"Henry Kuttner - Call Him Demon " - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

Charles, now that the ice was broken and Jane no longer an outsider, burst suddenly into excited gabble.
'Tell her, Bee! The real secretтАФyou know. Can I show her the Road of Yellow Bricks? Please, Bee? Huh?'
Then the silence again. Charles was talking too much. Jane knew the Road of Yellow Bricks, of course. It ran straight through Oz
from the Deadly Desert to the Emerald City.
After a long time Emily nodded.
'We got to tell her, you know,' she said. 'Only she might get scared. It's so dark.'
'You were scared,' Bobby said. 'You cried, the first time.'
'I didn't. Anyhow itтАФit's only make believe.'
'Oh, no!' Charles said. 'I reached out and touched the crown last time.'
'It isn't a crown,' Emily said. 'It's him, Ruggedo.'
Jane thought of the uncle who wasn't a real uncleтАФwho wasn't a real person. 'Is he Ruggedo?' she asked.
The children understood.
'Oh, no,' Charles said. 'Ruggedo lives in the cellar. We give him meat. All red and bluggy. He likes it! Gobble, gobble!'
Beatrice looked at Jane. She nodded toward the clubhouse, which was a piano-box with a genuine secret lock. Then, somehow,
quite deftly, she shifted the conversation onto another subject. A game of cowboys-and-Indians started presently and Bobby,
howling terribly, led the route around the house.
The piano-box smelled pleasantly of acacia drifting through the cracks. Beatrice and Jane, huddled together in the warm dimness,
heard diminishing Indian-cries in the distance. Beatrice looked curiously adult just now.
'I'm glad you came, Janie,' she said. "The little kids don't understand at all. It's pretty awful.'
'Who is he?'
Beatrice shivered. 'I don't know. I think he lives in the cellar.' She hesitated. 'You have to get to him through, the attic, though. I'd
be awfully scared if the little kids weren't soтАФsoтАФthey don't seem to mind at all.'
'But Bee. Who is he?'
Beatrice turned her head and looked at Jane, and it was quite evident then that she could not or would not say. There was a barrier.
But because it was important, she tried. She mentioned the Wrong Uncle.
"I think Ruggedo's the same as him. I know he is, really. Charles and Bobby say soтАФand they know. They know better than I do.
They're littler . . . It's hard to explain, butтАФwell it's sort of like the Scoodlers. Remember?'
The Scoodlers. That unpleasant race that dwelt in a cavern on the road to Oz and had the conventional ability to detach their heads
and hurl them at passersby. After a moment the parallel became evident. A Scoodler could have his head in one place and his
body in another. But both parts would belong to the same Scoodler.
Of course the phantom uncle had a head and a body both. But Jane could understand vaguely the possibility of his double nature,
one of him moving deceptively through the house, focus of a strange malaise, and the other nameless, formless, nesting in a cellar
and waiting for red meat. . . .
'Charles knows more than any of us about it,' Beatrice said. 'He was the one who found out we'd have to feed R-Ruggedo. We
tried different things, but it has to be raw meat. And if we
stoppedтАФsomething awful would happen. We kids found that out.'
It was significant that Jane didn't ask how. Children take their equivalent of telepathy for granted.
'They don't know,' Beatrice added. 'We can't tell them.'
'No,' Jane said, and two girls looked at one another, caught in the terrible, helpless problem of immaturity, the knowledge that the
mores of the adult world are too complicated to understand, and that children must walk warily.
Adults are always right. They are an alien race.
Luckily for the other children, they had come upon the Enemy in a body. One child alone might have had violent hysterics. But
Charles, who made the first discoveries, was only six, still young enough so that the process of going insane in that particular way
wasn't possible for him. A six-year-old is in a congenitally psychotic state; it is normal to him.
'And they've been sick ever since he came,' Beatrice said.
Jane had already seen that. A wolf may don sheepskin and slide unobserved into a flock, but the sheep are apt to become nervous,
though they can not discover the source of their discomfort.
It was a matter of mood. Even he showed the same moodтАФ uneasiness, waiting, sensing that something was wrong and not
knowing whatтАФbut with him it was simply a matter of camouflage. Jane could tell he didn't want to attract attention by varying
from the arbitrary norm he had chosenтАФthat of the human form.