"Paul J. McAuley - Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

stronger, too, strong enough to last a century even after the object of
her hate had fled its first malignant flowering, strong enough to
destroy
Beaumont, poor bastard, who had only been at the edge of things. The
ghost
of Orlando Richards had not been the danger; perhaps he had even tried
to
warn Tolley of his companion. And now Tolley had laid him to rest.
Panting, Tolley pushed through the gate, saw with dull shock the figure
waiting beside his car. For a moment he thought that his heart would
stop;
then the dog bounded ahead, and he realised that it was Marjory
Beaumont,
and he wondered how he could tell her about her husband. But then she
spoke, he voice halting and heavy. Her voice, but she was not using it.
"I've waited so long for this. So long."
The last thing Tolley saw was the axe she carried.

Afterword
'Inheritance' was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science
Fiction in 1988 and has not been published since; I'm pleased to be
able
to revive it. It was written while I was living in Oxford, and two
things
in it are true: the lost village with its ruined mill and burnt-down
manor
house (although I've changed the name); and the railway accident. Some
of
 the initial ruffles of the haunting were drawn from a local newspaper
story; I leave it to the reader to decide which are reported and which
invented.
With regard to ghosts, my position is that of Gerald Beaumont. We
respond
to places, and ghosts spring from our response. And we respond to any
place which was once inhabited in a different way to places which have
always been wilderness. The latter we say are empty because they have
no
human history, and it is human history, the traces of the passage of
people like us, to which we are most sensitive. Despite its American
protagonist (who shares some of my own culture shock: I returned to
Oxford
after two years in Los Angeles) this is a very English ghost story. It
deliberately echoes those of the doyen of English ghost story writers, M
R
James, although James was a Cambridge man, and would, of course, never
have written about Oxford.
Almost every square metre of England is resonant with past lives, but
the
most peculiarly haunted place I have encountered is a little canyon,