"Bailey-TheMall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

"I'm sorry?"

"Your money,"she said. "It's no good here. The book is yours. The night manager
has seen to that."

"The night manager?"

"Yes, sir."

"I see," Ellis said, but he didn't, not at all. He picked up the book and
hesitated briefly. "You don't happen to know where I pay for gas in this place,
do you?"

The girl gave him a puzzled smile. "Your money's no good here, sir," she
repeated.

Ellis nodded. "I see. Well, I need to go. My family's waiting."

The girl didn't reply. Ellis left the store and walked rapidly in the direction
of the revolving doors. Katie and the kids, he knew, would be waiting-- Katie
smiling because he hadn't made it back by three, the kids tired and grumpy.

But when he reached the doors at ten minutes after three, no one was there.
Puzzled, Ellis went to the edge of the walkway and stared into the depths. From
this angle, looking down beyond a lattice of walkways and escalators, with the
Ferris wheel spinning below him, the mall seemed as void of stable perspective
as an Escher print. Ellis felt as if he was staring into a kaleidoscope.
Impossible angles converged in an endlessly replicating network of images that
was somehow hideous. Sour bile rose in his mouth. With one hand, he clutched The
Boy's Book of Constellations --

-- Open it!--

-- and shut his eyes. The music of the calliope built to a frenzy and swept him
up in its jaunty rhythm. Against the dark screens of his eyelids, Ellis saw
projected that whirling paradox of images, a crazy melange of escalators and
walkways that slowly resolved into the ugly and familiar vista of the city as he
had seen it through the rearview mirror: a hodgepodge of garish boxes, drowning
out the stars.

Once, when Ellis had been in school, a professor had commented, "Nature hates a
straight line." That statement returned to him now, in company with an arresting
vision: a world with nothing but straight lines, a grid of streets that went on
forever. Nostalgia for the curve of tree and slope surprised him again. A
fleeting image of his grandfather's rolling pasture, the stars above, passed
before him, and unbidden the thought came to him: the book. Open it.

He turned his back to the pit and opened his eyes. He held The Boy's Book of
Constellations in trembling hands. Open it! part of him cried. Open it and be