"Levy-NewHorizons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levy Robert J)

Burton Street Games -- or rather, subject to uncomfortable silences, because
after that summer we never talked of the events. Unquestionably, though, there
was unanimity on what all of us saw, or thought we saw.

As the ball sailed over the red Plymouth it still had upward momentum, which
appeared quite impossible to anyone watching. Then, at some point beyond the
Plymouth, something happened to the sky.

Why search for different words when those I first used seem to fit the
phenomenon adequately? A door opened.

It did not open in the sky itself, but rather, it seemed, in the substance of
reality. What we saw, ever so briefly, was the ball sailing through an
other-dimensional portal over something that could have been a gigantic,
surrealistic version of a car, but could just have easily been some sort of
immense vessel for traversing interplanetary oceans. I looked at Huge dreamily
staring into that star-filled vortex, and saw him shake his head approvingly.

Then the door closed and everything was as before. Though, of course, everything
was different forever.

Huge had proved me wrong: There was something beyond a home run. He had, quite
literally, added a new dimension to the game of stickball.

Huge walked over to me and returned the broomhandle, because I was the next
batter up. Mitch was running in from the outfield, calling frantically.

"Uh, like, uh, it's getting near dinner time and my Mom will raise hell. I gotta
go."

"Yeah, sure, Mitch. No problem."

Suddenly, Stu and all the other guys were running in from the outfield, terror
written on their faces. Everybody was making lame excuses about why they had to
go home: dinner, lawns to mow, dogs to walk, chores to do. In no time the street
emptied out, and it was just me and Huge standing there alone. I regarded him
with awe, fascination, and, yes, no small amount of fear. Huge still gazed far
down the street toward where the door in the sky had opened. On his unfathomable
countenance was an expression that, in retrospect, I can only call wistful.

Then, without so much as a whyuuuugh, he walked off.

I don't know what it was that made me wait awhile and then follow him; perhaps
the part of me that yearned for an ineffable "something more." Perhaps in Huge I
sensed the presence of someone who would liberate me from the narrow confines of
my own life. I suspected where he might live, if live was the right word: the
lot where whatever had tumbled from that door in the sky had tumbled. Just
maybe, I thought, he was that mysterious whatever.

I watched him from down the street as he neared the fence, expecting him to