"Oscar Wilde. The Canterville Ghost" - читать интересную книгу автора

strange sixteenth-century curses, and ever and anon brandishing the rusty
dagger in the midnight air. Finally he reached the corner of the passage
that led to luckless Washington's room. For a moment he paused there, the
wind blowing his long grey locks about his head, and twisting into grotesque
and fantastic folds the nameless horror of the dead man's shroud. Then the
clock struck the quarter, and he felt the time was come. He chucked to
himself, and turned the corner; but no sooner had he done so, than, with a
piteous wail of terror, he fell back, and hid his blanched face in his long,
bony hands. Right in front of him was standing a horrible spectre,
motionless as a carven image, and monstrous as a madman's dream! Its head
was bald and burnished; its face round, and fat, and white; and hideous
laughter seemed to have writhed its features into an eternal grin. From the
eyes streamed rays of scarlet light, the mouth was a wide well of fire, and
a hideous garment, like to his own, swathed with its silent snows the Titan
form. On its breast was a placard with strange writing in antique
characters, some scroll of shame it seemed, some record of wild sins, some
awful calendar of crime, and, with its right hand, it bore aloft a falchion
of gleaming steel.
Never having seen a ghost before, he naturally was terribly frightened,
and, after a second hasty glance at the awful phantom, he fled back to his
room, tripping up in his long winding-sheet as he sped down the corridor,
and finally dropping the rusty dagger into the Minister's jack-boots, where
it was found in the morning by the butler. Once in the privacy of his own
apartment, he flung himself down on a small pallet-bed, and hid his face
under the clothes. After a time, however, the brave old Canterville spirit
asserted itself, and he determined to go and speak to the other ghost as
soon as it was daylight. Accordingly, just as the dawn was touching the
hills with silver, he returned towards the spot where he had first laid eyes
on the grisly phantom, feeling that, after all, two ghosts were better than
one, and that, by the aid of his new friend, he might safely grapple with
the twins. On reaching the spot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze.
Something had evidently happened to the spectre, for the light had entirely
faded from its hollow eyes, the gleaming falchion had fallen from its hand,
and it was leaning up against the wall in a strained and uncomfortable
attitude. He rushed forward and seized it in his arms, when, to his horror,
the head slipped off and rolled on the floor, the body assumed a recumbent
posture, and he found himself clasping a white dimity bed-curtain, with a
sweeping-brush, a kitchen cleaver, and a hollow turnip lying at his feet!
Unable to understand this curious transformation, he clutched the placard
with feverish haste, and there, in the grey morning light, he read these
fearful words:

YE OTIS GHOSTE.

Ye Onlie True and Originale Spook.
Beware of Ye Imitationes.
All others are Counterfeite.


The whole thing flashed across him. He had been