"Gardner Dozois - A Cat Horror Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

A CAT HORROR STORY
By Gardner Dozois

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DARKNESS. THE SMELL OF grass, and wet earth, and fog. The night moved
through the clearing like a river. A few distant pinpricks of stars overhead, faint and
far and pale. Somewhere down the hill, the grass rustled as a mouse fled through it,
but the People were not hunting tonight.

Eyes gleamed in the night. Occasionally, a tail would thump the ground, once,
twice, and then fall still. Very occasionally тАФ an act of bravado тАФ one of the
People would slowly, ostentatiously, lick a paw. Then stop.

You could smell the excitement in the wet air, the uneasiness, the fear.

The wind brought the distant sound of a dog barking, and the ears of the
People pricked forward instinctively, but, on this night of all nights, there was
certainly no time for dogs.

Somewhere down below, in one of the human lairs at the foot of the hill, you
could hear a human[1] calling for one of the People in that shrill mixture of human
talk, strange wet noises, and oddly garbled and nonsensically out-of-context phrases
of the True Tongue that humans used to try summon the People who were lair-mates
with them, but none of the People were interested in Food tonight, even the fattest or
the hungriest of them, not even when the human made an enticing rattling noise with a
Food. Opening-Stick against a Cold Round Thing of Food. After a while, the human
ceased his plaintive calls, and there was silence again, except for the human sounds
riding the night air: doors slamming, voices, the annoying clamoring and shrieking of
the Noisy Dead Things with which the humans insisted on cluttering the lairs, the
growling of the Fast Dead Things which the humans kept as slaves and actually
encouraged to swallow them! (although they made the Things spit them up again
later) . . . but the People were used to those sounds, and ignored them.

At last, when the sharp smells of excitement could get no stronger, when their
eyes could grow no wider or wilder, and when their tails were beginning to lash with
impatience with a noise like a strong wind slashing through the branches of trees, the
full moon rose, immense and pale and round, its pockmarked face pitiless and
remote and cold, and that creel orb was reflected full and bright in all the watching
eyes of all the People who waited below.

One of the People stretched and yawned, showing all his teeth. His name was
Caeser[2], and he was known as a good hunter, and a fierce defender of his territory.
In fact, he had a bloody feud of long duration and rich tradition going with Jefferson,
whose territory adjoined his own, but Jefferson sat quietly beside him now, and did
no more than turn a slightly disdainful glance at CaeserтАЩs display of teeth. This was
no time for fighting, or mating, or for territoriality. The Hunter Light, the Death Light,
The Night Face, That-Which-Lights-the-Way-to-Kill, was in the sky, and that had
always meant the same thing, for uncounted generations back to the beginning of all.