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

I noticed that I’d picked up the milk from outside the back door, and appeared to have spilt some of it on the floor.
I tried to clean it up with a piece of kitchen roll which seemed very dirty and yellowed as if with age, my mind aching
under the strain of trying to work out what the hell was going on. I felt that there must be some sense to it somewhere,
some logic of the situation that I was missing. Even if he had lived here once he had no right to just march in here with
his friend like that, but I realised as I continued ineffectively trying to swab up the milk before he noticed it (why?) that
there was something far wronger than a mere breach of protocol going on here. The suited man looked about
thirty-five, far older than he should have been if he was indeed the man I’d been to school with, and yet far too young
to ever have lived here, as between our family and the people we’d bought it from, the house’s last 40 years were
accounted for. So how the hell could it be his house? There was no way. And was it him anyway? Apart from being
too old, it looked like him, but was it actually him?
As I straightened up, having done the best I could with the milk, I staggered slightly, feeling very disorientated
and strange, my perception both heightened and jumbled at the same time, as if I was very drunk. Everything seemed
to have a nightmarish intensity and exaggerated emotional charge, and yet there also seemed to be gaps in what I was
perceiving, as if I was only taking in an edited version of what was going on. Things began to appear to jump from
one state to another, with the bits in between, the becoming, missed out like a series of jump cuts. I felt hot and dizzy
and the kitchen looked small and indescribably messy and the orange paint of the walls seemed to jump in at me
beneath a low swaying ceiling. I wondered confusedly if I was seeing the kitchen as they saw it, and then immediately
wondered what I meant by that.
All the time they just stood there, turning round occasionally to stare balefully at me, radiating distaste and
impatience. Obviously they were waiting for something. But what? What was going on? Noticing I still had the piece
of kitchen roll in my hand I stepped over all the rubbish on the floor – what the hell had been going on in this kitchen?
– to put it in the overflowing bin. Then, squeezing my temples with my fingers and struggling both to concentrate and
to stand upright against the weight of the air I turned towards the men.
“L-look,” I stuttered, “what the hell is going on?” and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was a pause and then
the suited man turned his head very slowly towards me and it kept turning and turning until he was facing me while his
body stayed facing the other way. I could feel my stomach trying to crawl away and fought against the gagging. He’d
done that deliberately, done it because he knew it would make me want to throw up, and I thought he might just be
right.
“Why don’t you just shut up?” he snarled, the words squirming from his mouth like rats out of the stomach of
something recently dead, and twisted his head slowly back round through 180 degrees until he was looking out onto
the drive once more.
Meanwhile, the mess in the kitchen seemed to be getting worse. Every time I looked there were more dirty pans
and bits of rubbish and old food on the floor. My head was getting thicker and heavier and felt like it was slipping
away from me. I half fell against the fridge and clung to it, almost pulling it off the wall, and began to cry, my tears
cutting channels in the thick grime on the fridge door. I dimly remembered that we’d bought a new fridge the week
before but they must have changed it because this one looked like something out of the fifties, but it was hard to tell
because it was swimming back and forth and there was a lot of white in my eyes and I couldn’t see past it. They were
both watching me now.
Suddenly a terrible jangling pierced my ear, as if someone were hammering a pencil into it. It happened again and I
recognised it first as a sound and not a blow after all, and then as the doorbell. Someone was at the front door.
The two men glanced at each other and then the blond one nodded. The suited man turned to me.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s the front door,” I said, trying to please him.
“Yes. So you’d better answer it, hadn’t you? Answer the door.”
“Should I answer it?” I said, stupidly. I just couldn’t seem to remember what words meant any more.
“Yes,” he grated and then picked up a mug, my mug, the mug I came down, I remembered randomly, to put tea in,
and hurled it at me. It smashed into the fridge door by my face. I struggled to stand upright, my head aching and ears
ringing, hearing a soft crump as a fragment of the mug broke under my foot. Then the doorbell jangled again, its harsh
sharpness making me realise how muted sounds had been becoming. I fell rather than stepped towards the kitchen
door, sliding across the front of the fridge, my feet tangling in the boxes and cartons that now seemed to cover the