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

McGrath went to Teresa. She looked up at him with fear and was barely able to say, "Can you ... please ... take me to a dark place...?"
He lifted her in his arms. She weighed nothing. He let her direct him up the stairs to the second floor, to the third bedroom off the main corridor. He opened the door; inside it was musty and unlit. He could barely make out the shape of a bed. He carried her over and placed her gently on the puffy down comforter. She reached up and touched his hand. "Thank you." She spoke haltingly, having trouble breathing. "We, we didn't expect anything ... like that..."
McGrath was frantic. He didn't know what had happened, didn't know what he had done to them. He felt awful, felt responsible, _but he didn't know what he had done!_
"Go back to them," she whispered. "Help them."
"Where is the woman who touched me...?"
He heard her sobbing. "She's gone. Lurene is gone. It wasn't your fault. We didn't expect anything ... like ... that."
He rushed back downstairs.
They were helping one another. Anna Picket had brought water, and bottles of medicine, and wet cloths. They were helping one another. The healthier ones limping and crawling to the ones still unconscious or groaning in pain. And he smelled the fried metal scent of ozone in the air. There was a charred patch on the ceiling above the chair where the burned woman had been sitting.
He tried to help Anna Picket, but when she realized it was McGrath, she slapped his hand away. Then she gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth, and she began to cry again, and reached out to apologize. "Oh, my God, I'm so _sorry_! It wasn't your fault. You couldn't know ... not even Lurene knew." She swabbed at her eyes, and laid a hand on his chest. "Go outside. Please. I'll be there in a moment."
A wide streak of dove-gray now bolted through her tangled hair. It had not been there before the instant of his sleep.
He went outside and stood under the stars. It was night, but it had not been night before Lurene had touched him. He stared up at the cold points of light, and the sense of irreparable loss overwhelmed him. He wanted to sink to his knees, letting his life ebb into the ground, freeing him from this misery that would not let him breathe. He thought of Victor, and the casket being cranked down into the earth, as Sally clung to him, murmuring words he could not understand, and hitting him again and again on the chest; not hard, but without measure, without meaning, with nothing but simple human misery. He thought of Alan, dying in a Hollywood apartment from AIDS, tended by his mother and sister who were, themselves, hysterical and constantly praying, asking Jesus to help them; dying in that apartment with the two roommates who had been sharing the rent, keeping to themselves, eating off paper plates for fear of contracting the plague, trying to figure out if they could get a lawyer to force Alan's removal; dying in that miserable apartment because the Kaiser Hospital had found a way around his coverage, and had forced him into "home care." He thought of Emily, lying dead beside her bed, having just dressed for dinner with her daughter, being struck by the grand mal seizure and her heart exploding, lying there for a day, dressed for a dinner she would never eat, with a daughter she would never again see. He thought of Mike, trying to smile from the hospital bed, and forgetting from moment to moment who Lonny was, as the tumor consumed his brain. He thought of Ted seeking shamans and homeopathists, running full tilt till he was cut down. He thought of Roy, all alone now that DeeDee was gone: half a unit, a severed dream, an incomplete conversation. He stood there with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, trying to ease the pain.
When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.
"What _happened_ in there?" he demanded. "Who _are_ you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I'm asking you, tell me _what's going on_!"
"We absorb."
"I don't know what -- "
"We take illness. We've always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to assume the illness. There aren't many of us, but we're everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper's garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don't know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But ... we do it ... we absorb."
"And with me ... what was that in there...?"
"We didn't know. We thought it was just the heartache. We've encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group."
"My wife ... is Tricia one of you? Can she ... take on the ... does she absorb? I lived with her, I never -- "
Anna was shaking her head. "No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She's never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I've brought them here. But she's a fine therapist, and we've helped a few of her patients. She thought you..." She paused. "She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn't even know of the _real_ REM Group."
He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.
_"What happened in there?"_
She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. "It was as you said. The mouth. We'd never seen that before. It, it _opened._ And then ... and then..."
He shook her. _"What!?!"_
She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. "Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just _hissed_ out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that _they_ held -- I'm just their contact for the world, they can't go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do -- the pain _they_ absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid ... Teresa won't live ... I know..."
McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, "What's happening to us, how could I do such an awfulness to you, why is this being done to me, to _us_, why _now_, what's going wrong, please, you've got to tell me, you've got to _help_ me, we've got to _do_ something -- "
And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm's length and looked closely at his face and said, "I don't know. I _do not_ know. This isn't like anything we've experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Aries know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body."
_"Help me!"_
"I _can't_ help you! No one can help you, I don't think _anyone_ can help you. Not even Le Braz..."
He clutched at the name. "Le Braz! Who's Le Braz?"
"No, you don't want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it's quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that's the only way!"
"Tell me who Le Braz is!"
She slapped him. "You're not hearing me. If _we_ can't do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can't be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don't really know. I went to him once, years ago, it's not something you want to -- "
I don't care, he said. I don't care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It's too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They're calling and I can't answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don't know what to say. I can't sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can't live like this, because this isn't living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don't care, to Hell with the whole thing, I just don't give a damn, so _tell me_!
She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.
* * * *
He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.
Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other...
...work. Other experiments. She had said the word _experiments_, with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, "For McGrath hath murdered sleep," and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.
It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath's world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.
So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz "place." She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn't say you're welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.
By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.
He walked to the gate, and pressed the button on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again. Then a voice -- he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old -- cracked, "Who is it?"
"I've come from Anna Picket and the REM Group." He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, "The _real_ REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills."
The voice said, "Who are you? What's your name?"
"It doesn't matter. You don't know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz."
"About what?"
"Open the gate and you'll know."
"We don't have visitors."
"I saw ... there was a ... I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of _mouth_ in my body ... a wind passed..."