"Thomas M. Disch - The Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Wednesday visits was that Lucille was a smoker. Roy had been a
smoker, too, and Angie had been as addicted to his secondhand
smoke as Roy had been to it at firsthand. тАЬI like how it smells,тАЭ she
would tell people when they asked her if they could smoke when
they visited.
She even liked the smell of these old butts in the ashtray, or
her shadow did. It bent low over the little square of stippled amber
glass and took a deep, luxuriating whiff. Shadows have a special
affinity for the other side of anything, its inverse, or obverse, or
opposite. Not just whatever lies in darkness, but the dregs and
refuse and wreckage that is left behind by floods or fires, the ashes
in the grate, the fumes that linger in a garage or a basement. They
take to such things by the same simple tropism that makes plants
strain toward the sun or attracts bees to bright colors.
While certain complex tasks would have been beyond the
shadowтАЩs limited competence (it could not have done the laundry,
for instance, or made the bed), the shadow did understand that to
smoke one of the butts from the ashtray it would have to be able to
light it. But it could not think where Angie kept the matches, since
she so infrequently had need of them that using them was not an
ingrained habit, an automatism that came with the vehicle. It stood
there stymied and peevish until it realized (it would probably have
taken Angie as long to do so) that the stove could be used as a
cigarette lighter.
It turned on the right front burner, and then, positioning the
cigarette in AngieтАЩs pouted lips, stooped to get a light. It took care
not to let anything but the splayed tip of the butt get close to the
flame. At the first sting of smoke it drew back and savored the
vaporized poisons of LucilleтАЩs Salem.
The very qualities that made tobacco lethal to human health
made it dear to the shadow, but even so the tissues of AngieтАЩs
throat, unused to the tickle of the smoke, reacted badly. The
shadow could not stop coughing, but neither could it resist another
drag of mentholated smoke, nor a third, though by then the
coughing had become violent, a convulsion. It flicked the cigarette
across the kitchen, a bullтАЩs-eye into the plastic garbage can beside
the sink. Angie herself would not have been so accurate. In many
ways her shadow was more comfortable in her skin than she.
While AngieтАЩs lungs recovered from their coughing fit in the
platform rocker in the living room, the cigarette smoldered inside
the garbage can, as it was engineered to do. A single wadded
Kleenex caught fire, and flared, and, as it died, relayed its flame to
the dry corner of an otherwise damp paper towel. Those flames in
turn reached the crumpled cellophane that had been a cookie
wrapper, after which, the entire contents of the can became a torch,
the flames of which rose high enough to ignite the roll of towels in
the dispenser and then the kitchen curtains and the flounce above.
From where it sat in the living room the shadow could not
see the fire in the kitchen until it had spread beyond the area
around the sink. Even when it became aware of what was