"Greg Egan - Mind Vampires" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

wanders past me and my heart aches at her vulnerability. In my mind her swan
neck becomes a giraffe neck, a single throbbing artery tight with blood ready
to gush and sate the hugest appetite. How sickening, when the skin of her
neck is so pale and delicate and, I am certain, cool as the night. In the
prisons, where they mutilate their limbs with razor blades, there is feeding
every month. The gatherings in the alleys of abortionists are indescribable.
The torture cells; well who do you think runs them? I stay away from all of
these. I am no fool. Large old families in large old houses, the better
schools, the quieter, cleaner asylums call for me. My reputation is the
 highest. The gardener's apprentice, a quiet young lad named Jack Rice,
disappeared two days ago. The headmistress thinks it's just a coincidence
(such a helpful boy). Nobody knows his family's address, but his father is
said to be a veteran and to shun the light of day. A legless spider moves its
mandibles in distress. A girl cries out: тАЬWhoa, nightmare!тАЭ Strange, dark
flowers appear in the fields. They open at midnight to send a sickly sweet
narcotic scent to corrupt the most innocent of dreams. Fear comes to me, but
only as an idea. I think about terror, but I do not feel it. Fear has saved
my life many times, so I do love and respect it, when it knows its place. I
enter the dormitory itself, I walk quiet as a nightgown between the tossing
beds. Over one bed, two heavy men in dark coats shoulder a fluttering
kinematograph machine with the lens removed, while a third man holds open a
girl's right eye. The pictures flash into the empty spaces of her brain. Fear
will not save her life; it has seduced her, possessed her, paralysed her, as
it has done to thousands, sweeping the countryside like fire or flood
wherever that one dread word is whispered. Even far from the sites of true
danger, men and women hear that word, form that image, and choke on the
terror that rushes up from their bowels. It is a plague in itself, a separate
evil with a life of its own now. I nod at the men, they nod (so very
slightly) back at me, then I walk on. I find Jack Rice easily enough, his
hobnailed boots protruding from the end of the bed. I call to the men in dark
coats to come and hold him still, for that is what they do best of all. His
girl's disguise fades as he struggles. I wonder what revealed the boots.
Perhaps his guard was down as he slept. Perhaps he dreamt he was discovered,
and so blurred the borders of the dream by bringing on its own fulfilment. I
smile at this idea as I drive in the stake. The tales they later tell me are
familiar: the girl he killed, the girl whose form he took, had mocked him
cruelly. We find her body, the lips and tender parts consumed, in one of the
many damp basements, crawling about gnashing its fangs, but very weak. A
matchstick would do for a stake. I hope her parents will not be awkward. The
headmistress tries to thank me and dismiss me with her chequebook, but the
ink of her fountain pen has changed colour, and she cannot sign the cheque
with her trembling bony hand. Oh dear. Jack's father will be angry. Jack's
mother will be grieved. I hope he was an only child, but the odds are against
it. The dark-coated men, unperturbed, move from bed to bed with their sawn-off
projector. Their enemies are different, but sometimes they will pause to come
to my aid. They're fighting mind vampires. Breakfast is dismal the next
morning, for all the milk had to be thrown out. The heated swimming baths are
closed, but the cloying odour escapes from the steam-dampened, padlocked
wooden doors. I ask around the village (of course a village) for word of Jack
and his family. Oh, the young vampire lad, they say merrily. He never gave an