"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)

Licking shut the paper, Diana looked away. She seemed to feel rebuked. `I've been offered it a few times,' Rose said, `but I'm always afraid it would bring on a migraine.'

`It might.' Diana glanced up sharply. `You have migraines?'

Less now than I used to. None since a year ago.' Why had Diana's question been so eager? She breathed out a cloud of sweetish smoke; the red light dimmed as though a fire was sinking. `What sort of thing did you use to see?' Diana said.

`Oh, a kind of tiny diamond that would break into fragments and spread across my whole field of vision. The first time was awful, because I didn't know what was happening - it was like reality exploding. I still see a spark now and then.'

`I know people who have that.' Diana's voice was slower, reflective. `And some people see intricate Oriental patterns. I remember that because it sounds like an acid trip.'

`I wouldn't know about that, Diana.' The smell of cannabis made Rose's head swim. Was it affecting her? She heard a tap abruptly relieving itself, a blurred voice muffled by what seemed all at once an infinity of intervening walls. She felt restless, but when she tried to stand up her legs were water, pouring over the edge of the couch.

`I used to do acid,' Diana said. `My Tarot says I may not go far in a job but develop inwardly instead. It kind of brings us back to what I was saying about your perceptions.'

`Really.'

`Yes, I believe so. See, certain things can heighten your perceptions. Drugs can, of course, and I'll tell you what someone once told me - being at a stance can sometimes give you special talents.'

Rose felt obscurely threatened, perhaps by the looming cannabis. `But migraines heighten your perceptions naturally,' Diana said.

`Not mine, I'm afraid.'

`Maybe you don't let it get to you. John says most cases experience the heightening just before a migraine. I figure there's a connection between the flickering you get with migraine and the strobing you see on a trip. You know ergotamine - that's the only migraine cure that works - derives from LSD.'

Rose was growing drowsy. `If you'll excuse me, Diana, I think I'll try to sleep.'

`Sure, I'll turn off the big light.' When she did so she said, as though the dark would help her to persuade Rose, `But if you ever have glimpses, you oughtn't to suppress them. I believe you're never given more to bear than you're capable of bearing.'

Rose tugged the blankets over herself. Why couldn't Diana leave her alone? Shrunken voices resounded in the corridor; a vague oval hovered beyond the bars of the fire escape - the back of Diana's head. Rose closed her eyes determinedly. She hoped that her floating sensation, the heaviness in her skull, were the beginnings of sleep.

Her own warmth lulled her. Within her eyelids was a soothing glow. She drifted. Faint sounds of New York touched memories: streets, faces. Close by, Diana's footsteps reassured her that she was not alone, though they were receding beyond her sleep.

They weren't Diana's footsteps. They were darting out of the vacated flat. The dim corridor was a tunnel, beyond whose distant mouth the staircase rushed away like the lit end of a train. She fled toward it, in terror of the touch on the back of her neck. Dimness thick as mud hindered her limbs. The blow seemed to buckle her spine. She fell.

Suddenly she realized she still had a chance. If she could just let go of her body, she could escape. He would have caught only the shell of her. No sooner had she realized than she was sailing out -of her body, out of the corridor. She had barely time to glimpse him, a shadowy figure tearing out his hair in frustration at her ruse. She soared gleefully, delighted to have beaten him. She was safe, and more free than she had ever been in her life.

And she was no longer dreaming - for she could see herself tying on the couch, asleep.

She would have screamed if she had been able to scream; but she had left her mouth down there on the couch. There below her, yards below her, lay her body, and she was something else. Her body looked doll-sized; the dimness had turned her face into wax. It looked alien; she seemed never to have seen it before; but even that was less terrifying than the sight of her left fist, which was poking its knuckles uncomfortably into her left cheek - for she could feel nothing.

Unless she regained her body at once, she was dead. Darkness surrounded her, eating away her sense of herself. She was unable to move in any direction. It seemed that everthing she could have used to fight the darkness lay slumped on the couch. Only her thoughts were struggling, and they were being crushed by darkness and by her panic into a last intense point of consciousness, rapidly dwindling.

Then her clenched terror seemed to explode, and she was lying on the couch. But she was paralysed, robbed of all sense of how to work her body. The smell of cannabis hovered over her. Nearby in the dimness, her fixed eyes could just distinguish a figure with a bloated head. Was it watching her, waiting to see what she would do?

In a moment she felt herself mesh with her body. Her inadvertent gasp was far too loud. The dark figure leaned towards her; light flared before it; the shadow of Diana's head bloomed momentarily on the wall, as she lit another cigarette. Headphones tethered her to a stereo turntable. `You okay, Rose?' she called.

`Yes.' She was too grateful to be awake and in her body to do more than lie there limply. But oh, she wished that Bill were here!

`You sound, uh - Anything wrong?'