The Fourth Bear полностью

“It doesn’t. I’ve just had a hunch.” She tapped the most recent name on the list. “We can interview this Mr. Aldiss fellow right now. No time to lose.”

“No time to lose,” repeated Ashley, reading the address.

“Good—it’s on the way to my parents’ place.”

“Oh, rats,” said Mary with a sigh, finally resigning herself to the inevitable. “Okay, okay, you’re on—listen, you don’t eat bugs or anything, do you?”

“Bugs? Why ever would we do that?”

“Well, I thought your antennae made you kind of… I don’t know… insectoid.”

Ashley gave out a high-pitched squeak of a laugh and said, “Insectoid? The very idea!” He squinted up at his stubby antennae before continuing. “These don’t do anything at all, really—as much use and purpose as your eyebrows. No, of all the many strange and barely related phyla you have on your planet, you know which body type most closely resembles ours?”

“I don’t know.” Mary shrugged as she looked at Ashley’s curious semitransparent, liquid-filled appearance. “A cross between an amoeba and a crème brûlée?”

“Not even close. I’ll tell you: None of them. The closest thing to our physiology is seven live jellyfish stuffed inside a balloon designed to fit only two.”

He pinged his cheek with a digit, and the shock waves in his elastic skin rippled out around his head and back again before he added, “Intelligent jellyfish, mind you. We’ll take my car. Shall we go?”

“These old things are a rarity these days,” explained Ashley, driving through the darkened streets at exactly twenty-two miles per hour in his meticulously restored 1975 Datsun 120A Coupe. “My brother rebuilt it for me.”

“You have a brother?”

“And a sister, although the concept of gender is a tricky one to understand, even for us. That reproduction stuff of yours sounds pretty messy. Does the man really—”

“Yes, yes, he does,” said Mary quickly. “It’s all true.”

“And is that really a satisfactory method? I’ve got a couple of ideas for improvements, if you want to hear them.”

“No, no, please keep them to yourself. It seems to have worked very well for quite a few years now.”

They drove slowly on in silence for a few minutes, while drivers behind them attempted to pass where they could and honked their horns in annoyance. Mary consulted the list of ex–Dorian Gray car owners and guided Ashley to a very ordinary-looking street in Tidmarsh.

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Mary, fully aware that some people still couldn’t get their heads around the fact that there really were aliens and on occasion would start screaming uncontrollably—sometimes for hours.

“Righto,” said Ashley, who generally didn’t like people screaming, especially at him. “I’ll sit here and listen to the Delfonics on my eight-track.”

Mary climbed out of the car and walked up the garden path of number sixty-two. Even though Dorian’s car had been consigned to the wrecker’s yard almost exactly three years previously, the owners, she reasoned, might still be living in the same house. They were. Or at least, Mrs. Aldiss was.

“Oh!” she said when Mary explained the reason for her visit.

“I’m sorry, but I thought I’d answered all the questions back then—do I have to go over the whole thing again?”

“What questions were those?” asked Mary. “After all, it was only about a car your husband once owned.”

“It was more than that, Officer,” she replied softly. “It was the one he… died in.”

Mary apologized, and Mrs. Aldiss invited her in for a cup of tea. Her husband had been something of a seventies-car nut, too, and the pristine 1976 Austin Maxi had been too good to resist.

“He was initially very happy with it,” said Mrs. Aldiss, staring at the carpet, “but after a few weeks I think he began to grow suspicious of it.”

“In what way?”

“It’s difficult to say precisely. I used to see him stand outside the house staring at it. He tried to take it back, but Dorian Gray had vanished.”

Mary felt herself shiver.

“He used the car as normal after that, and then one night they found it crushed on the eastbound lane of the A329. It had been hit by a truck, apparently, although the other vehicle was never traced. Brian died instantly.” She fell silent and wiped a tear from her eyelash.

“I’m sorry to ask you these things,” said Mary. “Did you ever drive it yourself?”

“Once. I didn’t like it.”

“I know the feeling. I have a colleague with an Allegro I have to drive.”

“It wasn’t that. There was something else. Something malevolent about the car.”

Mary knew what she meant. “The odometer went backward, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Aldiss quietly, “yes, it did.”

“What news?” asked Ashley, turning down the volume on “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time).”

Mary sat in the passenger seat and opened her phone. “The driver was killed and the car destroyed in an accident on the A329 three years ago. The odometer went backward on that car, too.”

She texted Jack: CAUTION ALLEGRO MILEAGE APPROACHES ZERO MARY, then snapped her cell phone shut.

“What does it mean?”