Зеленая миля / The Green Mile

There was a shelf jutting out from the back of the ladder near the top, the sort of thing a workman would use to hold his toolkit or a painter the bucket he was working out of. There was a flashlight on it. Brutal handed it to me.

“Get on up there. You’re shorter than me, so you’ll have to go pretty near all the way, but I’ll hold your legs!”

“I’m ticklish down there,” I said, starting up. “Especially my knees!”

“I’ll mind that!”

“Good,” I said, “because a broken hip’s too high a price to pay in order to discover the origins of a single mouse.

”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” My head was up by the caged light in the center of the ceiling by then, and I could feel the ladder wiggling a little under my weight. Outside, I could hear the winter wind moaning. “Just hold onto me.”

“I got you, don’t worry.” He gripped my calves firmly, and I went up one more step. Now the top of my head was less than a foot from the ceiling, and I could see the cobwebs a few enterprising spiders had spun in the crotches where the roof beams came together.

I shone the light around but didn’t see anything worth the risk of being up here.

“No,” Brutal said. “You’re looking too far away, Paul. Look to your left, where those two beams come together. You see them? One’s a little discolored!”

“I see.”

“Shine the light on the join!”

I did, and saw what he wanted me to see almost right away. The beams had been pegged together with dowels, half a dozen of them, and one was gone, leaving a black, circular hole the size of a quarter.

I looked at it, then looked doubtfully back over my shoulder at Brutal. “It was a small mouse,” I said, “but that small? Man, I don’t think so.”

“But that’s where he went,” Brutal said. “I’m just as sure as houses.”

“I don’t see how you can be.”

“Lean closer—don’t worry I got you—and take a whiff.”

I did as he asked, groping with my left hand for one of the other beams, and feeling a little better when I had hold of it.

The wind outside gusted again; air puffed out of that hole and into my face. I could smell the keen breath of a winter night in the border South… and something else, as well.

The smell of peppermint.

Don’t let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles, I could hear Delacroix saying in a voice that wouldn’t stay steady I could hear that, and I could feel the warmth of Mr.