"Barker, Clive - Books of Blood 06" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

curtains sealed her off from the auditorium, but she
hoped she might scramble under them before the tiger
reached her.
As she backed against the heavy fabric, one of the
shadows in the wings forsook its ambiguity, and the
animal appeared. It was not beautiful, as she had
thought it when behind bars. It was vast and lethal and
hungry. She went down on her haunches and reached
for the hem of the curtain. The fabric was heavily
weighted, and she had more difficulty lifting it than
she'd expected, but she had managed to slide halfway
under the drape when, head and hands pressed to the
boards, she sensed the thump of the tiger's advance.
An instant later she felt the splash of its breath on her
bare back, and screamed as it hooked its talons into her
body and hauled her from the sight of safety towards
its steaming jaws.
Even then, she refused to give up her life. She kicked
at it, and tore out its fur in handfuls, and delivered a hail
of punches to its snout. But her resistance was negligible
in the face of such authority; her assault, for all its
ferocity, did not slow the beast a jot. It ripped open her
body with one casual clout. Mercifully, with that first
wound her senses gave up all claim to verisimilitude,
and took instead to preposterous invention. It seemed
to her that she heard applause from somewhere, and
the roar of an approving audience, and that in place
of the blood that was surely springing from her body
there came fountains of sparkling light. The agony her
nerve-endings were suffering didn't touch her at all.
Even when the animal had divided her into three or
four parts her head lay on its side at the edge of the
stage and watched as her torso was mauled and her limbs
devoured.
And all the while, when she wondered how all this
could be possible - that her eyes could live to witness
this last supper - the only reply she could think of was
Swann's:
'It's magic,' he'd said.
Indeed, she was thinking that very thing, that this
must be magic, when the tiger ambled across to her head,
and swallowed it down in one bite.

Amongst a certain set Harry D'Amour liked to believe
he had some small reputation - a coterie which did
not, alas, include his ex-wife, his creditors or those
anonymous critics who regularly posted dogs' excrement
through his office letterbox. But the woman who was on
the phone now, her voice so full of grief she might have
been crying for half a year, and was about to begin again,