Максим Князев – The white door (страница 3)
He could feel it calling to him. A sound like a child
crying, muffled by the dirt and the stone.
Tom's hands shot up from the keys as if they'd been
burned. His heart was beating too fast. He felt a bead
of sweat roll down his temple, even though the room
was cold enough to see his breath.
What the hell?He scrolled up. The first sentence, his sentence, was
still there. But the second and third sentences—
They'd been replaced by the machine's words. The
machine was writing a story about a character named
Thomas Keene. A character who lived in a farmhouse
in a blizzard. A character who had a basement that
was calling to him.
His basement.
He listened. The wind howled. The house groaned.
And from somewhere below, so faint it was almost
imagined, he heard it.
A whimper.
It was high and thin, the sound of a child trying very
hard not to cry. It came from beneath the floorboards,
from the dark, damp cellar where he stored his boxes
of old books and Christmas decorations. A cellar he
hadn't been in for months. A cellar with a heavy,
bolted door.
"It's the wind," he said aloud, his voice cracking.
"Just the wind. The house is old. They make noises.
Settling. Pipes. That's all it is."
But it didn't sound like pipes. It sounded like a little
girl, and she was scared.
He looked back at the typewriter. The screen had
changed again. A new sentence appeared, typed as if
by ghostly fingers:
Henry opened the door to the basement, but Tom
was smarter than Henry. Tom wouldn't open the door.
Not until he read the next sentence.Tom stared at the screen, his mind racing. This was a
prank. It had to be. Someone had hacked the
machine, or it had some kind of malicious software.
He'd call the antique shop in the morning, demand a
refund, maybe even threaten to sue. That's what he'd
do.
But he knew, even as he thought it, that he was lying
to himself. There was no Wi-Fi here. No Bluetooth.
The storm had killed the cell signal. This machine was
running on batteries, and it was doing something that
terrified him to his core.
The cursor blinked.
He reached out, his fingers trembling, and typed a
question.
Who are you?
The screen paused. The cursor blinked three times,
five times, ten times. He thought it was over. He
thought it was just a glitch, an electrical hiccup, and
he was about to unplug the damn thing and toss it
out the window into the snow.
Then the words appeared:
I am the author. And you, Tom, are the character.
He laughed. It came out sharp and hysterical, a bark
of sound that was swallowed by the howling wind.
"Very funny. Very fucking funny. You're a goddamn
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