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

As soon as it was open I reeled backwards from the light and unthinkingly crouched just inside the back hall.
Then I realised that it wasn’t even that bright outside: it was late afternoon and the light was muted, but everything
seemed very intense, like colours before a storm. Odd, but not odd enough to throw yourself to the ground over, I
thought as I stood up. But it had been the milkman after all, for there was our milk bottle holder with four bottles of
milk in it. Only they weren’t milk bottles, but large American-style quart containers somehow jammed into slots meant
to take pints. And someone had taken the silver tops off.
Something at the edge of my vision caught my attention and I looked up towards the top of the driveway. There,
about thirty yards away, were two children, one fat and on a bike, the other slim and standing. I was seized with a
sudden irrational fury and started quickly up the drive towards them, convinced that the clinking sound I’d heard was
them stealing the tops off the milk.
I had covered scarcely five yards when from behind me someone who’d been at my school walked quickly and
inexplicably past me up the drive, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t remember his name, had barely known him, in fact.
He’d been two or three years older than me, and I’d completely forgotten that he’d existed, but as I stared after him I
remembered that he’d been one of the more amiable seniors. I could recall being proud of having some small kind of
communication with one of the big boys and how it had made me feel a bit older myself, more a man of the world, less
of a kid. And I remembered the way he used to greet my yelling a nickname greeting at him, a half-smile and the raising
of an eyebrow.
All this came back with the instantaneous impact of memory, but something wasn’t right. He didn’t smile at all, or
even seem to register that I was there. I felt oddly disturbed and chilled, not by the genuinely strange fact that he was
there at all, or that he was wearing school athletic gear when he must have left the school seven years ago, but
because he didn’t smile and tilt his head back the way he used to. It was so bizarre that I wondered briefly if I was
dreaming, but if you can ask yourself the question you always know the answer, and I wasn’t.
My attention was distracted on the other side by a reflection in the glass of the window in the back hallway. A
man with glasses, a chubby face and blond hair that looked as if it had been cut with a basin seemed to be standing
behind me, carrying a bicycle. I whirled round to face where he should have been, but he wasn’t there. Then I
remembered the kids at the top of the driveway and, seeing that they were still standing motionless, began to shout at
them again, needing something to take my bewilderment out on.
Almost immediately a tall slim man in a dark suit came walking down the drive. I don’t know if it was a trick of the
light in the gathering dusk, but I couldn’t seem to fix on his face. In retrospect it was as if an unnatural shadow hung
there but at the time my eyes just seemed to slide off it as if it were slippery, or made of ice.
“Stop shouting at them,” the man said as he passed me, walking towards the back door. I stared at him
open-mouthed. “They’re not doing anything wrong. Leave them alone.”
The kids took themselves off, the one walking beside the other on the bike, and I turned to the suited man, anxious,
for some reason, to placate him, and yet at the same time slightly outraged at his invasion of our property.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, well, I’m a bit thrown. I thought I saw someone I knew in the drive. Did you see him?
Sort of wavy brown hair, athletics gear?”
For some reason I thought that the man would say that he had, and that that would make me feel better, but all I got
was a curt “No”. I was by now looking at his back as he entered the back hallway.
“Shall we go into your old house then?” asked another voice, clearly talking to the suited man, and I saw that
someone else was in the back hall: the man with the blond hair and glasses. And he really was carrying a bicycle, for
God’s sake.
“What?” I said incredulously, and hurried after them, catching a glimpse of the suited man’s face. “But it’s you
…” I continued, baffled, as I realised that the man in the suit was the man who had been in athletics gear. The two men
walked straight into the kitchen and I followed them, quietly, and seemingly impotently, enraged. Was this his old
house? Even if it was, wasn’t it customary to ask the current occupants if you fancied a visit?
The suited man was by now peering round the kitchen, where for some reason everything looked very messy. He
poked at some fried rice I’d left in a frying pan on the stove, or at least I seemed to have left it there, though I wasn’t
sure when I would have done so. Again I felt the urge to placate and hoped he would eat some, but he just grimaced
with distaste and joined the other man at the window looking out onto the drive, hands on hips, his back to me.
“Dear God,” he muttered, and the other man grunted in agreement.