"Barker, Clive - Books of Blood 03" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

'I said no,' he snapped.
'OK, I offered.' She was already marching up the rake of the aisle, muttering something under her breath. At the foyer door she stopped and called across to him.
'I think we've got an intruder. There was somebody on the extension line. Do you want to stand watch by the front door while I fetch a cop?'
'In a minute.'

Ricky sat in the flickering light and examined his sanity. If Birdy said the boy wasn't in there, then presumably she was telling the truth. The best way to verify that was to see for himself. Then he'd be certain he'd suffered a minor reality crisis brought on by some bad dope, and he'd go home, lay his head down to sleep and wake tomorrow afternoon healed. Except that he didn't want to put his head in that evil-smelling room. Suppose she was wrong, and she was the one having the crisis? Weren't there such things as hallucinations of normality?
Shakily, he hauled himself up, crossed the aisle and pushed open the door. It was murky inside, but he could see enough to know that there were no sand-storms, or dead boys, no gun-toting cowboys, nor even a solitary rumble-weed. It's quite a thing, he thought, this mind of mine. To have created an


alternative world so eerily well. It was a wonderful trick. Pity it couldn't be turned to better use than scaring him shitless. You win some, you lose some.
And then he saw the blood. On the tiles. A smear of blood that hadn't come from his nicked ear, there was too much of it. Ha! He didn't imagine it at all. There was blood, heel marks, every sign that what he thought he'd seen, he'd seen. But Jesus in Heaven, which was worse? To see, or not to see? Wouldn't it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the hands of a power that could literally change the world?
Ricky stared at the trail of blood, and followed it across the floor of the toilet to the cubicle on the left of his vision. Its door was closed: it had been open before. The murderer, whoever he was, had put the boy in there, Ricky knew it without looking.
'OK,' he said, 'now I've got you.'
He pushed on the door. It swung open and there was the boy, propped up on the toilet seat, legs spread, arms hanging.
His eyes had been scooped out of his head. Not neatly: no surgeon's job. They'd been wrenched out, leaving a trail of mechanics down his cheek.
Ricky put his hand over his mouth and told himself he wasn't going to throw up. His stomach churned, but obeyed, and he ran to the toilet door as though any moment the body was going to get up and demand its ticket-money back.
'Birdy . . . Birdy
The fat bitch had been wrong, all wrong. There was death here, and worse.
Ricky flung himself out of the John into the body of the cinema.
The wall-lights were fairly dancing behind their Deco shades, guttering like candles on the verge of extinction. Darkness would be too much; he'd lose his mind.
There was, it occurred to him, something familiar about the way the lights flickered, something he couldn't quite put his finger on. He stood in the aisle for a moment, hopelessly lost.
Then the voice came; and though he guessed it was death this time, he looked up.
'Hello Ricky,' she was saying as she came along Row E towards him. Not Birdy. No, Birdy never wore a white gossamer dress, never had bruise-full lips, or hair so fine, or eyes so sweetly


promising. It was Monroe who was walking towards him, the blasted rose of America. 'Aren't you going to say hello?' she gently chided.
' . . . er . . .'
'Ricky. Ricky. Ricky. After all this time.'
All this time? What did she mean: all this time?
'Who are you?'
She smiled radiantly at him.
'As if you didn't know.'
'You're not Marilyn. Marilyn's dead.'
'Nobody dies in the movies, Ricky. You know that as well as I do. You can always thread the celluloid up again - '
- that was what the flickering reminded him of, the flicker of celluloid through the gate of a projector, one image hot on the next, the illusion of life created from a perfect sequence of little deaths.
' - and we're there again, all-talking, all-singing.' She laughed: ice-in-a-glass laughter, 'We never fluff our lines, never age, never lose our timing - '
'You're not real,' said Ricky.
She looked faintly bored by the observation, as if he was being pedantic.
By now sheТd come to the end of the row and was standing no more than three feet away from him. At this distance the illusion was as ravishing and as complete as ever. He suddenly wanted to take her, there, in the aisle. What the hell if she was just a fiction: fictions are fuckable if you don't want marriage.
'I want you,' he said, surprised by his own bluntness.
'I want you,' she replied, which surprised him even more. 'In fact I need you. I'm very weak.'
'Weak?'
'It's not easy, being the centre of attraction, you know. You find you need it, more and more. Need people to look at you. All the night, all the day.'
'I'm looking.'
'Am I beautiful?'
'You're a goddess: whoever you are.'
'I'm yours: that's who I am.'
It was a perfect answer. She was defining herself through him. I am a function of you; made for you out of you. The perfect fantasy.