Clive Barker - Abarat

Smiling as she walked, she headed on past the hotel and on down Lincoln Street toward the cloud.

The wavy lines in her head began to fade now, as though they had done their job by getting her out wandering until she came in sight of this blossom-cloud. She’d seen it; she had her destination.

The houses were thinning out now as she approached the end of Lincoln Street. She could remember venturing so far in this direction only once before, and that was because Patti Gibson, who’d been her best friend three years ago, had brought her down here to show her one of the few memorable front lawns in Chickentown. It had belonged to an old woman by the name of Lavinia White, known to all as the Widow White. In place of flowers, Lavinia had “planted” plastic pinwheels in the grass, the kind constructed of brightly colored plastic that made a whirring sound when the wind spun them. No doubt the Widow White was a little bit crazy, because she hadn’t simply put three or four of these things in her garden; she’d planted hundreds, in place of ordinary flowers. Some bright scarlet, some eye-pricking green, some striped or spiraled. It had been quite a sight, Candy remembered.

To her astonishment she found that they were still there. She heard them before she saw them, the massed noise of their whirring coming to meet her down Lincoln Street. When she came in sight of them, she found that they were all rather the worse for wear. Clearly the Widow White had not replaced the pinwheels with new ones over the last few seasons, and many had been knocked over by the wind, or had lost their plastic blooms, and she’d simply left the sticks in the dirt. But perhaps one in three of them remained operational, and that still provided a bizarre spectacle.

Candy glanced up at the house itself as she passed, and there in the upper window, sitting in a wheelchair watching the world go by (or as much of the world as would pass by the last house in the street before the grasslands began) was old Widow White herself. She had her eyes on Candy, so Candy gave her a wave and a smile. The Widow White returned neither.

There was no barricade or fence at the end of the street. Just a sign, placed at the limit of the asphalt that stated, with absurd redundancy:

STREET ENDS

“Oh really?” said Candy, looking up at the sign. Beyond it, there was just rolling prairie and the cloud. It had grown in size in the time that Candy had taken to walk the length of Lincoln Street, and it was no longer moving away from town. The wind had changed direction, and now seemed to be coming from the north. It had a curious tang to it, which was not the smell of the factory and its clotted drains. She didn’t know what it was.

She glanced back over her shoulder down the length of Lincoln Street. From here it was a half-hour walk home, at least. If the great gilded cloud was bringing rain, then she was going to get wet on her way back to Followell Street. But she had no desire to start the homeward trek, not for a little while, at least. She had no idea of what lay ahead of her besides the wild hills and the long grass, and the orange milkweed, the larkspur, and prairie lilies in among the grass.

But walking for a while where nobody (except the Widow White) knew she’d gone was better than going home to listen to her father in the first stages of the day’s drinking, raging on about the injustices of his life.

Without another thought she walked on past the STREET ENDS sign, catching it with her palm as she went so that it rocked in the shallow hole some lazy workman had made for it, and headed out into the gently swaying grass.

Butterflies and bees wove ahead of her, as if they were showing her the way. She followed them, happily. When next she looked back, the shoulder-high grass had almost obscured Chickentown from sight. She didn’t care. She had a good sense of direction. When the time came for her to find her way back, she’d be able to do just that.

Her eyes glued to the great swelling mass of the cloud, she walked on, her griefs and humiliations left somewhere behind her, where the road ended and the ocean of grass and flowers began.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.