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Child of the Stones
by Paul McAuley


At night, the past has a stronger hold on London than the present. The urgent beat of
daily business stalls and drifts backward. The city's inhabitants lock themselves in
the prisons of their homes and the vacant streets stretch away in every direction
under the thin orange glow cast by long, regular lines of street lamps, their silence
haunted by echoes of the dramas of past generations. But some of London's streets
are never quiet. Queensway; Hyde Park Corner; Old Compton Street in Soho; the
streets around Victoria Station; the Embankment; Upper Street in Islington: people
are drawn to these places at night, and it is to these unsleeping streets that many of
the dead are also drawn, by habit, hunger, and forlorn curiosity. Lately, it was where
I spent most of my nights, too, walking amongst the living and the dead.
Although the matter of the dead has been my business for as long as I have lived in
this great and terrible city, during those nocturnal rambles I was interested not in the
ghosts, imps, and other ordinary revenants I encountered, but in what they might
attract. Six months previously, I had discovered that there were new and terrible
things awakening into the world. Things that preyed on the dead, and drew strength
from them; things that were beginning to prey on the living. Lions and tigers and
bears. The unsleeping streets where the cities of the living and the dead intersected
were beginning to draw the attention of these new predators, just as a watering hole
in the African veldt draws the big cats that prey on the buffalo and zebra and gazelles
that come there to drink. It was while I was mapping this strange new bestiary that I
discovered that not only monsters were awakening in these strange times, and a door
onto my past opened and an old enemy stepped through it.



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Islington, Upper Street, summer, two hours past midnight:
A bare-chested young man with a bright green Mohican haircut, his arms ropy with
tattoos and track marks, was sitting in the doorway of an estate agent's office and
sharing a can of lager with a young woman in a ragged black dress and army boots.
Imps clustered around their eyes like tiny scorpions, pale, articulated, and fat with
the venom of heroin dreams.
In another doorway, a man slept jackknifed under a filthy blanket, guarded by a
starveling mongrel who looked at me calmly when I dropped a couple of pound
coins beside his master's head. The man, an old acquaintance, stirred and without
waking mumbled, "Mr. Carlyle. Take care."
It was good advice, and I should have taken it. For the past three nights, I had been
intercepted by a pair of men in an immaculately restored blood-red Mark 1 Jaguar.
Each night, the big car had purred up to me as I was making my way home, and the
man in the passenger seat had leaned at the open window and spoken to me about a
book in my possession, a rare volume his employer wished to buy. Each night he
had offered more money for the book, and each night I had refused his offer. I knew
that sooner or later he would try another tactic—most probably some kind of