The Lamp of the Wicked

Начало книги

Just about every door on the top landing of that three-storey house had a hole bored in it, for crouching at and watching. Holes and watching. Watching through holes. It would always start like that.

‘You still doing it?’

He realized he’d shouted it down the valley, which was wide and shallow and ambered under the late afternoon sun.

It was a lovely place. It ought to be grim and stark, with scrubby grass and dead trees. The reality – the actual beauty, the total serenity of the scene – he couldn’t cope with that, didn’t want any kind of balm on the memories that had brought him out here.

Oh, aye, a lovely place to be buried, beneath the wide sky and within sight of the church tower. But not the way the two women had been buried, chopped like meat and stowed in vertical holes. Not, for God’s sake, like that.

And now he had to turn away, with the weary knowledge of how futile this was, because there was still too much hate in him.

Читать дальше →