"S. P. Somtow - Vampire Junction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

fingers, like glaciers, and here, don't scratch you've drawn blood it's running down my
Izod sweater don't think I'm into this stuff now but you're so famous and all and ow! Let go
of it! What are you doing? Don't bare your teeth, you animal, you little bastard, you—
I grieve for you. You should not have awakened my memories. I've known. . .
someone like you. . . before.
Let me go you're so strong your teeth the moonlight don't bite! don't bite! it hurts it
hurts it hurts oh oh oh.
Rudy, not this exit yet. If we go into mid-town they'll see us.
I hate it when they scream and struggle. It attracts too much attention. I'm so hungry, it
hurts so! The breasts are all ripped up. She'll die in a minute or two. Oh, the fresh blood . .
.warming. . . easy . . . easy . . . shall I kill you permanently? Shall I? If I did not you would
wake up to a terrible solitude . . . poor creature. I've yanked her heart out, Rudy. That
should save her from the great loneliness. There it is, on the seat, going pit-a-pat as it
seeps into the upholstery. . . easy. . . still now, heart. . . look, her lifeless eyes. . . I'll close
them ... there, she's dead. The seat's all bloody now. Tell Maria to clean it up. My concert's
in an hour.

I'm sorry, Rudy! I was angry, she plucked such vivid memories from me. . . Forget,
master Timothy. How can I?


*memory: 1918*
He has slipped through the railings, this child of darkness, and is standing in a pool of
moonlight by the quadrangle's edge, his thin pale face striped by the shadows of the iron
bars. He feels the hunger a little, like a rodent scurrying in the pit of his stomach. But it is
not hunger that has drawn him out of his hiding place. It is the sound of children singing. It
has touched him in his dreamless sleep; he has followed it blindly, as a bloodhound follows a
scent, many days' walk from London, leaving behind the house on Fitzroy Square and the
old woman who took him in.
For a few moments he watches the stained glass windows, lit from within, of the
massive fifteenth-century chapel. It must be an evening choir practice. The building is one
of the Cambridge colleges with its own choirschool where young boys are trained for
chapel services. He hears the children's voices, cool as the wind.
"What are you doing here, boy?" He averts his eyes, catching a glimpse of the
Cambridge don's face, then looking down at the mirror-polished boots and the edge of the
gown. "Answer me. Are you lost?" The hunger stirs in him for a moment. "Are you late for
practice?" The don indicates the chapel. "No, you're too scruffy to be one of the choristers.
Go away, it's out of bounds here."
He stares at the man's eyes, stung by his rebuff. He thinks of feeding for a moment.
The pickings have been slim since he left the city. The young men have gone to the war,
the women have latched their doors, and there are only tramps, whose blood is bitter with
methylated spirits. He is about to spring-But no. The don rubs his eyes and sees only a
black animal, perhaps a cat, dark silver slicing the gloom.
The boy comes to in the nave. Soft light on the Rubens over the altar in the distance. A
few seconds of memory surface; he has been here centuries before, and there are dead
men, dust now, whose memories still touch him through the warm earth and the cold stone.
He longs to join them. In the dark the fan vaulting is shadowed, and there appears to be no
ceiling. The boy crouches in a pew as the singing dies away in the musty stillness. It is
Purcell's Funeral Music: the boy remembers it from long ago, a king's funeral.
For a moment peace steals into his haunted eyes, for he has always loved music.