Читать книгу The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1 - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 3
Morning
ОглавлениеMorning in the house on the embankment usually began not with sunshine, and not with an alarm clock, but with somebody’s disaster.
Sometimes the kettle boiled over with such outraged energy that it sounded ready to hand in its notice. Sometimes somebody failed to find a second sock and announced it as if a matter of national security had gone missing. Domino, for his part, considered this the proper state of the world. A house ought to sound like a house. Otherwise what was the point of having one?
But this morning everything was somehow… muffled.
Not silent. There were noises. A spoon clinked in the kitchen. A cupboard banged in the bathroom. Outside, the first tram went rattling past, old and arthritic, like a bad-tempered grandmother’s stool. Only all of it sounded as if the morning had been wrapped in a wool blanket.
Domino sat on the windowsill and frowned down into the yard.
Two crows were quarrelling over a piece of bread with the usual crowish lack of manners – that is to say, with commitment, with eloquence, and every intention of turning the matter into a brawl. This was a comfort of sorts. A world where crows still knew how to abuse one another was not entirely beyond saving.
«Ve-e-ra!» called a voice from the kitchen. «If you don’t get up this minute, I’m eating your casserole!»
It was Vadim. He was not shouting. He was merely stating a fact, in the tone of someone whose conscience had long ago gone off to live its own life.
Vera emerged from under the blankets like a person dragged out of an extremely important and probably heroic dream.
«Don’t you dare,» she croaked, and sat up at once. «I was saving that.»
Domino turned a yellow stare on her.
At first glance Vera looked perfectly ordinary: hair in all directions, sleepy face, one cheek marked with the pattern of the pillow, as if the pillow had won some overnight argument. But she had woken too quickly. No grumbling. No bargaining for five more minutes. It was as if sleep had simply been switched off.
Domino did not like that at all.
He jumped down to the floor and planted one paw firmly on the phone beside the bed.
The screen lit up.
For a moment the message icons shimmered – and then one name blurred, as if something had rubbed it from the inside with an eraser. Domino’s ears flattened. The name came back at once, but unwillingly.
«Domino, move,» said Vera automatically, dragging on her jumper. «Have you decided again that technology was invented specially for you to sit on?»
Domino had indeed decided exactly that. But at present the question was not one of ownership. He lashed her ankle with his tail and looked pointedly at the screen.
Vera looked too, and saw nothing.
«Exactly. Nothing interesting,» she said, in the tone of someone answering not the cat but life in general. Then she added, more quietly, «Not one message from Mum.»
Mum was away on a work trip, and without her the household had not exactly collapsed – everyone was managing quite bravely – but it had come a little undone. Like an old jumper still perfectly wearable, except that one thread had slipped free and gone wandering off to lead a separate existence. Their father had long since moved out and was somewhere in Argentina, so for the time being their small domestic republic was governed by the children, Domino, and chaos, each within its proper sphere.
In the kitchen, her brother was sitting at the table with the air of a man who had lived alone for years and had already had ample time to be disappointed in humanity.
Vadim, though he was Vera’s twin, was nothing like her. He had his chin propped on one hand and was scrolling through his phone with his thumb without really seeing it. Beside him stood a mug of tea, cold and untouched, which meant either deep thought or a small-scale calamity.
«Is the casserole still alive?» Vera asked suspiciously from the doorway.
«For the moment,» said Vadim, without looking up. «But I can promise it neither a long life nor a happy one.»
«Greedy pig.»
«Strategist.»
She sat down opposite him, rescued the plate, and only then looked at him properly.
«What’s wrong with you?»
Vadim shrugged. It was his preferred answer to any question he did not feel like dealing with, including, quite possibly, the design of the universe.
«Nothing.»
«You look like someone who dreamed about an algebra test and woke up in a maths olympiad.»
That got half a smile out of him, though only just. Vadim never wasted more amusement than necessary.
«There’s something odd in my phone,» he said.
«What kind of odd?»
He turned the screen towards her. Vera saw a list of notes. One of them was titled:
Don’t for…
And that was all.
«Did you write it like that for atmosphere?» she asked.
«I wrote more.»
«How much more?»
«I don’t remember.»
They looked at each other.
The tap dripped in the kitchen.
From the hall came a thump. Domino, naturally, had knocked something over that had not in the least needed knocking over.
«Wonderful,» said Vera. «The cat’s decided we aren’t awake enough.»
She got up, and at that exact moment Vadim’s phone gave a soft chime.
They both looked down.
A message from Mum.
Good morning, my dears. How are you?
And then, right in front of them, the second line quivered and changed to:
Good morning. How are you.
«Did you see that?» Vera asked at once.
«See what?»
«It just – » She stopped.
The message now looked entirely ordinary. More ordinary than it had any right to.
Vadim frowned. Not nervously – he disliked looking frightened – but with the expression he wore when something offended his sense of order and he had not yet decided whether it was worth discussing.
«Maybe the signal,» he said at last.
«Yes, obviously. The signal ate my dears because it was embarrassed by affection.»
«There are worse things.»
«Such as?»
«Such as Danya arriving again without knocking.»
As if summoned by name, the front door crashed open.
Danya burst in as though he were being chased by velocity itself. Ilya came behind him at a more civilised pace, and last of all Natan squeezed through – small, round-eyed, and wearing the expression of someone who had already had an idea and was still deciding whether it was merely good or absolutely brilliant.
