Назначение. Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity

 

Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens looked at me with no surprise when I said:

“I have a question I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.”

He smiled a little. “I suppose you should,” he said, “Christmas is a fine time for questions.”

Somewhere down the hallway to our left—a hall I had never been down—a grandfather clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I could smell old leather and oiled wood and, much more faintly than either of these, the smell of Stevens’s aftershave.

“But I should warn you,” Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside, “it’s better not to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here.”

“People have been closed out for asking too much?” Closed out was not really the phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.

“No,” Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. They simply choose to stay away.”

I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back—it was as if a large, cold, invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and wondered (as I had more than once before) exactly how many rooms there really were here.

“If you still have a question, Mr Adley, perhaps you’d better ask it. The evening’s almost over—”

“And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?” I asked, but Stevens only looked at me impassively. “All right,” I said. There are books in this library that I can’t find anywhere else—not in the New York Public Library, not in the catalogues of any of the antiquarian book-dealers I’ve checked with, and certainly not in Books in Print. The billiard table in the Small Room is a Nord. I’d never heard of such a brand, and so I called the International Trademark Commission. They have two Nords—one makes cross­country skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There’s a Seafront jukebox in the Long Room. The ITC has a Seeburg listed, but no Sea front. ”

“What is your question, Mr Adley?”

His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his eyes suddenly... no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the terror I felt had infused the atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock from down the lefthand hall was no longer the pendulum of a grandfather clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as he watches the condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure that the front door would blow open, revealing not 35th Street but an insane Clark Ashton Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile horizon below. which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.

Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his grey eyes.

Where do all these things come from? I had meant to ask. Oh, I know well enough where you come from, Stevens; that accent isn’t Dimension X, it’s pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in your eyes and stamped it on your face? And, Stevens—

—where are we RIGHT THIS SECOND?

But he was waiting for my question.

I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: “Are there many more rooms upstairs?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “A great many. A man could become lost In fact, men have become lost Sometimes it seems to me that they go on for miles. Rooms and corridors.”

“And entrances and exits?”

His eyebrows went up slightly. “Oh yes. Entrances and exits.” He waited, but I had asked enough, I thought—1 had come to the very edge of something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.

“Thank you, Stevens.”

“Of course, sir.” He held out my coat and I slipped into it.

There will be more tales?”

“Here, sir, there are always more tales.”

That evening was some time ago, and my memory has not improved between then and now (when a man reaches my age, the opposite is much more likely to be true), but I remember with perfect clarity the stab of fear that went through me when Stevens swung the oaken door wide—the cold certainty that I would see that alien landscape, cracked and hellish in the bloody light of those double suns, which might set and bring on an unspeakable darkness of an hour’s duration, or ten hours, or ten thousand years. I cannot explain it, but I tell you that world exists— I am as sure of that as Emlyn McCarron was sure that the severed head of Sandra Stansfield went on breathing. I thought for that one timeless second that the door would open and Stevens would thrust me out into that world and I would then hear that door slam shut behind me... forever.

Instead, I saw 35th Street and a radio-cab standing at the curb, exhaling plumes of exhaust. I felt an utter, almost debilitating relief.

“Yes, always more tales,” Stevens repeated. “Goodnight, sir.”

Always more tales.

Indeed there have been. And, one day soon, perhaps I’ll tell you another.

назначение

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