"Ellison,_Harlan_-_The_Avenger_of_Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

That was not quite true.
He had an idea, but it lay so far beyond the membrane, on the shadowy side of other realities, that he could not countenance it.
Chatley said, "The Dust Man. The reaper. He laughs when he calls himself Boneyard Bill."
"He did this to you?"
"I did this to myself. He gave me a termination order for you. I didn't do it. So he had George fulfill the order on me."
Pen remembered the file card in the book. "Take by truck."
Chatley was speaking so softly now, Pen had to lean in almost to his mouth. The blue glow had spread, the hole was gigantic, nearly from armpit to armpit. "George isn't as adept as he should be. The truck threw me over the railing. I've been waiting for you. I'm glad you came." These words were spoken so haltingly, so filled with dying air, that it took him several minutes to release them.
"Why didn't you take me?" Pen asked.
Chatley would have shrugged, had he been able. As it was, he twitched terribly, saying, "If it hadn't been you, it would have been my next order. Should have been the woman before you. The order was an epileptic seizure, death all alone, in the evening, dressed to go out to dinner with her daughter." He closed his eyes against the pain, and said, "Her name was Emily Austin. In California. It should have been her, but I was still afraid. I'm still afraid; it hurts very much; Bill likes to hurt. But he may not be done with me. There was a taker once, a while ago, Ottmar, he got word back to some of us ... the same way I got the papers into the book for you to find ... he said it didn't stop after Bill had his way. Not for orders like you or Emily Austin, you're on the books. But for us, the takers. Bill likes to hurt. He doesn't get as much of a chance as he'd like."
"Can I help you in _any_ way?"
Chatley opened his eyes. There was distance behind the color. He was on his way. The blue glow had eaten its way down through his stomach. "You know."
"I can't do that," Pen said, wishing he hadn't.
"Then why ask?"
"What would I have to do? I don't think I can do it, but what would that be ... to help...?"
Chatley told him. It was simple, but it was unpleasant. Then he said, "You can always tell one of us by the eyes." And he described the bad eyes Pen had seen watching him across a desk earlier that day. He lay silently for a long time, as the blue glow ate away the flesh and the bones and Pen could see the maelstrom swirling inside him. Then he said, "If you're going to do it, please now. It's very bad now. It's very bad."
And so Henry Chatley became the first for Pen Robinson.
But when Chatley was gone, perhaps having been saved from the Dust Man's special attentions on that other plain beyond the membrane, Pen realized he had not asked what the Chinese epigraphs meant, nor why he had written a check for cash in the amount of one hundred and fifty dollars, nor how he -- using Ottmar's method -- had been able to get the papers into that old book, nor what had turned him against the Dust Man, nor what had finally broadened his courage to defy Bill, nor what the takers posing as FBI men had sought to find out from Pen (but perhaps it had only been a matter of needing to be convinced Pen was an unsuspecting bystander), nor the answers to the other questions that now would never go into the solving of the puzzle, the passage through the membrane.
And one morning very soon, the truck would pick up a black plastic bag filled with remaining parts.
* * * *
Pen gave over the running of the shop to the clerks.
He wandered the city, looking into people's faces.
He found the taker who had fulfilled the orders on P. T. Barnum and Babe Ruth and Adlai Stevenson, among others. Those were the names she remembered best, the ones she would tell him about. He found her eating dinner alone at the Russian Tea Room, and he followed her home, and did what he would never have thought himself capable of doing. He forced his way into her building, then into her apartment. He tied her to a chair and asked her more than a hundred questions. Chatley had died before he could answer those questions, more than a hundred Pen had been too distracted to ask. She possessed the bad eyes Henry Chatley had described, so Pen was able to do what he had to do. But she knew only a few things, despite her age. She did as she was told. Had been doing it for a very long time; and Pen learned that it was because of the gift of _a very long time_ that many takers hired on.
It seemed to Pen a poor reason for working at such an unpleasant job. And when she told him, with resignation, that now he would have to put her out of Bill's reach, because of finding her and talking to her and interfering with her anonymity and making her suspect in Bill's eyeless sockets, he said he couldn't do that, and she began to cry, which Pen thought was shameless of her, and she told him some of what it would be like, but he already knew that because he had crouched beside Chatley, and she said if he had even a spark of human kindness, a vestige of human decency, he would do what had to be done, and he thought that was even crueler of her to say, because where did human kindness and human decency enter into _her_ job description? Had she said anything to Babe Ruth when she took him? Had Adlai Stevenson given her unassailable reasons for demonstrating human decency and kindness?
"You mustn't leave me for Bill!"
"It would serve you right."
_"Please!_ Show some compassion!"
"My god, this is an obscenity!"
But in the end, he did it. Because thinking about all the reasons why he _couldn't_ do it, which were all the reasons she had ignored and _did_ do it, made him so desolately angry that he couldn't stop himself. And so with the second one he became the avenger of Death.
* * * *
He found the taker who had gotten Ernie Pyle, and he killed him. He found the taker who had arranged for John Lennon and Fiorello La Guardia and Brendan Behan, and killed him. He found the taker who had gotten Mackenzie King and Marilyn Monroe and Frank Herbert, and he killed her. He found the taker who had gotten Sergei Rachmaninoff and Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller, and he killed him. He sat behind the one who had taken Emiliano Zapata and Leon Trotsky and Amelia Earhart and Aleister Crowley as she stolidly watched an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. She was a very old, blue-haired woman, and she studied the film as if preparing for a final exam. And Pen waited for a car crash, reached into her lap, pulled out a knitting needle; and he killed her. He saw the taker who had been his inquisitor, and he followed him into a restaurant, and when he went to the men's toilet followed him again, and didn't even ask whom he had gotten, because he knew the list would be long and filled with people whose names he would not know, and which the taker would not remember, and he simply killed him. But not once did he ask the question that transcended, in simplicity and importance, all the hundreds of questions he _did_ get answered.
Not once did he ask a taker why the Dust Man was not making any effort to stop him from decimating the ranks of his chosen agents, why he was allowing Pen Robinson to course through the city being the avenger of Death.
* * * *
On the first day of winter, in Central Park, near the statue of Alice, he saw a taker about to put his hands on a child climbing a rock. Pen moved in, feeling his years in his aching bones, and he was about to use the icepick on the man whose hand stretched toward the little girl, when he felt a chill that was not part of the season, and a hand dropped onto his shoulder. The voice behind him said, "No, I think not, Pen. That will be enough. It's certainly enough for me."
In the moment before the cold hand turned him away, Pen saw the taker reach to the child, and touch her on the ankle, and the child fell. It lay on the crackling icy grass, and the taker moved off, casting only a momentary glance at Pen and his companion. The taker was frightened.
Then Pen was turned, without seeming effort, and he looked at the face of the Dust Man. He had not seen that face in forty-one years.
Tears came to his eyes, and he reached out to touch the chest of the reaper, the reiver, the slayer of nations; and he said, "You went away and I never got to say goodbye."
Pen Robinson's father, who had died in a mill accident when Pen had been fourteen, smiled down at his boy and said, "I'm sorry, Pen. But I've spent a long time getting back to you, and I've missed you."
Now Pen could see clearly through the membrane; and he understood why Henry Chatley had been permitted to contact him; and why he had found it so effortless, after a quiet, empty, essentially lonely life of shelf dust and cold meals prepared after work, to do the things he had done.
And he walked with the Dust Man, whose name was Bill, as had been his father's name, through the membrane and straight into a long lifetime position in the family business.

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