«We’re here,» Danya announced with the satisfaction of a conqueror reporting a captured fortress. «And we’ve got news.»
«You always have news,» said Vera.
«That is because I pay attention to the world.»
«No,» said Ilya, shutting the door behind them. «It’s because you stick your nose into everything.»
«That,» said Danya, «is what paying attention means.»
Natan was already trying to stroke Domino. Domino endured this with the martyred dignity only very beloved cats can produce.
«What news?» Vadim asked.
Danya sat down on a stool without first asking permission from either the stool or reality.
«First of all, Auntie Zina at the bakery asked me my name twice in a row.»
«That’s because she knows you as Oi, boy, stop touching the pastries,» said Vera.
«Very funny. Secondly, in school, Ilya’s history teacher forgot what he was saying halfway through a sentence.»
Ilya nodded, gloomy but not especially surprised. He generally looked as though he had accepted long ago that life was peculiar and not open to correction.
«He said, «And now a crucial turn in the fate of – «» Ilya lifted his eyebrows. «And stopped. Just stood there staring out of the window. Then he said, «Right. Open your books to the chapter.» Didn’t even say which one.»
«And in mine,» Natan put in importantly, «the sound disappeared from a cartoon. Only for one character. Everybody else was talking, and he was just opening his mouth.»
For a second nobody laughed.
This was so unusual among them that even Domino turned his head.
Then Danya gave a short snort. «Maybe he was tired.»
«The cartoon character?» Vera asked.
«Why not? Everyone has a difficult life.»
But the laugh that followed was oddly brief. It flashed and went out at once.
Vera thought of Mum’s message and turned it over in her mind. The muffled morning. Vadim’s note that had forgotten itself. Auntie Zina forgetting Danya. A history teacher betraying history. And all the while there was that dull grey lump of unease under her ribs, pretending very hard not to exist.
«Maybe the adults are just tired,» she said, though the words sounded to her like a poor excuse arriving late.
«Maybe,» said Danya lightly. «Or maybe something interesting is starting.»
That was why people liked him.
Not just because he was always the first to charge at anything odd. Not because he often spoke before thinking. But because around Danya, strangeness stopped being simply unpleasant and became, at once, an invitation.
«If something is starting,» Vadim said slowly, «the first thing is to work out what it is.»
«There,» said Danya, pointing at him. «I always said you were a hidden genius.»
«You never said that.»
«No, but I thought it.»
Meanwhile Ilya had gone to the window.
«Look.»
In the yard, a neighbour was walking towards the gate with her dog. Everything looked ordinary – except that it didn’t, quite. The dog’s shadow was running slightly to one side, half a step too far left.
Only for a second.
Then it slipped back where it belonged.
«You saw that too?» Vera asked quickly.
Ilya nodded.
Vadim was already beside him. Danya too. Natan rose on tiptoe and gripped the sill with both hands like a very small sailor in rough weather.
«Is it the sun?» he asked.
«There isn’t any sun,» said Vadim.
And there wasn’t. The sky was pale and flat, with not a trace of sunlight anywhere. Only the river beyond the houses was shining, as if no one had told it the morning was not in the mood.
Domino leapt lightly up on to the sill and sat down between them with the air of someone who had been warning everybody all along and, naturally, had been ignored.
He was not looking into the yard.
He was looking at the window glass.
At the reflection.
And if any of the children had known how to read cat just then, they would have understood at once that Domino was deeply displeased by the thing standing behind them and not reflecting as it ought.
But they did not know how. Not yet.
They only felt – all five of them, each in a different way – that something in the ordinary morning had given a tiny crack. Only a tiny one. Like ice at the river’s edge that still bears your weight, but already knows the dark water underneath is beginning to move.
«Right,» said Vera, dragging her eyes away from the window first. «After school, here. Before any adults get involved. We tell everything properly. In order. No lying, no I probably imagined it, no I don’t know exactly.»
«And with food,» said Danya.
«And with food,» Vera agreed.
«And Domino’s in it too,» said Natan, leaning his cheek against the cat’s side.
Domino half-closed his eyes with the expression of someone condemned to organise incompetence.
Then, for no reason anyone could see, the doorbell rang.
It was loud in the hallway. Much too loud.
They all jumped and stared at one another, as if one of them might somehow turn out to be responsible. Then Vera went to open the door, with the others trailing after her in a cluster and Domino streaking past everybody’s legs.
The moment the door opened, every one of them started.
Because outside the door stood silence.
Not ordinary stairwell silence, dusty and faintly echoing, with smells of paint and boiled cabbage and somebody else’s soup drifting through it. This was something else. A flat, level sort of silence. An empty one.
Domino sprang up at once.
And this time even Vera understood that he was not simply being a cat in an inconveniently dramatic mood.
He was warning them.
She stood on the threshold for a second longer than was sensible for anyone who did not want to look absurd.
«Well?» said Danya behind her. «Is it a murderer, a ghost, or the electricity bill?»
«Worse,» said Vera. «Nobody.»
For some reason, nobody was always worse. If it was a murderer, or a ghost, or even a bill, at least you had some idea what category of trouble you were in. But try doing anything sensible with nobody.
