"Fritz Leiber - The Black Gondolier And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Taken as a whole, this book chronicles Leiber's remarkable achievements in weird fiction, stories that are
thoroughly modern examples of the horror story, tales such as тАЬThe Thirteenth StepтАЭ which uses the
unlikely device of a speaker's тАЬqualificationтАЭ talk at an AA meeting to tales such as тАЬLie Still, Snow
White", a masterpiece of erotic horror written years before the term had degenerated into a marketing
label. There's a variety and richness here that could only have come from an author as gifted as Fritz
Leiber.

John Pelan

Midnight House, 2000

THE BLACK GONDOLIER
Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the
caf├й La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark's Plaza.

I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took
himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to
take seriously my story of Daloway's strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power
which was menacing him. The police even make light of the very material clues which I pointed out to
them.

Or else Daloway was taken off, grimly and against his will, to parts utterly unknown and blackly horrible.
That is my own theory, especially on lonely nights when I remember the dreams he told me of the Black
Gondolier.

Of course the canal is a rather small one, showing much of its rough gravel bottom strewn with rusted
cans and blackened paper, except when it is briefly filled by one of our big winter rains. But gondolas did
travel it in the illusion-packed old days and it is still spanned by a little sharply humped concrete bridge
wide enough for only one car. I used to cross that bridge coming to visit Daloway and I remember how
I'd slow down and tap my horn to warn a possible car coming the other way, and the momentary
roller-coaster illusion I'd get as my car heaved to the top and poised there and then hurtled down the
opposite dusty slope for all of a breathless second. From the top of the little bridge I'd get my first
glimpse of the crowded bungalows and Daloway's weed-footed trailer and close behind it the black
hunch-shouldered oil well which figured so strangely in his dreads. тАЬTheirclosest listening post,тАЭ he
sometimes called it during the final week, when he felt positively besieged.

And of course the Grand Canal is pretty dismal these days, with its several gracefully arching Bridges of
Sighs raddled with holes showing their cement-shell construction and blocked off at either end by heavy
wire barricades to keep off small boys, and with both its banks lined with oil wells, some still with their
towering derricks and someтАФmostly those next to beach side housesтАФwith their derricks dismantled ,
but all of them wearily pumping twenty-four hours a day with a soft slow syncopated thumping that the
residents don't hear for its monotony, interminably sucking up the black petroleum that underlies Venice,
lazily ducking and lifting their angularly oval metal heads like so many iron dinosaurs or donkeys forever
drinkingтАФdonkeys moving in the somnambulistic rhythm of Ferde Grofe's Grand-Canyon donkey when
it does its sleepyhee ... haw. Daloway had a very weird theory about thatтАФabout the crude oil, I
meanтАФa theory which became the core of his dreads and which for all its utter black wildness may still
best explain his disappearance.

And La Gondola Negra is only a beatnik coffee house, successor to the fabulous Gashouse, though it did