Откуда счет ступеням - Глава 7 часть 1 - текст песни, слова, перевод, видео

Will turned off 1-95 towards the coast.

-Can I know where we are going? – asked Hannibal.

-Wrong question.

Hannibal thoughtfully drummed his fingers on his knee.

-So, we are not heading somewhere, but rather, to sometime?

-I guessed it. About thirty years ago.

-To your father's friend?

-He wasn't a friend. Just someone I know.

-He wasn’t a friend, but all these years you haven’t lost sight of him?

-When I was eleven, my father and I helped him hide the corpse.

In those days, they wandered around the northern states, and spent the winter in a panel house near Lake Michigan, where the frozen air was thoroughly saturated with an icy water suspension. As far as Will could remember, that winter everything around him seemed to be covered with a dirty, icy crust. He and his father caulked the windows with insulation and heat-resistant film, but still had to sleep in a sweater, pants and two pairs of socks. During the day, his father, wearing blue overalls (which Will for some reason kept for a long time after his death) and gloves with cut off fingers, repaired boat engines, heaters and microwaves. And in the evenings he hung out in bars.

One chilly Tuesday, my father returned in the evening with a swollen eye and broken knuckles on his right hand. Will brought him some ice and water and went to bed. His father woke him up an hour later.

-Get up, Willie. Go ahead and open the door. If it's the police, say I'm not here.

Will ran towards the loud knocking to the door, but, looking through the peephole, did not see any police. The man standing on the porch was alone, and wrapped up from the cold so that only his eyes were visible from under an army knitted hat, and everything else was reliably hidden by a dark brown scarf.

“This is Mr. Huxley,” Will shouted to his father.

He frowned, but waved his hand, allowing him to open the door. The first thing Mr. Huxley did was to push Will on the shoulder, so that he almost flew to the side, muttered “Get out” through his teeth and dragged his father to the far corner of the room. Will thought it best to return to the bedroom, but the walls of the house were too thin, and although he did not catch the conversation from the very beginning, he heard more than enough.

“That guy you got into a fight with in the Lundy's parking lot came after me with a knife, I had to give him a good whack, his whole head in. Everyone saw how you fought with him - you, not me, you skinned your fists on him, it’s his blood on your shirt, but I’m clean.”

And an unambiguous threat: “better help me, otherwise...”

Will quickly pulled on his jeans and stepped into his boots. As he emerged from the bedroom, his father and Huxley turned sharply and glared at him.

“Go back to the room, boy,” Huxley said. – You dreamed everything. Make a note of it, otherwise I’ll remind you, don’t hesitate.

“The ground is frozen,” Will answered. “But I know where to hide it.”

An abandoned house stood on the outskirts, at the dead end of a deserted street, like the end of a sentence. It had long since squinted, the roof began to fall onto the oak tree growing in the yard. Almost every day after school, Will climbed up the branches into the attic, where it was relatively warm in the sun, and boxes with a variety of literature, from comic books to French philosophy, gathered dust in the corners.

Will pointed upward.

-This is how I get there, but you can go around the house, where the door to the basement is closed only with a chain.

On Will's advice, his father took a bolt cutter with him. The chain gave way with a metallic squeal and clang - it’s good that there were no neighbors in the area who could be disturbed by the strange noise. The basement was dirty and cold, but the frost was not felt.