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

She felt her hand pass through the blankets.

Ten

The shock was too great. Her heart must be pounding uncontrollably, her body must be blazing with panic, her mouth parched as dust; but she could feel none of this. In fact she could not feel her body at all. In that case, she must be dreaming.

Yet how could a dream be so vivid? She could feel the texture of the blanket - warm, fibrous, slightly prickly -as she had never felt it before. The sensations were too awesome to be simply frightening. For a moment, since this could only be a dream, she let herself be overwhelmed by awe. In that moment she was dragged out of the shell of her body into the dark.

Bill lay below her, his lips fluttering with a snore. He was distant, unreachable, and so was the thing that lay beside him: her body. She could see her face, a dimly luminous mask of slack flesh; she could see her body breathing with a parody of life. It was a fake, a dummy placed in the bed to reassure Bill. She could feel her true body, hovering in mid-air, faintly palpable as a breeze.

At once her thoughts appalled her. It wasn't true, her real body was down there beside Bill, all she had to do was struggle back to it - In a sense her panic was reassuring, for surely it must wake her. But she was in the grip of a kind of vertigo, in which she was aware of nothing but her helplessness, the floating insubstantial victim that she had become. She glimpsed her body dwindling, whirling away as though the dark room had become a vortex, and she was rushing towards the wall. Surely the wall would halt her - oh, please -

She felt the bricks: rough, porous, cold as metal yet containing a kind of inner warmth. There was no pain, but that was hardly reassuring. Nothing was, for she had reeled out into the night.

She was nothing. That was why no barrier could hold her. Even her panic seemed lost to her; since it couldn't wake her, it had turned into a kind of harsh agonized incredulity, monotonous and inescapable. Sensations overwhelmed her: the immense overpowering chill of the night; a sourceless light which showed her that she had no form, nothing visible at all. How could she see if she had no eyes?

She was alone. The whispering had stopped, she couldn't tell when. There was no moon, and the sky was sealed with clouds; yet everything was visible, glowing from within, as far as the horizon. Trees were intricately lurid, smouldering with colours. The unbroken sky glowed like dull brass, the river burned like ice.

Shock seemed to have paralysed her in mid-air. Now, as though drawn by a force against which she had no notion how to struggle, she began to rush helplessly towards the river. This is a dream, she thought, a dream, a dream. The monotonousness of the repetition helped dull her sensations a little. But everything was more solid than she was, and relentlessly visible: the dusty road like a swathe of mist below the chained Fulwood Park garden, a demolished television set whose screen displayed a patch of wild flowers, a couple walking hand in hand over the grassy plateau above the river promenade. Everything was real except her.

The plateau fled beneath her, each blade of grass a separate filament of muted light. She swooped uncontrollably towards the strolling couple, so close that she could see the glimmer of their eyebrows. Without warning the woman glanced up. Her glowing lips parted; awe or fear seemed to kindle her eyes. Had she seen Rose -and if so, what exactly had she seen? Before she could do more than think of the woman as a potential ally, whose awareness of her might act as some kind of anchor, Rose was plunged deep into the river.

Oh God, she would drown! She could swim, except that she had no limbs to propel her to the surface. The water was dark as mud, and felt as thick; it filled her, choking her. Yet though she felt stifled, she apparently had no need to breathe. She could only endure the pressure of the depths, the pollution that blinded her, the currents that seemed to drag at her tenuous substance, threatening to tear her apart. She felt in danger of dissolving, of merging with the sluggish water that glowed like poisonous fog. Misshapen litter groped towards her, unfurling sodden tendrils clogged with filth. They invaded her substance, and there was nothing she could do.

At last her floating seemed to grow less aimless. She was going somewhere, though she had no idea what had given her purpose, nor what that purpose was. The river oozed through her, dragging its deformed burdens. Please let her be almost free of its torments, please let it be over now -

When she emerged from the river, she was beneath the earth.

Despite the total darkness, she knew where she was. Perhaps they were only memories of smell and taste that she was experiencing, but they were suffocating her. It was worse than being buried alive, for as she was drawn onward, she felt things squirming in the earth. They were squirming within her. She felt composed of rotten flesh.

Anything would have been a relief from this - even the sensation of rising uncontrollably through stone, which felt cold and massive, threatening to trap her like amber. It was the foundations of a house, for she emerged inside a wall - like a rat, except that she could not scrabble.

In a moment her desperate pleas were answered, and she was free of the wall. There was a floor, which felt tree-like, though less vital. Rising above it, she found that she was hovering in a darkened room.

Such relief as she was able to feel, she felt now. At least she was in someone's home. Perhaps she could rest here and grow calmer, before she tried to think her way back to her own home, Bill, her body. Even when she glimpsed the figures in the dark, she did not immediately panic.

There were more than a dozen of them. They sat in a circle, on chairs. Masks were tied over their faces, as though they were surgeons ready for an operation. But there was nothing in their midst except, on the otherwise bare carpet, a small object made indistinguishable by shadows.

She dreaded knowing what they planned to do. Their masks were black, and she could see nothing of their faces except their eyes, which glimmered white as grubs, with glistening bruises for pupils. Did the still object in their midst have small delicate hands? Was it a baby? She would know soon, for the faces leaned forward into the circle - and she was being drawn downward, into their midst.

All of them looked up, their whitish eyes glowing. Had they glimpsed her, or sensed her presence? Perhaps, for some force was dragging her towards them. A hand stretched out towards her, luminous as bone, with thin shadows for tendons. As she tried vainly to struggle out of reach, she realized that it wasn't reaching for her but for the small still object.

Then she seemed to hear a voice, cold as a reptile's, hissing urgently `No. Not yet. He's saying no.'

What happened then was too swift for her to grasp. Was she released, or thrust out, or simply freed of her panic? She knew only that she was in the chill foundations of the house, in the swarming earth, in the discoloured river. Somewhere a hand was tugging at her shoulder. The sensation was less convincing than a remembered dream, yet she was certain that if someone tried to awaken her body without her, she would die. Distantly she felt her eyelids flutter open.

She flooded back into her open eyes. The sensation was almost unbearable. She could feel her eyeballs, thinskinned globes of liquid, about to burst with the onslaught of her return. The shock ripped through her chest like a saw. Above her, out of focus, hovered an object with eyes. She screamed.

Even the touch of the hand on her forehead, trying to soothe her into awareness, was hardly reassuring, for she had almost forgotten the sensations of her own flesh. `It's all right, love,' Bill was murmuring. `It's all right. You were having a nightmare. I couldn't wake you.'