Текст книги "Annabel Lee"

Автор книги: Henry Lion Oldie

Henry Lion Oldie
Annabel Lee

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...This manuscript was found in a half-broken desolated bungalow on the island of San-Sebastian – one of the last strongholds and shelters of Mankind in the hard, troubled times after the Great Break. Banished from the cities, left to their own resources, – some gave in to the persuasions of the Avoiders of Objects (the Empters) and emigrated after signing the contract; some adapted to the new lifestyle, quickly losing restraining moral factors. And some went away to the rapidly developing hotbeds of the Necrosphere, and their further fate remained unknown. In that time few had associated the forming of the Necrosphere with the Great Emigration caused by the signing of the contract between man and Empter...

The manuscript itself was almost rotten, so that there was impression that its pages had been in the water for a long time, and what remained was written in a clumsy, uneven handwriting, as if it was hard for him who had written it to hold a pen in his hands – or whatever had he held it in, he who had written this tale too similar to a true story...

 
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me. [1]1
  Here and farther are used the extracts from the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe


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...Turquoise waves, bending in foamy white crests, were rolling on the scattered gold of the shore, and I was sitting on the sand, looking at the sea. I was looking at the sea, and it was licking my scratched bare feet. My name was Renaldo. I was born on this island, where incredibly huge coco-palms thrust into the incredibly blue, deep sky. I loved my island. Do you feel? Grownups used to tell that San-Sebastian (that was the name of our island) had been formerly a part of a continent. But that was long ago, before the Great Break. That’s why we live in the white stone houses – though here there’s nothing to build them from – and we have a school, and a church, and even an electricity station. But the grownups still regret, they miss the life on the continent where, according to their words, people had lots of stuff like that... But I’m all right without it. I have the sea, and the sky, and coco shells for different games, and home – and I don’t need the rest. Grandfather Ignacio says I am like an Avoider of Objects, but I have nothing to compare to. I’ve seen an Empter twice, when he visited the settlement, and both times I was being sent immediately to the shore to play, and from the distance he was ordinary and dull. I am fine. I can sit and look at the sea, and think of things, and the sand flows through my fingers and tickles them a bit...

“Hi, Renaldo!” someone’s shadow obscures the sun, but I know this is Annabel – she walks after me all the time. She always... What does she even need?!

“Hi,” I mumble without turning. Annabel keeps silent for some time and looks at me, and maybe not at me – because finally she says: “The sea is beautiful today.”

“The sea is always beautiful,” I agree, and unexpectedly for myself I suggest: “Sit down. Let’s look together.”

Annabel sits down quietly near me, and we are looking at the sea. For a long, long time. And then I look time and again not at the sea but at her, at her sunburn shoulders, at her ashen hair fluttering in the wind; and then she turns to me, and we look at each other, and for the first time I notice that Annabel’s eyes are deep and sad, and not at all mocking and spiteful, and...

“Annabel and Renaldo sitting on a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” a mocking cry is heard right by, and a whole cloud of wet sand falls on as, and Annabel’s eyes become filled with tears. Turning away so as not to see these tears and the sand stuck in the locks of her wonderful hair, I notice Fat Garcia from the nearby street and his friends, jumping around and crying their “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!..” – and then I leap to my feet and grapple Garcia, and we roll on over the sand, but soon enough I find myself under him, and there’s sand in my mouth, and in my eyes, and in my hair... Suddenly Garcia releases me, and I hear a horrible choking cry that stops abruptly. Cleaning my sand-filled eyes, I see slippery tentacles with flat whitish dishes of suckers, crawling over the beach, and a figure of boy – one of the friends of running away Garcia – taken away into the sea. The victim is winded around with thick pulsating hoses, and I barely have

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