Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

On the second-floor landing, Rafi’s door seemed untouched, but closer inspection showed that someone had fired several bullets through the lock until the striking plate simply came away from the splintered door frame.

No sign of Rafi, but Sallis was there. He was staring at nothing. His hands were clasped across his lower abdomen, but they hadn’t been able to halt the jack-in-the-box exuberance of bloody intestines that had spilled out through thÞds e huge hole in his lower torso. Feld was there, too: parts of him, anyway. Trudie was noisily sick in the corner of the room. I left her there, still sobbing and heaving.

A trail of bloody footprints led up the stairs from the second floor to the third. Imelda’s door had been torn loose and thrown across the landing where it lay, in two separate pieces, on the floor.

I went inside with my heart hammering a hectic, unsustainable beat like a schoolgirl’s skipping rope when she’s high on adrenalin and pushing it too far: about to fall, all tangled up in her own misjudgement; about to hit the asphalt one last and lasting time.

Imelda was in her kitchen, which had become an abattoir. Her head was in Lisa’s lap, and Lisa was in shock: exhausted and bullied by grief into some private place from which she didn’t stir when I came in.

But Imelda did stir. Amazingly, she wasn’t quite dead, though how a body could take so much damage, so much insult, and still not yield up the spirit it contained was a mystery beyond my fathoming.

She couldn’t speak. Judging from the blood that covered her lower face like a painted-on beard, Asmodeus had torn out her tongue. But she could move her right arm, just barely. She lifted it, like Atlas hefting the weight of the world. It trembled, but it stayed aloft while her chest rose and fell three times. Three last, agonising breaths.

She pointed at me.

And I nodded, accepting both the accusation and the challenge in those tortured, furious eyes.

You did this.

You talked to him, and he wound his lies around you.

You gave him to eat, and he grew stronger.

You let fools follow you here, and the fools set him free. Whatever they thought to do - whether to destroy him or to bind him faster - in their blind arrogance they set him free.

You killed me, Castor.

And now you have to kill your best friend.

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about the author

Mike Carey is the acclaimed writer of Lucifer and Hellblazer (now filmed as Constantine). He has also written extended runs for Marvel’s fan-favourite titles X-Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four, the comic book adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and a movie screenplay, Frost Flowers, soon to be proæ anduced by Hadaly/Bluestar Pictures. He lives in London with his wife, Linda, also a novelist and screenwriter, their three children and a cat named Tasha.

For more information about Mike Carey visit www.mike-carey.co.uk

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interview

This is your fourth Felix Castor novel. Have you found the story branching off in areas you didn’t expect when you started or has everything gone exactly to plan?"

"The plan is crucial, and everything conforms to the plan right up to the point where you start writing - then it instantly becomes irrelevant. No, I’m exaggerating for effect there. In terms of the big issues, the overall structure of the series, I’ve mostly stuck very close to what I originally had in mind. But a lot of the grace notes, incidentals, supporting cast and their arcs, came to me as I was writing and then were built into the whole. To take the most obvious example, Nicky Heath wasn’t dead in the original Castor pitch: I just had this great idea when I got to that part of The Devil You Know, that he’d be much more interesting as a zombie.

There’s a bit from Mervyn Peake’s journal where he talks about sticking to the plan for Gormenghast while ‘staying on the qui vive for a better idea’. That’s what you find yourself doing: if you’ve built it right, the plan is the structural skeleton that gives you the luxury of improvising without falling apart.

Did the idea for the Castor books come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

The starting point was Castor himself: the idea of a Chandler-style private eye who’s actually a private exorcist. Then I had a subsidiary idea for the mechanics of the story - for how the various undead beings could be explained and connected to each other. Throwing those two ideas against each other gave me a rough vision of how the first three novels would play out, and the big reveal we might play towards in the longer term - if there was a longer term.

Like you, Felix Castor hails from Liverpool but makes his home in London.