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

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

stoppedЧsomething 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 moodЧ uneasiness, waiting, sensing that something was wrong and not knowing whatЧbut 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 chosenЧthat of the human form.

Jane accepted it. The uncle who wasЧemptyЧthe one in the cellar called Ruggedo, who had to be fed regularly on raw meat, so that Something wouldn't happen. ...

A masquerader, from somewhere. He had power, and he had limitations. The obvious evidences of his power were accepted without question.

Children are realists. It was not incredible to them, for this hungry, inhuman stranger to appear among themЧfor here he was.

He came from somewhere. Out of time, or space, or an inconceivable place. He never had any human feelings; the children sensed that easily. He pretended very cleverly to be human, and he could warp the adult minds to implant artificial memories of his existence. The adults thought they remembered him. An adult will recognize a mirage; a child will be deceived. But conversely, an intellectual mirage will deceive an adult, not a child.

Ruggedo's power couldn't warp their minds, for those were neither quite human nor quite sane, from the adult standpoint. Beatrice, who was oldest, was afraid. She had the beginnings of empathy and imagination.

Little Charlie felt mostly excitement. Bobbie, the smallest, had already begun to be bored. . . .

Perhaps later Beatrice remembered a little of what Ruggedo looked like, but the others never did. For they reached him by a very strange road, and perhaps they were somewhat altered themselves during the time they were with him. He accepted or rejected food; that was all. Upstairs, the body of the Scoodler pretended to be human, while the Scoodler's head lay in that little, horrible nest he had made by warping space, so he was invisible and intangible to anyone who didn't know how tp find the Road of Yellow Bricks.

What was he? Without standards of comparisonЧand there are none, in this worldЧhe cannot be named. The children thought of him as Ruggedo. But he was not the fat, half-comic, inevitably frustrated Gnome King.

He was never that.

Call him demon.

As a name-symbol, it implies too much and not enough. But it will have to do. By the standard of maturity he was monster, alien, super-being. But because of what he did, and what he wantedЧcall him demon.

Chapter 2. Raw, Red Meat

ONE afternoon, a few days later, Beatrice hunted up Jane. 'How much money have you got, Janie?' she asked.