Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

Blood from my shoulder had found its way down the inside of my sleeve and was now running the length of my fingers before pattering to the ground in a continuous drip-drip-drip that sounded unnaturally loud in the surrounding stillness. I felt the pressure of the demon’s attention, drawn by the blood. And then I felt its heavy, invisible gaze pass beyond me to the two figures at the centre of the walkway.

I backed away, one step at a time. Juliet and Coldwood came with me, Gary throwing a curious glance at the man who’d come out of nowhere to help us.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Was he part of the programme?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Pure serendipity. It has to work on our side every once in a while.’

‘What’s his name?’

I shook my head. It was a long story, I was ignorant of more than half of it, and I was too tired to explain the parts I did know.

‘The body belonged to a man named Roman,’ I said. ‘But that was a while back. I think he probably answers to Anita these days.’

Coldwood blinked. ‘Anita, as in—?’

‘Yeah. As in Anita Yeats. Kenny’s - whatever you want to call it. She died, and she came back.’

‘And she’s what, cross-dressing?’ Gary sounded pained.

‘More or less. Ninety-nine times out a of a hundred, a zombie clings to their own flesh: Anita chose the flesh of the bloke she was knocking off. Maybe if you ask her she’ll tell you why.’

I turned away from him to end the conversation, because it was scraping on a raw nerve right then. From behind us on the walkway, I heard Matt’s voice and then Anita’s. And then Matt’s again, broken as he spoke by what sounded like sobs. I needed to get further away. I might hear some oÓght hef the words, and I didn’t feel strong enough for that. I pushed the swing doors open and stepped back into Weston Block. For a moment the floor under me seemed to lurch and shift. I slumped against the wall, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It intensified instead. It was costing me a lot of effort just to stay on my feet.

‘Christ,’ I muttered. ‘I need a Band-Aid and some TCP.’

Gary inspected the knife that was still jutting out of my shoulder. ‘You need a hospital,’ he said. ‘If we take this out you’ll bleed like a stuck pig.’

By way of answer, I held up my blood-boltered hand. Coldwood was unimpressed. ‘That’s nothing compared to the Niagara you’re going to see when that knife comes out,’ he said. ‘Stay there, Fix. Do not fucking move.’

He got out his phone, dialled and started talking rapidly into it. But I couldn’t follow the words. Juliet was talking too, looking back the way we’d come, out onto the walkway. I turned my head - actually, turned my body because my neck didn’t seem able to move independently any more - and followed her gaze."

"Matt was talking to the sky. Anita in her borrowed flesh stood beside him with her hands clenched into fists, her neck craned right back, her pale flesh almost luminous in the surrounding darkness. Something blacker than the darkness hovered above them, almost close enough to touch. Its voice was a soundless pulse inside my head: diastole followed by systole, the tide of my own blood given voice. Anita raised her hands - Roman’s hands - above her head, not in surrender but as if she was trying to reach something that hung in the air above her, to lift it down. Matt had his hands on her shoulders now, offering her strength or comfort or maybe just clinging to her to keep from falling down onto his knees.

I thought of the two of them in the nativity play: Come, Joseph. I am close to my time and we must reach Bethlehem before our baby is born. It was too much. I closed my eyes and looked away.

But the darkness was still there, behind my eyes. It filled the space around me, so big and so vast that it became to all intents and purposes the landscape in which I stood. And I remembered that I’d stood here before, in this selfsame black-on-black void: conversing with the genius loci, which had named itself and then asked me - pleaded with me - to stay. not leave this place.

Which I’d read as a threat instead of what it was: the lost boy asking not to be left alone in the dark.

The lightless immensity gathered itself and began to shrink: receded from me by concentrating its terrible essence into a smaller and smaller space. Soon it was almost invisible: a distant point of anti-light, impossibly small, painfully vivid. Then it winked out altogether, like the dot in the centre of the screen when you turn off an old CRT television set. What it left behind in the place where it had been was an absence, almost equally dark but empty of being, drained of purpose.

A metallic clatter from somewhere nearby made my eyes snap open. The knife had fallen from my shoulder, and Coldwood, still on the phone, was staring at it withÓrintal a bemused look on his face.

I put my finger in through the hole in the neck of my paletot, searching for the wound.