"William Kotzwinkle - The Magician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kotzwinkle William)

giving her his arm, "I feel a good show brewing."
The dancing girls kicked their bare legs in the glow of the footlights,
scattering balloons over the smoky stage, then disappeared into the wings
amid applause and the rattle of dishes. Three drunken pit musicians
struck up a tinny fanfare; one of the dancing girls returned, holding a
gilt-edged sign bearing the magician's legend.
His wife kissed him on the cheek and he made his entrance, coming out
onto the stage from the wings. Removing his white gloves and top hat, he
signaled to the light bridge.
A spotlight swept through the audience, illuminating the tables, and at
the magician's direction stopped amid a setting of sparkling wine goblets
and dessert dishes, on the table of an elderly man in evening dress. His
companion, a young woman, tried to withdraw from the smoky beam. The
magician came to the edge of the stage.
"Please," he said, holding out his hand, "will you assist me?"
Seeing the girl's reluctance, the audience began to clap. Her escort
helped her from her seat. She walked toward the stage, smiling nervously.
In her short cropped hair and cape she looked like a beautiful schoolboy.
The hypnosis began slowly; the magician, asked her questions, relaxing
her with small talk, at the same time flashing in her face the brilliant
stone from his ring, playing its reflection over her eyes like a miniature
spotlight.
They stood in the middle of the stage, he smiling confidently, she
looking fearfully into his fierce, piercing foxeyes. She would not let herself
be hypnotized, that was that, she would resist.
He stepped closer to her, touching her wrist lightly with his fingers. Her
face was purple in the spotlight, her dark eyes like windows, and he could
not resist slipping through them, into her hidden dimension.
The center of his forehead tingling, he passed through the delicate veil;
there was her youth and its tender longing, there her childhood and its
delight, here her infancy in white, and finally the darkness of the womb in
which she had slept He started to surface, then saw a light in the darkness,
and he plunged through this still more delicate veil, into her most secret
self. Down he went, through the gloomy ruins, where her antique past was
kept, and long-dead shadows chased.
Standing still as a stone on the stage, the young woman heard distant
voices, as if calling across the water. Something had happened, a magic
show, how odd she felt, as if in a dream.
Through the labyrinth he tracked, into the depths of her soul, where her
spirit was hidden away in its meditation. As in the rooms of a museum, he
passed the relics of her former lives a nun's veil, a gladiator's net, a
beggar's tin cup.
Suddenly a figure appeared, a priestess, highborn, by the sea, of
luminous and beautiful body, in the hallway of a temple hauntingly
familiar to him. In gold braided sandals and a necklace of shells she
walked by the sea and he who walked beside her . . .
The young woman and the magician stood motionless on the
smoke filled stage, she floating on the waves of the trance, he agasp with a
recollection.
"I loved you on Atlantis," he said with trembling voice.