"Avram Davidson - The Dive People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

The Dive People

Avram Davidson




Edward Peterson moved restlessly in the bed, troubled by bad dreams,
fatigue, and swift-approaching wakefulness. His mind insisted on his
recognizing certain things he would sooner forget: that he had left Jinny
to take up with Bran and left Bran to take up with Pauli. And with this last
of the names coming up bubble-like and bursting at the surface of his
mind, his body straightened out with a single convulsive kick and all at
once he was awake and sitting up, sweating and trembling and sickened
with fright. He knew now what he had done. It was no dream after all.

What Peterson had done was to take the sharp knife in his hand, reach
out for the soft throat of someone he knew well, and draw the knife across
from ear to ear.

He knew that he had done this and that it was a hideous thing and that
it could not be happening to him though he knew it was.


~~oOo~~



They had been living in a fetid tenement to the south of Cooper Union,
not one that still had a faint flavor of an honored past, but one that had
been built to be a tenement, a five-story hovel which could never attain to
dignity if it endured a thousand years. Of course, it was a question now if
it would endure a thousand days, if it would not collapse inside its own
filthy integument before the cannibal city fell upon it and destroyed it.

"Chili con carne for supper," Pauli said. As if he couldn't smell it, along
with every other meal ever cooked on that greasy stove. Peterson looked
around the single room of the place, feeling his feet burning in the shoes,
wondering vaguely where he could sit down. Even the broken chair was
piled highтАФhis old shirts, torn ones which the Chinese laundryman had
said wouldn't process; Pauli was going to mend them so they could be
washed and he could have some clean spares. She wouldn't wash them, no,
but she would mend them. One of these daysтАФAs for the sofa, it had been
weeks since that had been available for sitting.

Pauli passed into the kitchen, took the lid off the pot. He wrinkled his
nose, opened his mouth. What was the use?

Q. That's not your chili con carne, is it?