"Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

2
Two hours later, Franz Westen looked out of his open casement window at the
1,000-foot TV tower rising bright red and white in the morning sunlight out of the snowy fog
that still masked Sutro Crest and Twin Peaks three miles away and against which Corona
Heights stood out, humped and pale brown. The TV towerтАФSan Francisco's Eiffel, you
could call itтАФwas broad-shouldered, slender-waisted, and long-legged like a beautiful and
stylish womanтАФor demigoddess. It mediated between Franz and the universe these days,
just as man is supposed to mediate between the atoms and the stars. Looking at it,
admiring, almost reverencing it, was his regular morning greeting to the universe, his
affirmation that they were in touch, before making coffee and settling back into bed with
clipboard and pad for the day's work of writing supernatural horror stories and especially
(his bread and butter) novelizing the TV program "Weird Underground," so that the mob of
viewers could also read, if they wanted to, something like the m├йlange of witchcraft,
Watergate, and puppy love they watched on the tube. A year or so ago he would have been
focusing inward on his miseries at this hour and worrying about the day's first
drinkтАФwhether he still had it or had drunk up everything last nightтАФbut that was in the past,
another matter.
Faint, dismal foghorns cautioned each other in the distance. Franz's mind darted briefly
two miles behind him to where more fog would be blanketing San Francisco Bay except for
the four tops thrusting from it of the first span of the bridge to Oakland. Under that
frosty-looking surface there would be the ribbons of impatient, fuming cars, the talking ships,
and coming from far below the water and the mucky bottom, but heard by fishermen in little
boats, the eerie roar of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains rocketing through the tube
as they carried the main body of commuters to their jobs.
Dancing up the sea air into his room there came the gay, sweet notes of a Telemann
minuet blown by Cal from her recorder two floors below. She meant them for him, he told
himself, even though he was twenty years older. He looked at the oil portrait of his dead wife
Daisy over the studio bed, beside a drawing of the TV tower in spidery black lines on a
large oblong of fluorescent red cardboard, and felt no guilt. Three years of drunken griefтАФa
record wake!тАФhad worked that all away, ending almost exactly a year ago.
His gaze dropped to the studio bed, still half-unmade. On the undisturbed half, nearest
the wall, there stretched out a long, colorful scatter of magazines, science-fiction
paperbacks, a few hardcover detective novels still in their wrappers, a few bright napkins
taken home from restaurants, and a half-dozen of those shiny little Golden Guides and
Knowledge Through Color booksтАФhis recreational reading as opposed to his working
materials and references arranged on the coffee table beside the bed. They'd been his
chiefтАФalmost his soleтАФcompanions during the three years he'd laid sodden there stupidly
goggling at the TV across the room; but always fingering them and stupefiedly studying their
bright, easy pages from time to time. Only a month ago it had suddenly occurred to him that
their gay casual scatter added up to a slender, carefree woman lying beside him on top of
the coversтАФthat was why he never put them on the floor; why he contented himself with half
the bed; why he unconsciously arranged them in a female form with long, long legs. They
were a "scholar's mistress," he decided, on the analogy of "Dutch wife," that long, slender
bolster sleepers clutch to soak up sweat in tropical countriesтАФa very secret playmate, a
dashing but studious call girl, a slim, incestuous sister, eternal comrade of his writing work.
With an affectionate glance toward his oil-painted dead wife and a keen, warm thought
toward Cal still sending up pirouetting notes on the air, he said softly with a conspiratorial
smile to the slender cubist form occupying all the inside of the bed, "Don't worry, dear, you'll
always be my best girl, though we'll have to keep it a deep secret from the others," and