F. Paul Wilson - Haunted Air
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- Название:Haunted Air
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- Рейтинг книги:3 / 5. Голосов: 1
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She hates everything. Everything, and everyone.
But even more she hates being here, being a shadow among the living. She realizes that she was once alive and is now dead. And she hates that. Hates all the living for having what she does not. For having a past, a present, a future!
That is the worst part. She has no future. At least none that she can see. She is here, she is now, she has a vague, undetermined purpose, but after that is completed, what happens to her? Will she be cast back into the darkness, or must she remain here, forgotten, alone?
She drifts on... waiting...
IN THE WEE HOURS
Charlie awoke in the dark and listened.
Was that...? Yes. Someone was crying. The sound was echoing down the hall. High-pitched, like a child.
Charlie couldn't be sure if it was a boy or a girl. He sat up and listened more closely. Not so much a sound of sadness as a whimper of terror, and so devoid of hope it tore his heart.
Not a real child, he thought. It's a spirit, a demon sent here to lead us astray.
He pulled the covers over his head and shivered in the warm darkness.
TUESDAY
1
Gia wiped a tear from her eye as she hung up the bedside phone.
After hearing from Jack last night about the child he'd saved, Gia had called Vicky's camp first thing this morning, just to make sure everything was okay there. She trusted the camp and its security, trusted the counselors, but she'd had this steamrolling urge to hear her daughter's voice.
The director had told her that Vicky and the other kids were at breakfast. Was it an emergency? No, just ask her to give her mother a ring when she was through.
Gia had spent the next ten minutes thinking about child molesters and how the horrors they subjected their little victims to should be visited upon them a hundred-no, a thousandfold.
The call came while she'd been making the bed. Vicky was fine, great, wonderful, having the time of her life, and wanted to tell her about the hippo she'd made in her clay modeling class, rattling on about how she'd started out making a pony but the legs wouldn't hold up because she couldn't get the body right so she'd made the legs thicker and thicker and shorter and shorter until the horse could stand without collapsing or tipping over but by then it looked like the fattest horse in the world so instead of calling it a horse she told everyone she'd made a hippo. Wasn't that the funniest, Mom?
It was. So funny it had been all Gia could do to keep from breaking down and sobbing.
God, she missed her little girl.
Gia couldn't remember the last time she'd felt lonely, but with Jack out running an errand, and Vicky off in the Catskills, the house seemed more than empty. It was barren, a wasteland, an echoing shell with no heart, no life.
Get a grip, she told herself. It's not that bad. Vicky will be back soon. In just four days and three hours, to be exact. It seemed like forever.
And when Vicky returned, should she tell her about the baby?
No. Too soon.
All right, but if not now, when? And how? How to tell her daughter that Mommy screwed up big time and got pregnant when she hadn't wanted to.
Who's the daddy? Why, Jack of course.
Which meant that the new baby would have a daddy while Vicky didn't. Vicky's father, Richard Westphalen, was missing and officially presumed dead. Gia knew, unofficially, that Vicky would never see her father again.
No big loss. While alive, Richard had been a nonparticipant in his inconvenient daughter's life. Over the past year and a half, Jack had become Vicky's father figure. He doted on her and she loved him fiercely. Partly, Gia was sure, because Jack was in many ways a big kid himself. But he took time with her, talked to her instead of at her, played catch with her, came along and sat with all the other kids' parents to watch her T-ball games.
He was everything a good father should be, but his real child was now growing inside Gia. Would Vicky see the new baby as a threat, someone who'd come between her and Jack and usurp his love? Gia knew that would never happen, but at eight years of age, could Vicky grasp that? She'd already had one father abandon her. Why not two?
All excellent reasons for Vicky to hate the new baby.
Gia couldn't bear the thought of that. One possible solution was marrying Jack. A hopelessly mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois solution, she knew, cooked up by a terminally mundane, pedestrian, bourgeois person, but as her husband, Jack could officially adopt Vicky as his daughter. That symbolic cementing would give Vicky the security she needed to accept the new baby as a sister or brother rather than a rival.
The marriage was a problem, though. Not a matter of would Jack marry her, but could he? He'd said he'd find a way. She had to trust that he would... if he lived long enough.
Some godawful mess I've made.
She yawned as she finished tucking in the sheets and straightening the spread. Little wonder she wasn't sleeping.
Bad enough to be worrying about Vicky and the new baby, but then Jack comes in last night with a thick bandage on his side. Told her he'd been stabbed by the very man he'd been hired to protect, who'd turned out to be some sort of pedophile.
She'd changed his dressing this morning and gasped at the four-inch gash in his flank. Not deep, just long, he'd told her. Doc Hargus had sewn him up. Gia inspected the neat running suture that had closed the wound. She'd never liked the idea of Jack going to an old defrocked physician, but last summer she'd come to trust Hargus after he guided Jack's recovery from other, worse wounds.
She was angry with Jack for getting hurt. Would he ever learn?
But then, if he did learn, did change, would he still be the same Jack? Or would some fire within him go out and leave her with a hollow man, a wraithlike remnant of the Jack she loved?
Add that to the list of things to keep her awake at night.
And then, last night, when she'd finally fallen asleep... visions of the mysterious little girl she'd seen in the Kenton house drifted through her dreams. Her eyes... Gia had caught only the briefest glimpse of them as the child had glanced back over her shoulder, but their deep blue need haunted Gia, in her dreams, and even here and now in her waking hours.
Who was she? And why such longing in those eyes? It seemed a need Gia might fill if she only knew how.
No question about it, she had to go back to that house.
2
"Got it," Jack said, tapping his finger on a story in the newspaper.
He'd grabbed the Daily News from Abe's counter as soon as he'd walked in and thumbed through it, looking for stories about the little Asian kid and the wounded Bellitto.
He'd found a two-inch column reporting that a Mr. Eli Bellitto of Soho had been stabbed and a companion, Adrian Minkin-so that was Gorilla Arms's name-had been bludgeoned by an unknown assailant last night. Both were admitted to St. Vincent's.
Predators playing victims, Jack thought. Smart.
But the story about the recovery of a kidnapped Vietnamese boy got big play, with a picture of little Due Ngo and another of his mother.
"Nu?" Abe said as he arranged-with surprising delicacy for his pudgy fingers-strips of lox across the inner surface of a sliced bagel. "Got what?"
"A story about the kid those pervs snatched last night. He's okay."
"What kid?"
Abe didn't look up. He was busily smearing the other half of the bagel with cream cheese-the lowfat kind. Although, considering the amount he was slathering on, he wasn't sparing himself any calories or fat.
"Hey, leave some for me," Jack told him.
He'd brought breakfast, as usual, splurging on lox-not Nova, because Abe liked the saltier kind-but trying to help Abe in the calorie department with the lowfat Philly.
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