"Bierce, Ambrose - Can Such Things Be" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bierce Ambrose)

shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption
that the night was chill, he lay down again and
went to sleep. But his sleep was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road
that showed white in the gathering darkness of a
summer night. Whence and whither it led, and why
he travelled it, he did not know, though all seemed
simple and natural, as is the way in dreams; for in
the Land Beyond the Bed surprises cease from
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Bierce, Ambrose - Can Such Things Be
troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came
to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway
was a road less travelled, having the appearance, indeed,
of having been long abandoned, because, he
thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into
it without hesitation, impelled by some imperious
necessity.
As he pressed forward he became conscious that
his way was haunted by invisible existences whom
he could not definitely figure to his mind. From
among the trees on either side he caught broken
and incoherent whispers in a strange tongue which
yet he partly understood. They seemed to him
fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy
against his body and soul.
It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable
forest through which he journeyed was lit with
a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in
its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A
shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old
wheel rut, as from a recent rain, met his eye with
a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged his hand
into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood! Blood,
he then observed, was about him everywhere. The
weeds growing rankly by the roadside showed it in
blots and splashes on their big, broad leaves. Patches
of dry dust between the wheel-ways were pitted
and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks
of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and
blood dripped like dew from their foliage.
All this he observed with a terror which seemed
not incompatible with the fulfilment of a natural
expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation
of some crime which, though conscious of his
guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces
and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness
was an added horror. Vainly he sought, by tracing
life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment
of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding