F. Cottam - Dark Echo

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «F. Cottam - Dark Echo» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Старинная литература, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Dark Echo: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Dark Echo»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Dark Echo Because this boat isn't just unlucky, it's evil. It was built for Henry Spalding, a soldier and sorcerer who committed suicide yet still casts his malevolent spell nearly a century after his death. Suzanne must uncover his last, terrible secret before 
 destroys the man she loves.
From Publishers Weekly
When businessman Magnus Stannard buys Dark Echo, a haunted yacht, at the start of Cottam's overstuffed occult thriller, it fulfills a dream from his impoverished childhood: to own the luxury boat he saw in one of his favorite books. But Dark Echo's American builder, WWI hero Harry Spalding, had an unsavory history of evil exploits, and everyone who's owned the ship since his suicide has suffered misfortune and a grim death. Magnus and his son, Martin, become the latest victims of the yacht's malignant legacy when, after setting out in it to cross the Atlantic, the ship reveals the malevolent mission it has chosen them to complete. Cottam (The House of Lost Souls) works up a byzantine backstory for his spook ship that's imaginatively complex, but that thwarts thrills with its confusing historical detail, digressions into Martin and Magnus's relationship, and shifts of narrative viewpoint. What could have been an exceptional tale of maritime terrors reads more like a horror story adrift at sea. 
From Booklist
Can a haunted object continue to cast the spell created by its evil, long-dead creator? That may be the case of Dark Echo, the oceangoing yacht in this religious-suspense/horror blend spanning the better part of a decade. Cottam sets the scene with a stunning description of nonhuman malevolence embodied in the fog covering 1917 Rouen. Add five deeply buried corpses forming a five-pointed star, a pentagram used in rituals involving animal sacrifice, and a priceless and missing holy relic thought to have delivered the final death blow to the crucified Christ, and this is one compelling story. Along the way, readers will enjoy uncovering the secrets of the regatta-winning racing schooner and its owner, the dashing millionaire Harry Spalding, as Suzanne, a contemporary heroine with a knack for research and the determination to save the man she loves, delves deep and discovers a box filled with 80 years of darkness. A shivery and entertaining read for the beach or firelit evenings.

Dark Echo — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Dark Echo», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

I did not want her going anywhere near the Jericho Crew. They were long dead, as my father had pointed out. But to me they were feral ghosts that could maraud across the decades, given the right encouragement. They were malevolent and restless and waiting in an impatient pack behind their hungry leader. No, the Jericho Crew were best left to history and themselves. All my instincts told me so. I untangled myself from Suzanne and went and brushed my teeth and then got into bed and listened to her shower. We finally fell asleep, thankfully dreamless, wrapped in one another’s arms in the Lambeth night.

Dark Echo - изображение 3

I was awoken the following morning by an agitated phone call from my father. I looked at my watch and at Suzanne’s sleeping head, her hair raven black on the crumpled white of the pillow. It was just before six thirty.

‘Appreciate it if you’d get round here, Martin. Pronto, if you’ve no engagement more pressing. Bring your under-achieving Scandinavian motor car with you. Once again, we face a day apparently beyond the capabilities of rotorblades.’

Groggily, I opened the curtains a chink. I did not want to awaken Suzanne after her trying day and exhausting evening. The weather was foul, our little glimpse of river grey and turbulent in the wind, the cloud low and the rain splattering on the panes and thrumming on the road outside in big, percussive drops. What a dismal month March was turning out to be.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Frank Hadley seems to be in the throes of some sort of breakdown.’

I cleared my throat. I still wasn’t fully awake. ‘I take it you know about the fire, Dad?’

‘I know about it. Hadley doesn’t. The charred log is not the problem.’

‘What is?’

‘Just get over here, Martin.’ As was his perennial habit, he then hung up on me.

Without telling him anything of what I had experienced for myself or recently learned, I tried on the drive to the Hamble to sow doubts in my father’s mind. I told him that it was fair from what we both knew to call the Dark Echo accident-prone. Our prospective voyage seemed foolhardy.

He pondered what I’d said without immediate comment. He took out his cigar case, chose a cigar and smoked for a while. I did not get the explosion from him with which he usually blustered his way out of a corner. This was not out of respect for me, I knew. It was because the evidence was compelling and seemed despite his wishes to be mounting all the time.

‘A thing is only ever cursed in retrospect,’ he said eventually. ‘And bad reputation is always a matter more than anything of interpretation. If mountaineers are killed attempting to climb a Himalayan peak, and the attempt fails, the expedition is cursed. They’ve crossed the yeti, or antagonised the mountain gods, or some other similar nonsense impossible to substantiate or refute. If, by contrast, the attempt to scale the peak is a success, it doesn’t much matter what happens to the team on the way down. The expedition is judged a success. The objective was achieved. Nothing was cursed. Do you see my point?’

