"Fritz Leiber - Best of Fritz Leiber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Hollow and made it seem they were stroking their beards of Spanish moss. Joe sensed that the ghosts
were just as restless as the breezes, uncertain where and whom to haunt, or whether to take the night off,
drifting together in sorrowfully lecherous companionship. While among the trees the red-green vampire
lights pulsed faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken space fleet. The feeling of
deep misery stuck with Joe and deepened and he was tempted to turn aside and curl up in any convenient
tomb or around some half-toppled head board and cheat his Wife and the other two behind him out of a
shared doom. He thought: Gonna roll the bones, gonna roll тАШem up and go to sleep. But while he was
deciding, he got past the sagged-open gate and the rest of the delirious fence and Shantyville too.

At first Night Town seemed dead as the rest of Ironmine, but then he noticed a faint glow, sick as the
vampire lights but more feverish, and with it a jumping music, tiny at first as a jazz for jitterbugging
ants. He stepped along the springy sidewalk, wistfully remembering the days when the spring was all in
his own legs and heтАЩd bound into a fight like a bobcat or a Martian sand-spider. God, it had been years
now since he had fought a real fight, or felt the power. Gradually the midget music got raucous as a
bunny-hug for grizzly bears and loud as a polka for elephants, while the glow became a riot of gas flares
and flambeaux and corpse-blue mercury tubes and jiggling pink neon ones that all jeered at the stars
where the spaceships roved. Next thing, he was facing a three-storey false front flaring everywhere like
a devilтАЩs elbow, with a pale blue topping of St. ElmoтАЩs fire. There were wide swinging doors in the
center of it, spilling light above and below. Above the doorway, golden calcium light scrawled over and


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 best of fritz leiber

over again, with wild curlicues and flourishes, тАЬThe Boneyard,тАЭ while a fiendish red kept printing out,
тАЬGambling.тАЭ

So the new place theyтАЩd all been talking about for so long had opened at last! For the first time that
night, Joe Slattermill felt a stirring of real life in him and the faintest caress of excitement.

Gonna roll the bones, he thought.

He dusted off his blue-green work clothes with big, careless swipes and slapped his pockets to hear the
clank. Then he threw back his shoulders and grinned his lips sneeringly and pushed through the
swinging doors as if giving a foe the straight-armed heel of his palm.

Inside, The Boneyard seemed to cover the area of a township and the bar looked as long as the railroad
tracks. Round pools of light on the green poker tables alternated with hourglass shapes of exciting
gloom, through which drink girls and change-girls moved like white-legged witches. By the jazz-stand
hi the distance, belly dancers made their white hourglass shapes. The gamblers were thick and hunched
down as mushrooms, all bald from agonizing over the fall of a card or a die or the dive of an ivory ball,
while the Scarlet Women were like fields of poinsettia.

The calls of the croupiers and the slaps of dealt cards were as softly yet fatefully staccato as the rustle
and beat of the jazz drums. Every tight-locked atom of the place was controlledly jumping. Even the
dust motes jiggled tensely in the cones of light.

JoeтАЩs excitement climbed and he felt sift through him, like a breeze that heralds a gale, the f aintest
breath of a confidence which he knew could become a tornado. All thoughts of his House and Wife and
Mother dropped out of his mind, while Mr. Guts remained only as a crazy young torn walking stiff-