"Lucy Sussex - Matricide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sussex Lucy)

"I'm more intrigued by his sheer grip on narrative," she says. "To keep on reading, when it's four A.M. on
some red-eye shuttle and you're totally grossed out. That's ability."

"I still say it's the scary stuff that makes him powerful. Guess we'll have to agree to differ." He sips from
the margarita glass, spraying salt. "Hey, what scares you?"

The way the question is asked, the sly sneaking out of left field, does something to her it shouldn't, brings
back a memory so compelling she can't confess it, especially to a stranger and client. She had been nine
or ten, impressionable. Idly she had been watching a television program, a fifteen-minute filler before the
news. The topic was famous ghosts, and this week's episode was a historic haunted hall in England. It
had burnt down, and witnesses saw two figures walking out of the flames. The commentator said: "One
had the form of a young woman, the other was a shapeless thing."

The memory still made her want to shudder, at what the "shapeless thing" might have been. It was
suggestive of so much, once you let your imagination play with it, as children will: like pulling a scab off a
wound, horrified, hurting, but unable to stop.

"You tell me what scares you first," she counters.

"I could … but I won't."

The creepiness she first perceived as an affectation in her client now seems genuine, in much the same
way as does Stephen King. If it really is Stephen King, she thinks. Isn't he a reformed alcoholic, not seen
in bars at all? As if reading her thoughts, Ween lifts his glass in the direction of the novelist—and for a
moment it seems that King lifts his glass of Coke in response, a returned salute.

"A very powerful dude. You ever hear about the guy in the car who ran into King when he was jogging?
Near killed him. And guess what, he's dead now. You can't tell me that's an accident, anything less than a
revenge. There are dark forces out there, just ready for payback, for an injury to the guy who let them
walk free among us."

His tone is admiring, and now she has had quite enough of this weird exchange. "You should be writing
horror yourself." She drains the dregs of the margarita, stands. "And now I have a plane to catch."

Without looking up, he says: "You haven't, not here …"

And as she turns to go, he adds, a faint, parting shot: "Unless the plane catches you."

She steps out of the VIP lounge, aware as she does that there is some commotion behind her, people
craning, staring out the windows. She walks on, not wanting to look back, not at Ween and his implied
threat. Outside she looks for the elevator. She finds it but merely opens the door on a very plush Ladies,
marble-topped tables, hibiscus in the vases, gilt-rimmed mirrors …

In which she sees herself as she was a few months ago: hair lifeless, skin white and crepey, even green in
tinge. At the sight, the nausea rises again, and she rushes for the nearest receptacle, luckily not the flower
vase, but—unhygenically—the basin.

As she holds onto the taps, washing away the regurgitated margarita, somebody comes into the room
behind her. She looks up into the mirror and sees her Brooklyn doctor.