"Richard Laymon - Dreambox Junkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

waste-not-want-not, she had given birth to Kali in it and then hung on to it, sentimentally attached.

He asked, тАЬWhere's Kali? Asleep?"

Ruth nodded. Without looking round at him, she pulled open the cutlery drawer, snatched something out
and tossed it over her shoulder toward him. тАЬThat what you're looking for?"

It was a new bottle of Vitamin C, procured by Ruth for his use. She had even done that for him, got him
his precious dethan gear.

Paulie picked up the bottle off the floor.

тАЬThanks,тАЭ he said.

And then he said, тАЬI'm sorry."

Ruth said nothing.

тАЬSee you in a while,тАЭ Paulie said.

He returned to the bedroom and sat down on the bed. It was totally his own fault, that it had come to
this. His own childish, selfish, stubborn, stupid doing. Poor Ruth. He didn't deserve her. And she
deserved far better.

There were two Crowning Glory tabs left. Enough for four more hooks. Half a tab was quite enough to
do the job. They had a little indentation down the middle, so you could easily snap them in two, just as if
it had all been planned; just as if, when the tablets had been developed by his ex-wife's scientists in order
to block dihydrotestosterone production and forestall male pattern baldness, those pharmacologists had
also foreseen the widespread use of the tablets by wildcarding Dreamboxers. So outrageously ironic,
having Frances to thank for all of this. One full tablet, one a day, was the dosage required to keep your
hair growing. But only half a tab plus a C capsule was needed to dethanatize your boxdreams. No one
seemed to know who had discovered it, this antinegativity side-effect.

Hilford Abbots was Netless save for a single old landline screenphoneтАФa necessary evil for emergency
use onlyтАФat the home of village elder Robin Richly. Depending on his mood, Paulie sometimes found life
in a media shelter liberating, sometimes suffocating, and he had been in the habit, on his occasional trips
into Cambridge, of pigging out on inf and coming back with his head in a whirl. Among the fruits of one
such expedition had been the alleged dethanatory power of Crowning Glory when taken with Vitamin C.
Another Net myth, it had sounded like, to begin with. But then, when he himself had become a
Dreambox user, Paulie had tried out the peculiar combination, and every hook had been clear of dark
clouds. Not that dark clouds were necessarily always ready to sweep in, but it was wisest not to risk
psychic self-injury.

If, right back at the start, Paulie had known what the dethan tablets could do, he could have guarded
against the grotesque little nightmare that had been his first, unprotected boxtrip. Like an idiot he'd
hooked up without properly consulting the Dreambox instruction manual, and had plunged straight into
what he had later learned was a standard male wish-and-punish complex, in which the primal was
viciously scourged by the sociocultural. The net result of this dynamic had been his finding his boxself
suffering from uncontrollable penile development. After first becoming too sizeable forGroundRuth to
accommodate, the organ had gone on to attain such bloated dimensions that he couldn't get it up anyway,