‘Not really.’

‘In 1970 an expedition organised by Chris Bonington was successful in climbing the South Face of a Himalayan peak called Annapurna. It was the last great unconquered mountain challenge the roof of the world had to offer. Annapurna had always possessed the reputation of an unlucky mountain. One morning, a thousand feet from the top, the climbers Don Whillans and Doug Scott, leading the ascent, left their tent and achieved the summit. On the way down to base camp, two of the party were killed in separate accidents. Was the expedition cursed? Was the mountain unlucky?’

The road to our destination on the Hamble was clear but the driving hard in atrocious visibility and streaming surface water. ‘You tell me, Dad.’

‘Bonington was a skilled enough climber in his own right. He climbed the North Face of the Eiger. With Whillans, he shared the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney. But his chief talents were as an organiser and a manipulator of the media. Annapurna was not cursed. The expedition was a triumph, because that’s how Bonington was able to present it.’

I wasn’t convinced. My father knew I wasn’t. ‘A boat is a repository of human thought and feeling, Martin. Within its fragile hull, our dreams and aspirations of adventure and achievement can be nurtured. But a boat is also a place where our fears and insecurities can become magnified and distorted to a point that can threaten sanity. I can only tell you that the Mary Celeste would not have met that enigmatic and disastrous fate with a Columbus or a Drake at the helm.’

I laughed. I had to. ‘You’re not Columbus, Dad. You’re certainly not Drake. I don’t even think you’re a Bonington.’

He laughed himself. ‘I’m not. Not for a moment, I’m not. I’m no more a mountaineer than the Dark Echo is cursed.’

Frank Hadley was waiting for us amid a crowd of his men on the quay when we got to his boatyard. The Solent was a gunmetal hue with white topping its waves and ugly yellow foam billowing at the tideline. Some large creature had been winched by its tail out of the water and was suspended by a loop of hawser from a crane boom over the wet dock adjacent to where the Dark Echo lay wrapped and silent and blind. There was a strong smell of blood and secretion. The animal carcass was of a porpoise or a dolphin and it was missing its head. The butchered creature turned on its steel rope slowly in the ferocious wind. It looked like something huge but half-finished, like some clumsy joke played against nature. It was bitterly cold on the dock. But the headless creature lashed from the crane was beyond any kind of feeling.

‘Washed up this morning before first light,’ Hadley said to my father. He looked gaunt under his wind-whipped hair. I had seen the very same expression he wore, the night before, on the face of Patrick Boyte. ‘It’s a portent, Mr Stannard. It’s an omen as plain as I ever wish to see. I don’t need superstitious men to explain it to me. I want your abomination of a boat gone from my yard. I’ll reimburse you for any extraneous expenses incurred as a consequence. And I’m happy to compensate you for any delay to the original work timetable.’

My father laughed. He looked incredulous. He looked at the turning corpse of the dead creature. ‘Because of this? Because a porpoise is injured by a boat propeller in the busiest stretch of water in the world? What kind of fucking joke is this, Hadley? What kind of fucking witchcraft are we discussing now?’

‘It isn’t a porpoise, Mr Stannard. It’s much too big to be that, you see. And it’s a long way from home. It’s a species of dolphin only usually found in tropical waters.’

A shiver gripped me. It was nothing to do with the cold. I was thinking of Gubby Tench, his relentless luck and terror, and his boat bobbing in the fog in the Gulf Stream. I looked over towards the shrouded Dark Echo . That boat.

‘And it wasn’t a propeller,’ Hadley was saying, in the here and now in the rain on the quay. ‘It was a fish did that damage. It was a shark.’

But my father would not look at the dolphin’s remains. ‘I’ll sue you,’ he said to Hadley. ‘I’ll fucking ruin you if you do this.’

But Hadley did not look flustered by my father. He was too disturbed already by the deteriorating pattern of events for that. ‘I’ll be ruined if I don’t,’ he said, proving the point. He smiled a bitter smile.

There was the movement of a figure at the edge of my vision and I saw that someone was actually aboard the Dark Echo , about to clamber off her wrapped deck on to the quayside. Whoever it was moved with ease and practised agility between the ropes binding the tarp and leapt lightly down on to the cobbles, rubbing his palms together. He had on canvas trousers, a buttoned-up reefer jacket and a watch cap, and his hair was reddish-blond and unruly under the cap. His skin was ruddy, wind-tanned. His appearance made me realise how pale with apprehension were Frank Hadley’s little cluster of helpers.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Dark Echo»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Dark Echo» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Dark Echo»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Dark Echo» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x