Janee: переводы

→Ronan hurled himself toward Whelk at the same moment that Whelk rose with the gun. Whelk smashed the side of it into Ronan’s jaw. Ronan’s head snapped back.

→Whelk plunged from the pentagram. It took Adam only a bare second to realize that he was lunging in the direction of the gun.

→For a moment, nothing happened. Everyone was frozen in a diorama of uncertainty.

→The writing continued until the driver’s side glass was clear, entirely swept clean by an invisible finger, until there were so many words that none of them could be read. Until it was only a window into an empty car with the memory of a burger on the passenger seat.

→Neeve moaned and shook her head slowly, so Whelk gave her another blow for good measure. He tied her up with the bindings he’d removed from himself — he did them up rather tightly, having learned from her errors — and dragged her semi-unconscious form into the middle of the pentagram.

→When she turned her back to get her knives, he slipped his hands from the binding. Then he selected a fallen branch and crashed it down on her head with as much force as he could muster. He didn’t think it would be enough to kill her, because it was still green and flexible, but it certainly brought her to her knees.

→Neeve caught a glimpse of him and imagined that he was upset over his approaching death. “Oh,” she said mildly, “don’t be like that. It will not hurt very much.” She reconsidered what she had said, and then corrected, “At least for very long.”

→Neeve didn’t have to tell Whelk to sit quietly while she arranged the ritual. Instead, as she laid out the five points of a pentagram with an unlit candle, a lit candle, an empty bowl, a full bowl, and three small bones arranged in a triangle, he sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and his hands still tied behind him and wished he could find it in himself to cry. Something to relieve this terrible weight inside him.

→But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him.

→He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.

→He missed his life. He missed everything about it: the carelessness, the extravagant Christmases at home, the gas pedal beneath his foot, free time that felt like a blessing instead of an empty curse. He missed skipping classes and taking classes and spray-painting the Henrietta sign on I-64 after getting astonishingly drunk on his birthday.

→The whispers hissed and popped in his head, like a fire just getting underway, but Whelk ignored them.

→It’s a hard thing to hold a civil conversation after recalling that one party has used a Taser on the other, so both of them finished the walk in silence. It was a strange feeling for Whelk to be back inside the woods where he’d last seen Czerny alive. He’d thought that woods were woods and he wouldn’t be affected by returning, especially at a different time of the day. But something about the atmosphere immediately took him back to that moment, the skateboard in his hand, the sad question gasped in Czerny’s dying sounds.

→He tripped over another clump of grass, and this time, Neeve did not apologize or answer his questions. Instead, she fixed a gaze of interminable length on him. It was not so much keenly penetrating as exhaustively extensive. “For a brief time, Barrington, I’ll admit that I was feeling slight regret over choosing you. You seemed very pleasant until I Tasered you.”

→Whelk said, “If you kill me, does that mean that someone else ought to kill you in fairness? Down the road?”

→Neeve winced. “I wish you wouldn’t say it like that. You’re meant to be a sacrifice. Being a sacrifice is quite a fine thing, with a lovely tradition behind it. Besides, you deserve it. It’s fair.”

→Whelk, who was annoyed by absolutely everything about Neeve, from her soft, fluffy hands to her crinkled broom skirt to her curled hair, replied, without much civility, “Why are you bothering to apologize? Aren’t you planning on killing me?”

→Tied in the back of the car, it had been hard for Whelk to know when he should make his play for freedom. The fact was, Neeve clearly had a plan, which was far more than Whelk could say of himself. And it seemed extremely unlikely that she’d try to kill him until she’d set up the finer details of the ritual. So Whelk allowed himself to be driven in his own car, now reeking of garlic and full of crumbs, to the edge of the woods. Neeve was not brave enough to take his car off-road — a fact for which he was very grateful — so she parked it in a little gravel turn-around and made them both walk the rest of the way. It was not yet dark, but still, Whelk stumbled over hummocks of field grass on the way.

→Puzzled, Adam’s eyes slid from the dry bowl at his feet to another bowl about ten feet away, equally conspicuous among the pink and yellow leaves on the ground. The second bowl was identical to the one at his feet, only it was full to the brim with a dark liquid.

→At his feet was an empty, wide-mouthed bowl. It was a glistening, ugly purple, strange and man-made in this place.