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

call again and relieve her of this duty. But no voice came.
The simple mechanics of what she had to do were sufficiently prosaic to keep fear at a little distance. Besides, she was scarcely
nine. And it was not dark in the attic.
She walked along the rafter, balancing, till she came to the plank bridge. She felt its resilient vibration underfoot.
'One, two, buckle my shoe, Three, four, knock at the door, Five, six, pick up sticks, Seven, eightтАФтАФ'
She missed the way twice. The third time she succeeded. The mind had to be at just die right pitch of abstraction . . . She crossed
the bridge, and turned, andтАФтАФ
It was dim, almost dark, in this place. It smelled cold and hollow, of the underground. Without surprise she knew she was deep
down, perhaps beneath the house, perhaps very far away from it. That was as acceptable to her as the rest of the strangeness. She
felt no surprise.
Curiously, she seemed to know the way. She was going into a tiny enclosure, and yet at the same time she wandered for awhile
through low-roofed, hollow spaces, endless, very dim, smelling of cold and moisture. An unpleasant place to the mind, and a
dangerous place as well to wander through with one's little pan of meat.
It found the meat acceptable.
Looking back later, Jane had no recollection whatever of it. She did not know how she had proffered the food, or how it had been
received, or where in that place of paradoxical space and smallness it lay dreaming of other worlds and eras.
She only knew that the darkness spun around her again, winking with little lights, as it devoured its food. Memories swirled from
its mind to hers as if the two minds were of one fabric. She saw more clearly .this time. She saw a great winged thing caged in a
glittering pen, and she remembered as Ruggedo remembered, and leaped with Ruggedo's leap, feeling the wings buffet about her
and feeling her rending hunger rip into the body, and tasting avidly the hot, sweet, salty fluid bubbling out.
It was a mixed memory. Blending with it, other victims shifted beneath Ruggedo's grip, the feathery pinions becoming the beast
of great clawed arms and the writhe of reptilian litheness. All his victims became one in memory as he ate.
One flash of another memory opened briefly toward the last. Jane was aware of a great swaying garden of flowers larger than
herself, and of cowled figures moving silently among them, and of a victim with showering pale hair lying helpless upon the lip of
one gigantic flower, held down with chains like shining blossoms. And it seemed to Jane that she herself went cowled among
those silent figures, and that heтАФitтАФRuggedoтАФin another guise walked beside her toward the sacrifice.
It was the first human sacrifice he had recalled. Jane would have liked to know more about that. She had no moral scruples, of
course. Food was food. But the memory flickered smoothly into another picture and she never saw the end. She did not really
need to see it. There was only one end to all these memories. Perhaps it was as well for her that Ruggedo did not dwell over-long
on that particular moment of all his bloody meals.
'Seventeen, eighteen, Maids in waiting, Nineteen, twentyтАФтАФ'
She tilted precariously back across the rafters, holding her empty pan. The attic smelled dusty. It helped to take away the reek of
remembered crimson from her mind. ...
When the children came back, Beatrice said simply, 'Did you?' and Jane nodded. The taboo still held. They would not discuss the
matter more fully except in case of real need. And the drowsy, torpid heat in the house, the psychic emptiness of the Wrong
Uncle, showed plainly that the danger had been averted againтАФfor a time. . . .
'Read me about Mowgli, Granny,' Bobby said. Grandmother Keaton settled down, wiped and adjusted her spectacles, and took up
Kipling. Presently the other children were drawn into the charmed circle. Grandmother spoke of Shere Khan's downfallтАФof the
cattle driven into the deep gulch to draw the tigerтАФ and of the earth-shaking stampede that smashed the killer into bloody pulp.
'Well,' Grandmother Keaton said, closing the book, 'that's the end of Shere Khan. He's dead now.'
'No he isn't,' Bobby roused and said sleepily.
'Of course he is. Good and dead. The cattle killed him.'
'Only at the end, Granny. If you start reading at the beginning again, Shere Khan's right there.'
Bobby, of course, Was too young to have any conception of death. You were killed sometimes in games of cowboys-and-Indians,
an ending neither regrettable nor fatal. Death is an absolute term that needs personal experience to be made understandable.
Uncle Lew smoked his pipe and wrinkled the brown skin around his eyes at Uncle Bert, who bit his lips and hesitated a long time
between moves. But Uncle Lew won the chess game anyway. Uncle James winked at Aunt Gertrude and said he thought he'd take
a walk, would she like to come along? She would.
After their departure, Aunt Bessie loked up, sniffed.
'You just take a whiff of their breaths when they come back, Ma,' she said. 'Why do you stand for it?'