"Blaylock, James P - The War Of The Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blaylock James P)

The War of the Worlds
by James P. Blaylock


From their second-story bedroom window in the Berkeley hills, Ed watched strange lights flicker through the treetops a mile or so above the house, a two-story rental that backed up to the wooded area around Tilden Park. The October night was unseasonably warm, the window open to catch the land breeze that drifted through the screen, ruffling Ed's hair. It hadn't been the lights that awakened him, although they cast an eerie, moving glow on the bedroom wall opposite the window; he had been up and around anyway, disturbed by odd nighttime noises, unable to sleep, his troubles going around in his head. He and Lisa had argued late last night, and had left the argument unresolved.

Somewhere around four o'clock every small noise had conspired to awaken him: the slowly dripping faucet in the bathroom, Lisa's rolling over in bed, the early-morning chatter of Lisa's parakeets in their cage downstairs. And then he had heard a low, unidentifiable humming noise, like bees in an immense hive. He had gotten up and gone downstairs, draping the parakeet cage before searching for the source of the noise, going out onto the front porch, where it was quieter, the sound evidently blocked by the house itself. By the time he had gotten back upstairs he was fully awake, and it was only then that he had noticed the oddly moving lights shining in through the window.

His eyes searched the vast shadow of the eucalyptus grove now, where it merged with the darkness of the pine forest farther up, mostly piёon pines, all in all a couple of hundred densely-wooded square miles cut with trails and cleared patches of grass and wildflowers. The fall sky was clear of clouds and fog. There was no telltale sign of smoke, just thousands of stars and the moon throwing out its cold lightЧno fire or terrestrial tragedy to account for this display of light and sound, which made him increasingly uneasy. He watched the lights playing across the hillside, now and then shooting up into the air like beacons; mostly white light, but with red flashes spaced evenly in a circular pattern, as if they traced the perimeter of a landing pad or of a vast spherical ship.

He and Lisa had taken this house at the top of the world partly because of its proximity to mother nature, which was actually something Lisa appreciated more than he did. He had liked the two-bedroom flat off Telegraph Avenue just fine, where they had lived happily during the first two years of their marriage. But Lisa had wanted something farther from the scene downtown, especially because they planned to have a child. His stubborn objection to moving had been met with a resistance that still surprised him when he thought about it. That had been their first real argument as a married couple, the first time he had seen Lisa lose her temper. To use the word lose was to understate it, though. There had come a point when her temper had flooded over the top of the dam and he'd had to swim to safety.

He was big enough now to admit that he had contributed his small part to that one, especially since she'd been right about moving. The Berkeley flat was too small, the plumbing leaked, the heating was lousy. There hadn't really been room for Ed's stuff, let alone for theirs, although Lisa wasn't a stuff kind of person, not the way he was, which was their philosophical gulf. His HO trains filled eight big cardboard boxesЧnot the trains alone, but the papier-mтchщ tunnels and mountains and the depot and houses and allЧbut during the years of their marriage the trains had been packed away, as had certain other of his collections. Out here at the edge of the wilderness they had an extra room, a piece of a basement, and forced-air heating. The monthly payment was more than they could afford, and that didn't generate harmony, but then everything these days cost more than you could afford, so to hell with it, or at least to hell with it as regards the house and other domestic concerns.Е

As for his stuff, it was still in boxesЧa hell of a lot of boxes, admittedlyЧand the futile idea that the basement would become a train yard rather than a guest bedroom still haunted the new house like a dwindling ghost. But that was thin ice. There was nothing to be gained by skating around on it this morning.

There seemed to be some sort of increase in whatever was going on out in the woods, a series of blips and blaps that synchronized with the rising glow of a strangely purple light, like an old hippie nightclub. He could see movement now, too, large shadows shifting and growing and then shrinking away again. The bed creaked, and he turned around, thinking that Lisa had awakened, but she slept the sleep of the just, probably whacked out from the enormity of yesterday's work.

They had just gotten the last of the boxes from the move unpacked, putting in God knew how many hours, with the bulk of his crated-up stuff relegated indefinitely to the garage, which is what struck this off-key nostalgic chord in him. Lisa's vast collection of films occupied an entire bedroom downstairs. She taught film classes at San Francisco State, so the films were her work, whereas his own stuff was useless trash. Being married meant making concessions, and of course now that she was pregnant, there would be more concessions. His simple observation that the concessions were largely his had spoiled their late-night dinner, that and his unfortunate mention of his bowling ball, which was one of the treasures living in the garage, and which was actually more of a sore point than any of the rest of it, his trains included.

He cocked his head, hearing a high-pitched, dog-whistle-type shriek, just barely audible, as if it were projected at an inhuman decibel. A dog immediately started howling some distance away, and the sound of the howling struck him as unnatural, as if the dog sensed the presence of something fearful out in the woods. The sound diminished, but the howling continued now that the dog was spooked.

Back when he was single, Ed had bowled in a Tuesday night league. He had enjoyed the bowling alley: the sound of pins falling, the smell of spilled beer from longneck Budweiser bottles, the predictable wit that followed a picked-up spare or a lucky strike. He still had his bowling shirt with their sponsor's name embroidered on it: Nick and Fergy's Appliances. But Lisa wasn't a fan of bowling. That was the long and the short of it. She just didn't appreciate the art form. She had tried to for a little while, but it didn't wash, and, as with so many things, his bowling had gone by the boards as their marriage defined itself over time. He still wore the shirt now and then, although it made him feel like a fraud to invoke the names of Nick and Fergy now that he had become an outsider at the lanes.

