Читать книгу Mutilated. Crypt of the Seven Angels - Natalie Yacobson - Страница 3

Month before

There is morning in London. Together with it came the usual noise of traffic and people hurrying to work. Claire didn’t like bright sunny rays. She was not used to getting up early. Recently the night began to attract her. If it was not for business, she would not have risen from bed.

So it all started. Study, work, thoughts about classes… Everything was mixed in a solid cocoon of the usual and annoying routine. She did not wait for something unusual today. The most unusual thing happened to her was an early rise and a cup of coffee at breakfast. She did not want to tear off her head from the pillow, but the stack of sketches in the folder was waiting. Claire has long been going to take her work on the studio. Today’s morning was suitable for this. She needed money. And the idea of returning to the University didn’y like her. Claire hated studies. She was not allowed to comprehend systematic sciences. But creativity brought her a small profit. She was enough for her. Even quite. Clair got used to live modestly. The only luxury that she possessed, perhaps, was her face. People often accompanied her with delighted glances. Not often you will see something so beautiful in the middle of the usual urban fuss. Clair was accustomed to her beautiful appearance so much that it was not for her the special gift of heaven. Up to this day! Today she realized that everything could change in one moment.

There is nothing stable in this world. Even wonderful things in one minute can turn into ashes. The same rule applies to people. They are also easy to destroy, as some museum rarity of the Renaissance’s era. And only a terrible skeleton will remain.

Claire was tired and sleeping. The tram was half empty. She sat on a double seat and leaned off his forehead to the window. The travel ticket lay in her pocket. The smell of hot dogs and mustard tickled the nostrils, but Claire did not feel hunger. Maybe it only seemed to her that a thin aroma of freshly cut roses was mixed to the daily smells of perfumes and sweat of the crowd. Absorbing eyelids, Claire presented to herself this rose, just cut into any magic garden. Someone’s fingers squeeze the stem, and suddenly blood appears on the spikes.

It looks like her ordinary dreams! Claire with difficulty opened the eyelids. How bad do not get enough sleep in the morning! She forced herself to be held on the seat and look at the melted urban landscapes.

London is a nice City. It is so calm and good. The proximity of the Thames does not inspire a danger. And there are no prisoners in Tower today. And yet… somehow is it too quiet today.

Claire looked at her beatiful reflection in the window glass. She looked great. Only today, some shadow flashed in the window. As if someone else’s reflection was laid on her own. And although the seat close was empty, Claire turned around. Nobody. But she was almost sure that she sees someone…

Suddenly something similar to the solar strike occurred. Claire did not even expect this. The tram made a stop, and a couple entered the wagon. The most common teenagers are in appearance, but she even almost dropped the folder with sketches. Yes, what about her? These people… She had previously seen a couple, but this… The girl in appearance was the most common with a mouse tail and a nonsense makeup on her face. Claire could not tear the eye from the boy. What is it in him? In this guy? She didn’t even like him. However, something in the bend of his eyebrows, in the lip lines, even in a slightly female laid hair seemed vaguely acquaintances.

Effect similar to shock! On one moment Claire lost a sense of time and orientation. Even when the couple came out from the tram, she still felt herself bad. The time as if stopped. With difficulty Claire turned around. A new boy immediately attracted her attention.

Clair caught his breath. She felt as if she had just appealed to the statue. Pain! That’s what she was covered by the form of an unfamiliar young man. The pain piercing like a knife. Pain like a strong sunlight. But why? After all, it was not love, and not a passion, and at the same time, the head was burning like fire. Claire covered eyelids to cope with it. The face arose in her mind remains beautiful only a moment. Probably, this is her own pain, playing with the memory of the joke. A beautiful face burned like on fire, covered with scars and injuries. Claire has become scary.

She has an excellent imagination. It was that allowed her to paint. She knew how to invent characters and plots for drawings, which no longer succeeded anyone. However, now the fantasy was at nothing. Probably, insomnia affected. Non-sleeping people always become the most impressionable. As well, drunk. Or taking drugs. Claire, fortunately, belonged only to the first category. But she heard about visions that are pursued by drug addicts. Today’s vision was like it. It was worth covering the eyelids, and she saw the face of an angel in the fire. She preferred to draw more relaxed plots: fairies and elves in the garden, Undines and mermaids in the lagoons, Leprekhuns on flowers. Fabulous plots were intermitted with the pictures of nature and bright exotic birds. Claire loved to imprint on paper something beatiful. In her works there was no mystics. Anything ominous! It was her main principle: only please the eye, and not scare the viewer. Taboo on any sinister hints! But today she suddenly wanted to break all the rules. Take and draw something so terrible that it scares everyone. As her own, a beautiful face was frightened, which is gradually covered with burns and scars.

Danger to sleep on the go. Everything can continue anything. Claire did not want to destroy the usual stereotypes, and yet the fingers themselves reached for a pencil. She just had ten minutes to the desired stop and several clean paper sheets for sketches. It is necessary to try to spend time that remains for the trip. The tram moved smoothly along the rails. She tried so much to reproduce exactly the person saw in the crowd, that she almost missed the desired stop.

She was lucky to sell all the work and even get an order to illustrate several magic fairy tales at once. She has never been so lucky in her life. Firstly, it will be necessary to draw on her favorite topic, secondly they will pay her well. Claire has already received an advance and was going to sit at dinner in some cafeteria. She just looked through the most pretty building among street eaters when her gaze again attracted a passerby.

The stranger seemed to look at her and at the same time he looked somewhere past. Oh God, he is so beautiful, flashed in the head, as if a prayer. Hows so beautiful boy can be alive! It’s a place for him, nor in London, but in some palaces of Italy or France, in the museums, among the gallery perfect sculptures… Yes, something like that can meet there. But only not here. Not on the passerby part of the street. Claire almost screamed, noticing that some bus moves right on him. But the young man did not pay attention to the transport stream. He looked back at Claire. Now it is for sure. His blue eyes flashed like a blade in the sun. Claire did not even have time to carefully consider his features. They collapsed like paper under the head of fire. Literally! Here it is harbing his skin and burns, here are terrible cuts of depth to the bone, here poisonous ulcers eat forehead… and nothing remains from beauty. Only a terrible mask of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But it’s still he! The one who attracted her attention is like an angel from heaven. The one for another minute ago was so strikingly distinguished by its beauty from a nondescript crowd. And here it is mutilated.

Claire wanted to scream and could not. The lips did not obey. In the throat, it was stuck cold com. She saw a stranger of all instant, and here it is no longer. Is it really stamped? Maybe yes.

The girl was tired of shuffled, turned around and went away. Itself is not knowing where. How strange that the imagination plays with her such jokes.

However, the noise on the next street were not imagination. Something happened. The pillar of a peaceful street, according to which she just passed, did not speak anything good.

Claire with difficulty squeezed among the people. She did not really know what happened, just saw the chips, felt the smell of something burning from the charred bodies, which were hidden on the stretchers of Sanitars. Before the corpses wathered in cellophane bags, she still managed to consider that the people of the dead turned into terrible masks from the bones, burns and wounds. Nobody recognized them. But Clare recognized. She was rushed into the eyes of bizarre bracelets on the hands of a dead guy and a skirt of a teenage girl. According to the signs, this is the same couple that she saw in the tram in the morning! But how can it be? They hurt her with their appearance, and in the evening they are already dead… It looks like a work of the demon!

«How?» She herself did not notice that she said it loud.

«Neon sign caught fire, there, at the top,» someone from the idle onlookers standing next to her, helpfully suggested. Blissful! He did not even understand what she had in mind. Claire looked at the wreckage of the signboard, as on her own catafalque. Why should this have happened that she turned her close attention to those who were doomed? Could her wish to get rid of pain killed them. Pain, which arose like a flash, at the sight of these people.