"Michael Marshall Smith - The Dark Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

THE DARK LAND

by

Michael Marshall Smith



For want of anything better to do, and in the spirit that keeps my room austerely tidy when there are other things I
should be doing, I decided to move my bed. After returning from college I’d redecorated my room, as it had been the
same since I’d been about ten, and I’d moved just about everything round except for the bed. I knew it was largely an
excuse for not doing anything more constructive but pulled it away from the wall and tried it in another couple of
positions.
It was hard work, as one of the legs is rather fragile and the thing had to be virtually lifted off the floor, and after
half an hour I was hot and irritated and becoming more and more convinced that its original position had been the
optimal, and indeed the only, place to put it. And it was as I struggled to shove it back up against the wall that I began
to feel a bit strange. When it was finally back in place I sat down on it, feeling light-headed and a bit ill and I suppose
basically I just drifted off to sleep.
I don’t know if the bed is part of it in some way. I only mention it because it seems important, and I guess that it
was while I was asleep on it that it all began. After a while I woke up, half-remembering a dream in which I had been
doing nothing more than lying on my bed remembering that my parents had said that they were going to extend the
wood panelling on the downstairs hall walls. For a few moments I was disorientated, confused by being in the same
place in reality as I had been in the dream, and then I drifted off again.
Some time later I awoke again, feeling very sluggish and slightly nauseous. I found it very difficult to haul my mind
up from sleep, but eventually stood up and lurched across the room to the sink to get a glass of water, rubbing my
eyes and feeling very rough. Maybe I was going down with something. I decided that a cup of tea would be a good
idea, and headed out of the bedroom to go downstairs to the kitchen to make one.
As I reached the top of the stairs I remembered the dream about the panelling and wondered vaguely where a
strange idea like that could have come from. I’d worked hard for my psychology paper at college, and was fairly
confident that Freud hadn’t felt that wood panelling was even worth a mention. I trudged downstairs, still feeling a bit
strange, my thoughts dislocated and confused.
Then I stopped, open-mouthed, and stared around me. They really had extended the panelling. It used to only go
about eight feet up the wall, but it now soared right up to the front hall ceiling, which is two floors high. And they’d
done it in exactly the same wood as the original panelling: there wasn’t a join to be seen. How the hell had they
managed that? Come to that, when had they managed that? It hadn’t been there that morning, both my parents were
at work and would be for hours and … well, it was just impossible, wasn’t it? I reached out and touched the wood,
marvelling at how even the grain was the same, and that the new wood looked just as aged as the original, which had
been there fifty years.
As I struggled to get my still sluggish mind in gear surprise suddenly gave way to astonishment. Wait a minute, I
thought, that isn’t right. There hadn’t used to be any panelling in the hall. It used just to be white walls. Sure, the
stairs were panelled in wood, but the walls were just plain white plaster. How the hell could I have forgotten that?
What had made me think that the front hall had been panelled, and think it so unquestioningly? I could now remember
that I’d recently noticed, sensitised to these things as I was by having recently repainted my room, that the white paint
in the hall was rather dirty, especially round the light switches. So what was all this panelling doing here? Where had
it come from, and when, for Christ’s sake? And why had I been so sure that at least some of it had always been there?
I walked slowly into the kitchen, casting bewildered backward glances at the walls. I heard a soft clinking sound
outside and walked to the back door, too puzzled about the front hall to even notice that it was rather late for a milk
delivery. The back door, which like the front door opens out onto the driveway, is in a little corridor full of gardening
implements, shoes and tools which leads off the kitchen to the garage. I threaded my way through these and
wrenched the stiff door open.