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

A rather thin, pale brown rock detached itself from the others and waved at him. Damn
the way these glasses jiggled with his heartbeat! A person who expected to see neat,
steady pictures through them just hadn't used binoculars. Or could it be a floater in his vision,
a microscopic speck in the eye's fluid? No, there he had it again! Just as he'd thought, it
was some tall person in a long raincoat or drab robe moving about almost as if dancing. You
couldn't see human figures in any detail at two miles even with sevenfold magnification; you
just got a general impression of movements and attitude. They were simplified. This skinny
figure on Corona Heights was moving around rather rapidly, all right, maybe dancing with
arms waving high, but that was the most you could tell.
As he lowered the binoculars he smiled broadly at the thought of some hippie type
greeting the morning sun with ritual prancings on a mid-city hilltop newly emerged from fog.
And with chantings too, no doubt, if one could hearтАФunpleasant wailing ululations like the
yelping siren he heard now in the distance, the sort that was frantic-making when heard too
close. Someone from the Haight-Ashbury, likely, it was out that way. A stoned priest of a
modern sun god dancing around an accidental high-set Stonehenge. The thing had given
him a start, at first, but now he found it very amusing.
A sudden wind blew in. Should he shut the window? No, for now the air was quiet again.
It had just been a freakish gust.
He set down the binoculars on his desk beside two thin old books. The topmost, bound
in dirty gray, was open at its title page, which read in a utilitarian typeface and layout
marking it as last century'sтАФa grimy job by a grimy printer with no thought of artistry:
Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities , by Thibaut de Castries. Now that was a funny
coincidence! He wondered if a drug-crazed priest in earthen robesтАФor a dancing rock, for
that matter!тАФwould have been recognized by that strange old crackpot Thibaut as one of
the "secret occurrences" he had predicted for big cities in the solemnly straight-faced book
he'd written back in the 1890s. Franz told himself that he must read some more in it, and in
the other book, too.
But not right now, he told himself suddenly, looking back at the coffee table where there
reposed, on top of a large and heavy manila envelope already stamped and addressed to
his New York agent, the typed manuscript of his newest novelizationтАФ Weird Underground
#7: Towers of Treason тАФall ready to go except for one final descriptive touch he'd hankered
to check on and put in; he liked to give his readers their money's worth, even though this
series was the flimsiest of escape reading, secondary creativity on his part at best.
But this time, he told himself, he'd send the novelization off without the final touch and
declare today a holidayтАФhe was beginning to get an idea of what he wanted to do with it.
With only a flicker of guilt at the thought of cheating his readers of a trifle, he got dressed
and made himself a cup of coffee to carry down to Cal's, and as afterthoughts the two thin
old books under his arm (he wanted to show them to Cal) and the binoculars in his jacket
pocketтАФjust in case he was tempted to check up again on Corona Heights and its freaky
rock god.


3
In the hall, Franz passed the black knobless door of the disused broom closet and the
smaller padlocked one of an old laundry chute or dumbwaiter (no one remembered which)
and the big gilded one of the elevator with the strange black window beside it, and he
descended the red-carpeted stairs, which between each floor went in right-angling flights of
six and three and six steps around the oblong stair well beneath the dingy skylight two
stories up from his floor. He didn't stop at Gun's and Saul's floorтАФthe next, the fifthтАФthough
he glanced at both their doors, which were diagonally opposite each other near the stairs,