"Marc Laidlaw - The Black Bus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laidlaw Marc)

THE BLACK BUS
By Marc Laidlaw
****

DRIVER APPROACHED THE main gates, hunched low against the cold clouds
and the eerie onrush of music that crept out over the escarpments of the
amphitheater, thin groping notes like the claws of wintry trees made of black sound.
Colored lights, auroral, pulsed against the clouds in time to the music, reminding him
of something older than memories of childhood Hell-dreams. He imagined his
grandfatherтАЩs evangelical words driving down at him like a pelting brimstone hail,
and thought how the old man would see the theater as a concession erected around
the mouth of Hell, into which the damned were lured with music and screams which
passage through the gates had transfigured into wild, seductive laughter. He pulled
up his collar against the storm of invisible coals, and wished he could have stayed in
the bus. But it had broken down completely, the prognosis was terrible, and he
needed help.

He glanced back at the old bus, cold now in the mountain moonlight and the
distant moth-battered glare of the stadium lights, far out at a corner of the lot among
a dozen other buses not quite as full of memories, though equally lurid: paisleys,
spirals, fractal swirls in luminous paints. An anachronism, a retrograde voyager, an
affront to the new serious spirit of reform. Do drugs! тАФ it seemed to tell all the little
children who followed its progress on the back roads, delighting in its psychedelic
colors. Run from home and join the circus! Following the Group was the same
thing.

Turning back toward the gates, he saw another bus pulling in before the
amphitheater, brakes squealing and then a gasping hiss of air as it stopped almost
directly in his path. Gleaming black, with a long row of square windows all
seemingly cut from warm yellow parchment. Its black surface was weirdly textured
in diamond-shapes, oblique facets that turned light back on itself: like a stealth-bus,
invisible to enemy detection. He walked around it cautiously, watching it over his
shoulder, expecting the front door to open тАФ anxious, in fact, to see the driver
sitting up in the high seat at the top of the steps.

тАЬTickets,тАЭ said a voice, and he whirled to find himself in the shadow of the
gate. A flashlight caught and held his hands in glare, making the hairs stand out like
abrupt shards of spun glass, the blemishes suddenly malign. He jerked his hands out
of the light and plunged them into his pocket as if to spare them such scrutiny, but
actually searching for the plastic pass that had been his for longer than he could
remember.

The torch, its bearer still unseen, waved him in, opening a path into the cement
tunnel strewn with tom tickets, broken bottles, pools of piss with cigarette butts
disintegrating in them. He hurried, but the beam deserted him. Laughter, and then a
low growling that might have been nothing worse than some enormous old man
clearing his throat. He walked around the sound of breathing, kicked a crushed can
skittering, walked into a solid wall of stench and sound. He didnтАЩt need to see the
Group. Their music was everywhere. He brushed cobwebs from his face and
stepped out into the amphitheater.