Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

All he had to do was reach Mattie’s room, break the window, and collect her in his arms, then jump two floors into the rhododendron hedge below.

He could do it, though the hairs on his arms were electrified wires and his eyeballs felt like boiled grapes.

Mattie’s door was just ahead, closed against the storm of fire. The great yellow-and-red beast chewed the ceiling, licked paint from the walls, clawed at the stair railing. A light fixture fell, shattering three feet to Jacob’s left. He crawled onward, ignoring the shards of glass gouging his hands and knees.

He would not fail.

The door beckoned, its rectangular shape lost in the shimmering haze. Jacob blinked moisture into his eyes and focused on the doorknob. Its brass reflected the conflagration, a kaleidoscope sunburst, acid lemon, nuclear tangerine.

Ten more feet.

He shoved himself forward, commanded his worthless limbs to work, embraced the pain. His lungs were two bricks of ash, his sinuses raw. In the crackling laughter of the surrounding blaze, Jacob heard soft whispers: Sleep, surrender, lie down and lose.

His eyes begged to be closed. The smoke churned and twisted in dark hurricanes. The golden maelstrom swelled with new passion as it reached the framing lumber behind the walls, tasted pine and found it sweet. The house shook in its first death throes. The smoke detector finally reached critical mass and emitted a piercing staccato of beeps.

The doorknob became Jacob’s grail. Failure’s gravity pressed upon him from all directions, as heavy as molten lead. He squirmed forward like some pathetic primitive creature crawling up from steamy slime. Sense of purpose had almost abandoned him, and his muscles screamed in rebellion as he kept moving.

The door.

Open it.

Because behind it lay everything.

Mattie.

Her birthday was February 3rd. Six weeks ago. He’d given her a 35mm camera and a bird book, Renee had given her a bicycle. The cake was chocolate, the nine candles arranged to form an M. The neighborhood kids sat around the table squealing while Mattie smiled amid the splendor of bright ribbons and wrapping paper. Princess for a day.

Princess for every day, in Jacob’s heart.

He couldn’t surrender.

The flames seemed to whisper his father’s voice: A Wells never fails.

He rose, his body wracked with fever, the flames whining and screaming, pieces of construction falling downstairs, large timbers and shelves and furniture. He could only imagine the chaos below them, heat like liquid, and wondered if the floor would collapse before he made it through Mattie’s door. Steam rose from the carpet, its threads curling and shriveling.

“Mommy . . .”

At first Jacob thought Mattie had called out, but the voice was muted, metallic.

The voice came again: “Wish me.”

Jacob had given Mattie a Rock Star Barbie for Christmas that recorded short sound bites. While the quality and tone were the same as pull-string dolls, the newer technology allowed the owner to record bits of song for playback. Mattie and Jacob had a blast playing silly messages back and forth, but she couldn’t know about “Wish me.” The recording erupted into giggles, a perverted mirth that blended into the chaotic and crackling symphony of holocaust.

Broken toys. Nothing but broken toys.

He reached for the doorknob, patted it with his fingers. He knew that if he opened the door, the oxygen would create a backdraft. He wasn’t sure if the draft would blow inward or outward, or how much he’d endanger Mattie with the act.

“Mattie!” he shouted again, his voice lost in fire, becoming the fire, all one now, an angry, all-consuming, sky-eating roar. The detector was an electric hawk, shrieking overhead.

“Daddy?”

No recording. She was there, alive.

He cupped his blistered hands and yelled. “Move away from the door, honey.”

“Daddy?” Sobs surrounded the word, joined by tears that would evaporate before reaching the floor.

“Move back.” A sock lay by the door, somehow missed by Renee’s latest compulsive clean sweep. He rolled it over his fingers and grasped the knob. It was like sticking his hand in a forge, as if he were trying to meld his fingers into some sort of cold weapon.

The fire crowded behind him like a spectator, swelled, held its breath in waiting.

Jacob twisted the knob and pulled back, the gap in the door showed dark, then yellow and red and blue and white leaped through the opening like twisted and howling sheets of wet metal.

The flames lapped at Jacob, raced over his body, singed the hair on his arms and chest and groin. He fell backward against the hot gale while the fire kicked the door wide. The oxygen lifeblood of the fire pulsed forward in both directions and funneled toward the fuel of the hall. Jacob rolled over, heart heavy as a hearthstone as he crawled once more toward Mattie’s room.

She squatted at the foot of her bed in Winnie the Pooh pajamas, stuffed animals huddled around her for protection. Flames crept from the edges of the ceiling. The wallpaper border featuring Sesame Street characters fell away, showing the darkened faces of Big Bird, Elmo, and the Cookie Monster.

“Stay down, honey,” Jacob yelled, his breath a swarm of razors as it slashed his windpipe.

“Daddy,” she said, pleading, as if she were like the smoke detector and had been programmed for one terrible sound.

He forced himself to rise into a crouch and moved through the orange rectangle of the burning doorway. He could see her eyes now, so wide, so scared, eyes like Renee’s, and then fear for Renee gripped him, sluiced through his bloodstream like menthol, and he wondered why he had left his wife alone.

Because you’re not like him. Because you can’t fail.

He couldn’t fail. Not Jacob Daniel Wells, the man who had it all. Not bulletproof Jake, who could buy his luck and whose ladders led only upwards. Not the man with the Midas touch, who had gold at his fingertips and gold for guilt and gold now eating his house and flesh and family, taking back everything it had ever given.

No. It wasn’t taking Mattie. He wouldn’t let it.

He clawed toward her, blew the smoke aside, huffed and puffed like the wolf in Mattie’s bedtime story. Fire hissed at him, outraged by his defiance. Its insistent voice tickled the dry paper of his eardrums and filled his head: Surrender.

Only one of us can have everything, and it’s not you.

“No,” he shouted, reaching for Mattie. Because he saw her, all of her, the smoke parting as if the fire’s master wanted to play one final, cruel joke of revelation.

Her pajamas had melted to her skin. Her body quivered, cold and hot, her flesh shrink-wrapped to her bones. Her stuffed alligator had dissolved into a goo of synthetic fibers around her hand. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. Except with her eyes.

And her eyes screamed plenty.

“Wish me,” they said.

He touched her, afraid to touch her, not knowing where she was least damaged. He was oblivious to the fire now, as if it were a Red Sea that had parted, a miracle that allowed him not escape but a single path for his eternal soul.

Then he lifted her, the window exploded from the heat and the stress of collapsed wood, the detector gave a last long wail of agony, the ceiling folded in, the fire stoked itself, the embers made their bed upon his back, the night pressed its black boot upon them both, and his last thought was that he’d forgotten to give Mattie a goodnight kiss when he’d tucked her in.

And he couldn’t now, because she had no lips.

CHAPTER TWO

This dream was one of darkness, set in a cool, timeless place, like the underwater bottom of a grotto.

Jacob found he didn’t need to breathe this time. Breathing had been a bother all along, an endless exercise in futility, air in and out toward no purpose. Suffocating was so much easier. Breathlessness almost seemed a natural state.