"Jack Finney - Invasion of the Body Snatchers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finney Jack)

four


Jack's house is a green frame house sitting by itself on the side of a hill, and the garage is a part of the
basement. The garage was empty, the door open, and Jack motioned me to drive right in. We got out of
the car then, Jack snapped on a light, closed the garage door, then opened a door leading into the
basement proper, motioning us to walk on in ahead of him.
We stepped into an ordinary basement: laundry tubs, a washing machine, a wooden sawhorse, stacked
newspapers, and against one wall, on the floor, some cardboard cartons and several used paint cans.
Jack walked past us across the room to another door, then stopped, turning toward us, his hand on the
doorknob. He had a pretty good secondhand billiard table in there, I knew; he'd told me he used it a lot,
just knocking the balls around by himself, doing a lot of his writing in his head. Now he looked at Becky,
glancing at his wife, too. "Get hold of yourself," he said, then walked in, pulled the chain on the overhead
light, and we followed after him.
The light over a billiard table is designed to light up the table surface brilliantly. It hangs low so it won't
shine in your eyes as you play, and it leaves the ceiling in darkness. This one had a rectangular shade to
confine the light to the table top only, and the rest of the room was left in semigloom. I couldn't see
Becky's face very clearly, but I heard her gasp. Lying on the bright green table top under the sharp light
of the 150watt bulb, and covered with the rubberized sheet Jack kept on the billiard table, lay what was
unmistakably a body. I turned to look at Jack, and he said, "Go ahead; pull it off."
I was irritated; this worried and scared me, and there was too damn much mystery to suit me; it
occurred to me that the writer in Jack was laying on the dramatics a little heavily. I grabbed the rubber
sheet, yanked it off, and tossed it to a corner of the table. Lying on the green felt, on its back, was the
naked body of a man. It was maybe five feet ten inches tall тАУ it isn't too easy to judge height, looking
down on a body that way. He was white, the skin very pale in the brilliant shadowless light, and at one
and the same time, it looked unreal and theatrical, and yet it was intensely, over real. The body was slim,
maybe 140 pounds, but wellnourished and well-muscled. I couldn't judge the age, except that he wasn't
old. The eyes were open, staring directly up into the overhead light, in a way that made your own eyes
smart. They were blue, and very clear. There was no wound visible, and no other obvious cause of
death. I walked over beside Becky, slipped my arm under hers, and turned to Jack. "Well?"
He shook his head, refusing to comment. "Keep looking. Examine it. Notice anything strange?"
I turned back to the body on the table. I was getting more and more irritated. I didn't like this; there
was something strange about this dead man on the table, but I couldn't tell what, and that only made me
angrier. "Come on, Jack" тАУ I looked at him again. "I don't see anything but a dead man. Let's cut out the
mystery; what's it all about?"
Again he shook his head, frowning pleadingly, "Miles, take it easy. Please. I don't want to tell you my
impression of what's wrong; I don't want to influence you. If it's there to see, I want you to find it
yourself, first. And if it isn't, if I'm imagining things, I want to know that, too. Bear with me, Miles," he
said gently. "Take a good look at that thing."
I studied the corpse, walking slowly around the 'table, stopping to look down at it from various angles,
Jack, Becky, and Theodora stepping aside out of my way as I moved. "All right," I said presently, and
reluctantly, apologizing to Jack with the tone of my voice. "There is something funny about it. You're not
imagining things. Or if you are, so am I." For maybe half a minute longer I stood staring down at what lay
on the table. "Well, for one thing," I said finally, "you don't often see a body like this, dead or alive. In a
way, it reminds me of a few tubercular patients I've seen тАУ those who've been in sanitariums nearly all
their lives." I looked around at them all. "You can't live an ordinary life without picking up a few scars, a