Читать книгу The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Guillermo Toro del - Страница 31

KELLY GOODWEATHER could not believe how quickly the day went dark. She stood out on the sidewalk, as did the rest of her Kelton Street neighbors—on what was normally, at that time of day, the sunny side of the street—staring up at the darkened sky through the cardboard-framed glasses that had come free with two two-liter bottles of Diet Eclipse soda. Kelly was an educated woman. She understood on an intellectual level what was occurring. And still she felt an almost giddy surge of panic. An impulse to run, to hide. This lining up of celestial bodies, the passing into the shadow of the moon: it reached something deep inside her. Touched the night-frightened animal within.

Others surely felt it. The street had grown quiet at the moment of total eclipse. This weird light they were all standing in. And those wormy shadows that had wriggled on the lawn, just out of their vision, against the sides of the house, like swirling spirits. It was as though a cold wind had blown down the street and not ruffled any hair but had only chilled their insides.

That thing people say to you, after you shiver: Someone just walked over your grave. That was what this whole “occultation” seemed like. Someone or something walking over everyone’s grave at once. The dead moon crossing over the living earth.

And then, looking up: the solar corona. An anti-sun, black and faceless, shining madly around the nothingness of the moon, staring down at the earth with glowing, gossamer white hair. A death’s head.

Her neighbors, Bonnie and Donna, the couple renting next door, stood together with their arms around each other, Bonnie with her hand in the back pocket of Donna’s saggy jeans. “Isn’t it amazing?” Bonnie called, smilingly, over her shoulder.

Kelly could not respond. Didn’t they get it? To her, this was no mere curiosity, no afternoon entertainment. How could anyone not see this as some kind of omen? Astronomical explanations and intellectual reasoning be damned: how could this not mean something? So maybe it had no inherent meaning, per se. It was a simple convergence of orbits. But how could any sentient being not imbue it with some significance, positive or negative, religious or psychic or otherwise? Just because we understand how something works doesn’t necessarily mean we understand it …

They called back to Kelly, alone in front of her house, telling her it was safe now to remove her glasses. “You don’t want to miss this!”

Kelly was not going to remove her glasses. No matter what the television said about it being safe to do during the “totality.” The television also told her she wouldn’t age if she bought expensive creams and pills.

Oohhs and aahhs all up and down the street, a real communal event as people got comfortable with the singularity, embracing the moment. Except for Kelly. What is wrong with me? she wondered.

Part of it was just having seen Eph on TV. He didn’t say much at the press conference, but Kelly could tell by his eyes and the way that he spoke that something was wrong. Really wrong. Something beyond the governor’s and the mayor’s rote assurances. Something beyond the sudden and unexplained deaths of 206 transatlantic passengers.

A virus? A terror attack? A mass suicide?

And now this.

She wanted Zack and Matt home. She wanted them here with her right now. She wanted this solar occultation thing to be over with, and to know that she would never have to experience this feeling again. She looked up through the filtered lenses at the murdering moon in all its dark triumph, worried that she might never see the sun again.