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

======================
The Function of Dream Sleep
by Harlan Ellison
======================

Copyright (c)1988 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.


Fictionwise Contemporary
Fiction


---------------------------------
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines. Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright violators of Fictionwise ebooks.
---------------------------------


McGrath awoke suddenly, just in time to see a huge mouth filled with small, sharp teeth closing in his side. In an instant it was gone, even as he shook himself awake.
Had he not been staring at the flesh, at the moment his eyes opened from sleep, he would have missed the faintest pink line of closure that remained only another heartbeat, then faded and was gone, leaving no indication the mouth had ever existed; a second -- secret -- mouth hiding in his skin.
At first he was sure he had wakened from a particularly nasty dream. But the memory of the thing that had escaped from within him, through the mouth, was a real memory -- not a wisp of fading nightmare. He had _felt_ the chilly passage of something rushing out of him. Like cold air from a leaking balloon. Like a chill down a hallway from a window left open in a distant room. And he had _seen_ the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically, just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navel. Down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth; and it had been open to permit a breeze of something to leave his body.
McGrath sat up on the bed. He was shaking. The Tensor lamp was still on, the paperback novel tented open on the sheet beside him, his body naked and perspiring in the August heat. The Tensor had been aimed directly at his side, bathing his flesh with light, when he had unexpectedly opened his eyes; and in that waking moment he had surprised his body in the act of opening its secret mouth.
He couldn't stop the trembling, and when the phone rang he had to steel himself to lift the receiver.
"Hello," he heard himself say, in someone else's voice.
"Lonny," said Victor Kayley's widow, "I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour..."
"It's okay," he said. Victor had died the day before yesterday. Sally relied on him for the arrangements, and hours of solace he didn't begrudge. Years before, Sally and he ... then she drifted toward Victor, who had been McGrath's oldest, closest ... they were drawn to each other more and more sweetly till ... and finally, McGrath had taken them both to dinner at the old Steuben Tavern on West 47^th, that dear old Steuben Tavern with its dark wood booths and sensational schnitzel, now gone, torn down and gone like so much else that was ... and he had made them sit side by side in the booth across from him, and he took their hands in his ... I love you both so much, he had said ... I see the way you move when you're around each other ... you're both my dearest friends, you put light in my world ... and he laid their hands together under his, and he grinned at them for their nervousness...
"Are you all right; you sound so, I don't know, so _strained_?" Her voice was wide awake. But concerned.
"I'm, yeah, I'm okay. I just had the weirdest, I was dozing, fell asleep reading, and I had this, this _weird_ -- " He trailed off. Then went back at it, more sternly: "I'm okay. It was a scary dream."
There was, then, a long measure of silence between them. Only the open line, with the sound of ions decaying.
"Are _you_ okay?" he said, thinking of the funeral service day after tomorrow. She had asked him to select the casket. The anodized pink aluminum "unit" they had tried to get him to go for, doing a bait-and-switch, had nauseated him. McGrath had settled on a simple copper casket, shrugging away suggestions by the Bereavement Counselor in the Casket Selection Parlor that "consideration and thoughtfulness for the departed" might better be served by the Monaco, a "Duraseal metal unit with Sea Mist Polished Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet."
"I couldn't sleep," she said. "I was watching television, and they had a thing about the echidna, the Australian anteater, you know...?" He made a sound that indicated he knew. "And Vic never got over the trip we took to the Flinders Range in '82, and he just loved the Australian animals, and I turned in the bed to see him smiling..."
She began to cry.
He could feel his throat closing. He knew. The turning to tell your best friend something you'd just seen together, to get the reinforcement, the input, the expression on his face. And there was no face. There was emptiness in that place. He knew. He'd turned to Victor three dozen times in the past two days. Turned, to confront emptiness. Oh, he knew, all right.
"Sally," he murmured. "Sally, I know; I know."
She pulled herself together, snuffled herself unclogged and cleared her throat. "It's okay. I'm fine. It was just a second there..."
"Try to get some sleep. We have to do stuff tomorrow."
"Of course," she said, sounding really quite all right. "I'll go back to bed. I'm sorry." He told her to shut up, if you couldn't call a friend at that hour to talk about the echidna, who the hell _could_ you call?
"Jerry Falwell," she said. "If I have to annoy someone at three in the morning, better it should be a shit like him." They laughed quickly and emptily, she said good night and told him he had been much loved by both of them, he said I know that, and they hung up.
Lonny McGrath lay there, the paperback still tented at his side, the Tensor still warming his flesh, the sheets still soggy from the humidity, and he stared at the far wall of the bedroom on whose surface, like the surface of his skin, there lay no evidence whatever of secret mouths filled with teeth.
* * * *
"I can't get it out of my mind."
Dr. Jess ran her fingers down his side, looked closer. "Well, it _is_ red; but that's more chafing than anything out of Stephen King."
"It's red because I keep rubbing it. I'm getting obsessive about it. And don't make fun, Jess. I can't get it out of my mind."
She sighed and raked a hand back through her thick auburn hair. "Sorry." She got up and walked to the window in the examination room. Then, as an afterthought, she said, "You can get dressed." She stared out the window as McGrath hopped off the physical therapy table, nearly catching his heel on the retractable step. He partially folded the stiff paper gown that had covered his lap, and laid it on the padded seat. As he pulled up his undershorts, Dr. Jess turned and stared at him. He thought for the hundredth time that his initial fears, years before, at being examined by a female physician, had been foolish. His friend looked at him with concern, but without the _look_ that passed between men and women. "How long has it been since Victor died?"
"Three months, almost."
"And Emily?"
"Six months."
"And Steve and Melanie's son?"
"Oh, Christ, Jess!"
She pursed her lips. "Look, Lonny, I'm not a psychotherapist, but even I can see that the death of all these friends is getting to you. Maybe you don't even see it, but you used the right word: obsessive. _No_body can sustain so much pain, over so brief a period, the loss of so many loved ones, without going into a spiral."
"What did the X-rays show?"