Neil Gaiman - Coraline - Глава 7
текст песни

Somewhere inside her Coraline could feel a huge sob welling up. And then she stopped it, before it came out. She took a deep breath and let it go. She put out her hands to touch the space in which she was imprisoned. It was the size of a broom cupboard: tall enough to stand in or to sit in, not wide or deep enough to lie down in.

One wall was glass, and it felt cold to the touch.

She went around the tiny room a second time, running her hands over every surface that she could reach, feeling for doorknobs or switches or concealed catches—some kind of way out—and found nothing.

A spider scuttled over the back of her hand and she choked back a shriek. But apart from the spider she was alone in the cupboard, in the pitch dark.

And then her hand touched something that felt for all the world like somebody's cheek and lips, small and cold, and a voice whispered in her ear, "Hush! And shush! Say nothing, for the beldam might be listening!"

Coraline said nothing.

She felt a cold hand touch her face, fingers running over it like the gentle beat of a moth's wings.

Another voice, hesitant and so faint Coraline wondered if she were imagining it, said, "Art thou—art thou alive?"

"Yes," whispered Coraline.

"Poor child," said the first voice.

"Who are you?" whispered Coraline.

"Names, names, names," said another voice, all faraway and lost. "The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names. I still keep pictures in my mind of my governess on some May morning, carrying my hoop and stick, and the morning sun behind her, and all the tulips bobbing in the breeze. But I have forgotten the name of my governess, and of the tulips too."

"I don't think tulips have names," said Coraline. "They're just tulips."

"Perhaps," said the voice sadly. "But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange-and-red, and red-and-orange-and-yellow, like the embers in the nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them."

The voice sounded so sad that Coraline put out a hand to the place where it was coming from, and she found a cold hand, and she squeezed it tightly.

Her eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness. Now Coraline saw, or imagined she saw, three shapes, each as faint and pale as a moon in the daytime sky. They were the shapes of children about her own size. The cold hand squeezed her hand back. "Thank you," said the voice.

"Are you a girl?" asked Coraline. "Or a boy?"

There was a pause. "When I was small I wore skirts and my hair was long and curled," it said doubtfully. "But now that you ask, it does seem to me that one day they took my skirts and gave me britches and cut my hair."

"Tain't something we give a mind to," said the first of the voices.

"A boy, perhaps, then," continued the one whose hand she was holding. "I believe I was once a boy." And it glowed a little more brightly in the darkness of the room behind the mirror.

"What happened to you all?" asked Coraline. "How did you come here?"

"She left us here," said one of the voices. "She stole our hearts, and she stole our souls, and she took our lives away, and she left us here, and she forgot about us in the dark."

"You poor things," said Coraline. "How long have you been here?"

"So very long a time," said a voice.

"Aye. Time beyond reckoning," said another voice.

"I walked through the scullery door," said the voice of the one that thought it might be a boy, "and I found myself back in the parlour. But she was waiting for me. She told me she was my other mamma, but I ne