"Henry Kuttner - The Portal in the Picture " - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

any world.
"Don't give me cliches," he said. "That's no answer."
"Cliches!" I said and choked in my glass. "Okay, okay, never mind. Nothing wrong with cliches, you
know. They're just truths that happen so often they're trite. It doesn't make them any less true, does it?" I
looked at Malesca squaring off at the mike, getting ready to sing again.
"I knew a man once who tried to discredit cliches," I went on thoughtfully, knowing I was probably saying
too much. "He failed. He had quite a time, that guy."
"What happened?"
"Oh, he found a fabulous land and rescued a beautiful goddess and overthrew a wicked high priest andтАФ
forget it. Maybe it was a book I read."
"What fabulous land was that?" my friend inquired idly.
"Malesco."
He lifted an eyebrow at me and glanced across the room at the Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
"Malesco? Where's that?"
"Right behind you," I said.
Then I picked up my fresh highball and buried my nose in it. I had nothing more to sayтАФto him. But a
chord in the music just then woke a thin shivering wire of sound at the back of my brain, and for an instant
the barrier between this world and the worlds outside was as thin as air.
Malesco, I thought. I shut my eyes and tried to make the domes and towers of that rose-red city take shape
in the darkness while the chord still sounded in my ears. But I couldn't do it. Malesco had gone back into
the fable again and the gates were shut forever.
And yet, when I think about it now even the sense of wonder and disbelief is suspended and I have no
feeling at all that it was in some dream I walked those streets. They were real. I've got the most convincing
kind of proof that they were real.
It all happened quite a while ago...
Chapter I
REMEMBER the story of the blind men and the elephant? Not one of them ever found out it was an
elephant. That's the way it was with me. A new world was opening right in front of me and I put it down
to eyestrain.
I sat there in my apartment with a bottle and watched the air flicker ^
I told myself to get up and switch off the lights because Lorna had got in the habit of dropping by if I
didn't show up at the ginmill where she worked, and I didn't want to talk to her. Lorna Maxwell was a
leech. She had attached herself to me with all the simple relentlessness of her one-track mind and short of
killing her I knew no way to pry her loose.
It all seemed so easy to Lorna. Here I was, rising young actor Eddie Burton with a record of three straight
Broadway hits and a good part in something new that all the critics liked. Fine.
Here she was, that third-rate young ginmill singer Lorna Maxwell with no record at all that she admitted
to. Don't ask me how we met or how she got her hooks into me. I'm a born easy mark. Children, animals
and people like Lorna can spot people like me a mile away.
She'd got it into her addled little head somehow that all I had to do was say the word and she'd be right up
there beside me, a success, the darling of the columnists. Only selfishness kept me from saying the magic
word to somebody in authority and turning her into Cinderella. Arguments wouldn't move her. It seemed
simpler to turn off the lights when I was at home alone and not answer the door.
The air flickered again. I squinted and shook my head. This was getting a little alarming. It couldn't be the
Scotch. It never happened outside the apartment. It never happened unless I was looking at that particular
wall.
There was a Rousseau picture on it, Sleeping Gypsy, something Uncle Jim had left me along with the
apartment. I made a great effort to focus on the blue-green sky, the lion's blowing mane, the striped robe
of the black man on the sand.
But all I got was a blur. And then I knew I must be drunk because a sound seemed to go with the blur, a