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

The Wrong Uncle. Hunger and the avidity to be fed. The nearness of bloody meat tantalizing him as he lay hidden in his strange, unguessable nest elsewhereЧotherwhereЧin that strange place where the children had vanished.

He was down there, slavering for the food; he was up here, empty, avid, a vortex of hunger very nearby.

He was double, a double uncle, masked but terrifyingly clear. ...

Jane closed her eyes and dug her head deeper into Grandmother Keaton's shoulder.

Aunt Gertrude gossiped in an oddly tense voice, as if she sensed wrongness under the surface and was frightened subtly.

'I'm opening at Santa Barbara in a couple of days, Ma,' she said. 'IЧwhat's wrong with this house, anyhow? I'm as jumpy as a cat today!Чand I want you all to come down and catch the first show. It's a musical comedy. I've been promoted.'

'I've seen the "Prince of Pilsen" before,' Grandmother Keaton said.

'Not with me in it. It's my treat. I've engaged rooms at the hotel already. The kids have to come, too. Want to see your auntie act, Jane?' Jane nodded against her grandmother's shoulder.

'Auntie,' Jane said suddenly. 'Did you see all the uncles?'

'Certainly I did.'

'All of them? Uncle James and Uncle Bert and Uncle Simon and Uncle Lew?'

'The whole kaboodle. Why?'

'I just wondered.'

So Aunt Gertrude hadn't noticed the Wrong Uncle either. She wasn't truly observant, Jane thought.

'I haven't seen the kids, though. If they don't hurry up, they won't get any of the presents I've brought. You'd never guess what I have for you, Janie.'

But Jane scarcely heard even that exciting promise. For suddenly the tension in the air gave way. The Wrong Uncle who had been a vortex of hunger a moment before was a vortex of ecstasy now. Somewhere, somehow, at last Ruggedo was being fed. Somewhere, somehow, that other half of the double uncle was devouring his bloody fare. ...

Jane was not in Grandmother Keaton's lap any more. The room was a spinning darkness that winked with tiny lightsЧ Christmas tree lights, Charles had called themЧand there was a core of terror in the center of the whirl. Here in the vanished room the Wrong Uncle was a funnel leading from that unimaginable nest where the other half of him dwelt, and through the funnel, into the room, poured the full ecstatic tide of his satiety.

Somehow in this instant Jane was very near the other children who must stand beside that spinning focus of darkness. She could almost sense their presence, almost put out her hand to touch theirs.

Now the darkness shivered and the bright, tiny lights drew together, and into her mind came a gush of impossible memories. She was too near him. And he was careless as he fed. He was not guarding his thoughts. They poured out, formless as an animal's filling the dark. Thoughts of red food, and of other times and places where that same red food had been brought him by other hands.

It was incredible. The memories were not of earth, not of this time or place. He had traveled far, Ruggedo. In many guises. He remembered now, in a flow of shapeless fissions, he remembered tearing through furred sides that squirmed away from his hunger, remembered the gush of hot sweet redness through the fur.

Not the fur of anything Jane had ever imagined before. . . .

He remembered a great court paved with shining things, and something in bright chains in the center, and rings of watching eyes as he entered and neared the sacrifice.

As he tore his due from its smooth sides, the cruel chains clanked around him as he fed. . . .

Jane tried to close her eyes and not watch. But it was not with

eyes that she watched. And she was ashamed and a little sickened because she was sharing in that feast, tasting the warm red sweetness widi Ruggedo in memory, feeling the spin of ecstasy through her head as it spun through his.