"David Langford - Different Kinds of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

the ritual, like a secret password that proved that the last one to arrive
wasn't an outsider or a spy. Of course they all knew each other, but imagine a
spy who was a master of disguise....
Khalid solemnly held up an innocent-looking ring-binder. That was his
privilege. The Club had been his idea, after he'd found the bogey picture that
someone had left behind in the school photocopier. Maybe he'd read too many
stories about ordeals and secret initiations. When you'd stumbled on such a
splendid ordeal, you simply had to invent a secret society to use it.
'We are the Shudder Club,' Khalid intoned. 'We are the ones who can
take it. Twenty seconds.'
 Jonathan's eyebrows went up. Twenty seconds was _serious_. Gary, the
fat boy of the gang, just nodded and concentrated on his watch. Khalid opened
the binder and stared at the thing inside. 'One ... two ... three...'
He almost made it. It was past the seventeen-second mark when Khalid's
hands started to twitch and shudder, and then his arms. He dropped the book,
and Gary gave him a final count of eighteen. There was a pause while Khalid
overcame the shakes and pulled himself together, and then they congratulated
him on a new record.
Julie and Gary weren't feeling so ambitious, and opted for ten-second
ordeals. They both got through, though by the count of ten she was terribly
white in the face and he was sweating great drops. So Jonathan felt he had to
say ten as well.
'You sure, Jon?' said Gary. 'Last time you were on eight. No need to
push it today.'
Jonathan quoted the ritual words, 'We are the ones who can take it,'
and took the ring-binder from Gary. 'Ten.'
In between times, you always forgot exactly what the bogey picture
looked like. It always seemed new. It was an abstract black-and-white pattern,
swirly and flickery like one of those old Op Art designs. The shape was almost
pretty until the whole thing got into your head with a shock of connection
like touching a high-voltage wire. It messed with your eyesight. It messed
with your brain. Jonathan felt violent static behind his eyes ... an
electrical storm raging somewhere in there ... instant fever singing through
the blood ... muscles locking and unlocking ... and oh dear God had Gary only
counted four?
He held on somehow, forcing himself to keep still when every part of
him wanted to twitch in different directions. The dazzle of the bogey picture
was fading behind a new kind of darkness, a shadow inside his eyes, and he
knew with dreadful certainty that he was going to faint or be sick or both. He
gave in and shut his eyes just as, unbelievably and after what had seemed like
years, the count reached ten.
Jonathan felt too limp and drained to pay much attention as Heather
came close -- but not close enough -- to the five seconds you needed to be a
full member of the Club. She blotted her eyes with a violently trembling hand.
She was sure she'd make it next time. And then Khalid closed the meeting with
the quotation he'd found somewhere: 'That which does not kill us, makes us
stronger.'
****
School was a place where mostly they taught you stuff that had nothing to do
with the real world. Jonathan secretly reckoned that quadratic equations just