"Avram Davidson - Dr. Bhumbo Singh" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

Dr. Bhumbo Singh
AVRAM DAVIDSON


Trevelyan Street used to be four blocks long, but now it is only three,
and its aft end is blocked by the abutment of an overpass. (Do you find the
words Dead End to have an ominous ring?) The large building in the 300
block used to be consecrated to worship by the Mesopotamian Methodist
Episcopal Church (South) but has since been deconsecrated and is
presently a glue warehouse. The small building contains the only
Bhuthanese grocery and deli outside of Asia; its trade is small. And the
little (and wooden) building lodges an extremely dark and extemely dirty
little studio which sells spells, smells, and shrunken heads. Its trades are
even smaller.
The spells are expensive, the smells are exorbitant, and the prices of its
shrunken heads тАФ first chop though they be тАФ are simply inordinate.
The studio, however, has a low rent (it has a low ceiling, too), pays no
license fee тАФ it is open (when it is open) only between the hours of seven
p.m. and seven a.m., during which hours the municipal license
department does not function тАФ and lacks not for business enough to keep
the proprietor, a native of the Andaman Islands, in the few, the very few
things, without which he would find life insupportable: namely curried
squid, which he eats тАФ and eats and eats тАФ baroque pink pearls, which he
collects, and (alone, and during the left phase of the moon) wears; also live
tree-shrews. Some say that they are distantly cognate to the primates and,
hence, it is supposed, to Man. Be that as it may. In their tiny ears he
whispers directions of the most unspeakable sort, and then turns them
loose, with great grim confidence. And an evil laugh.
The facts whereof I speak, I speak with certainty, for they were related
to me by my friend Mr. Underhand; and Mr. Underhand has never been
known to lie.
At any rate, at least, not to me.



тАЬA good moonless evening to you, Underhand Misterjee,тАЭ says the
proprietor, at the termination of one lowering, glowering afternoon in
Midnovember, тАЬand a bad evening indeed to those who have had the
fortune to incur your exceedingly just displeasure.тАЭ He scratches a filthy
ear-lobe with a filthy finger.
тАФMidnovember, by the way, is the months which was banished from
the Julian Calendar by Julian the Apostate; it has never appeared in the
Gregorian Calendar: a good thing, tooтАФ
тАЬAnd a good evening to you. Dr. Bhumbo Singh,тАЭ says Mr. Underhand.
тАЬAs for them тАФ Ha Ha!тАЭ He folds his thin and lilac-gloved hands over the
handle of his stalking-crutch. Even several so-called experts have declared
the handle (observed by light far less dim than that in the shop of Bhumbo
Singh) to be ivory: they are wrong: it is bone, purely boneтАж Or perhaps
one would better say, impurely boneтАж
тАЬHa Ha!тАЭ echoes (Dr.) Bhumbo Singh. He has in fact no right at all to