The dog's howling stopped abruptly, as if someone had shut the creature up. A long shaft of ruby red light shot straight up into the sky from the darkness of the woods, then blinked out, followed by a half dozen such shafts, perhaps beacons, projected skyward now from the red perimeter lights. He wondered if this was some kind of Air Force or Army maneuverЧnighttime war games using infrared lights.

Suddenly cool, he walked across the room to find a sweater in his open closet. Inside hung his retired bowling shirt, a delicate robin's egg blue that looked silver in the white light cast from the thing on the hillside. It was made of a high-quality rayon that could pass for silk, with royal blue embroideryЧsixty dollars' worth of peerless, hometown American shirt. It occurred to him that it wouldn't be out of place framed, hanging on a wall, but then the very idea that it had become a mere keepsake depressed him, and he shut the closet door quietly and returned to the window, pulling on the sweater.

The bowling ball trouble had reared its ugly head several months ago, right after the move, when he had gone down to the lanes on San Pablo Avenue with his friend Jerry to bowl a couple of frames. He found that he hadn't lost his touch, even after two years of abstinence, which had probably made him feel slightly self-satisfied and off-guard, affecting his judgment when, afterward, they had gone into the pro shop. Ed had never owned a ball that was worth a damn, even in his playing days, and he coveted Jerry's ball, which was a rainbow swirl of colors that would have been right at home in an art museum. It had put Jerry back three hundred dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money, but to Ed it was like the house: these days nothing was affordable, so you bought it anyway.

In the pro shop, Ed had impulsively bought a ball of his ownЧa jet-black, oversized eight ball, which reminded him nostalgically of the fortune-telling eight balls of his youth. The transparently glossy finish was like water in a well, the sort of thing you sat and stared into, like a tidepool or a fire in a fireplace, and the figure eight itself, pearl white and with its suggestion of the infinite, hovered immensely deep within the black sphere. It had cost him nearly four hundred and sixty irretrievable dollars. The experience had been a little like getting a tattooЧonce they drilled it, it was yoursЧand he had walked out of the pro shop in a rising tide of buyer's remorse that was in utter conflict with the virgin object that he carried in its fleece-lined bag. Afterward he and Jerry had spent a couple of hours in the Triple Rock Brewery, and Ed's doubts had dissolved.

It dawned on him now that the red lights in the woods must be lasers. He had read an article about them recently, about what they could doЧdrill teeth, slice neat little doughnut rings into your eyeballs, blast things to smithereens. Lisa had one that she used as a pointer in her film classes. The idea was unsettling, almost otherworldly. He had been unable to grasp the fine points of the article, why one laser would eliminate an incoming ICBM and another was just a jolly red dot, like the bouncing ball in old sing-along cartoons.Е

Sober, he would have known enough not to bring the bowling ball into the house when he got home from the brewery. They had a little detached garage built into the hillside, and it would have been easy enough for him to hide it out there and visit it from time to time, sneaking it out if he went down to the lanes with Jerry. In a year or two, when it was scuffed up, he could have brought it in and made up a perfectly reasonable lie about buying it at a garage sale. But he had blown all of that in his porter-fueled enthusiasm and in the interests of honesty. Don't lie to your wife; that's what the good angel had told him, although why God had let the good angel drink beer was more than he could say.

Lisa had been puzzled by the ball at first, full of disbelief. If she hadn't seen the receipt, he might have convinced her that he'd picked it up for $29.99 at Kmart, but his planning had been faulty. Following her puzzlement had come a measure of angry unhappiness. It was no problem now to see that a hugely expensive bowling ball might have had this effect on her, but at the time Ed's rationale for the purchase had sounded as brilliant as Newton to him. Lisa had shown him their skyrocketing Visa bill and accused him of domestic crimes. She was pregnant, for God's sake. The baby would need a cradle, a high chair, an advanced degree from a good university. Of course he hadn't been able to use the ball, ever, and yet it had remained a sore spot in their marriage, the straw that could break the camel's back if it ever landed there again. Buying the eight ball had quite simply wrecked bowling forever, like the stolen diamond that the heiress could never wear in public. Calling up its ghost last night had been an error.

No more errors, he told himself as he heard Lisa roll over in bed. You don't need to be right to be happy: that would be his thought for the day. You could reach for the brake as easily as the accelerator. She put out her arm now and patted the place where he should have been. He wondered if his absence would wake her up, and he heard the rising shriek of the whistle noise out in the woods again. She raised herself blearily onto her elbows and looked around the room, as if trying dreamily to make out the source of the noise. The dog resumed its howling.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know," he said, turning toward the bed. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face.

"Some kind of thing up in the hills," he told her. "Dwarves playing nine pins, maybe." With my bowling ball, he thought, surprised to find the anger rekindle itself so easily. He would have to watch it. Cover the brakeЧthat was what the good angel would whisper to him.

"What are those noises?"

"There's something going on up there in the woods, maneuvers or something."