"Barry N. Malzberg - The Third Part" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

The Third Part
by Barry N. Malzberg
Beyond the woods, Jeb could see the burning, the thin haze from another level of darkn
it arced the trees, the denser hidden spaces. Birds emerged from this haze in little straggles
their chirps like screams. He squinted but could not find their color against that darkness; th
flight was tumult in the dangerous air. He did not know where to go. He was not lost, not
exactly, but the fire-haunted town and its people were behind him, and he did not know if h
could return, if they were looking for him.
Presently, two black men Jeb had never seen before struggled from a space between the
trees, their clothing disheveled but their faces, as they tumbled toward Jeb, curiously neat a
blank as if their features were a bad artist's approximation of human facade. They were gap
their arms beckoning grotesquely. The taller might have been close to seven feet; the shorte
a peculiar hunched-over position, might have been any height at all, might have been deform
the cloak which covered him made his aspect mysterious. "Mister," this shorter man said, "
need water. We need help. Him there, that's Clayton. Me, I'm Damascus."
There's going to be another lynching tonight, Jeb thought. The thought was like a caress,
something strange and soft enticing his mind as it entered then flapping through like one of
those birds in sudden flight. Those folks back there, maybe coming for me now, they are no
going to like this.
"Don't have water," Jeb said roughly, that tone the only warning the men would get. If th
were too dumb to take it, he couldn't be blamed. They should have known.
"Thirsty," Clayton said. He was elongate, but there was no bulk; it exaggerated his
helplessness. He was panting in his overalls. His open mouth as he talked revealed teeth as
black and twisted as the smoldered trees, rotting incongruously under the orderly lips like t
trees under the flat, gray sky. "It's burning; everything is burning. My mouth is burning."
"Told you there's no water here. Fire burned it up." Jeb patted his water bottle, swaddl
secretly like an infant under his jacket as a bird whispering lynch, lynch sped through his s
again, fluttering its wings against his brain. Dumb all right. Dumb right out of the fire. And
going back for good, so soon.
"Now we seenтАФ" Clayton said and stumbled and fell. Damascus rolled toward him as
hold the man, but halfheartedly, like someone reaching for milkweed as it billowed away in
summer breeze. "It ain't nothin' like we ever seen," Clayton said, holding the ground. "It be
hellfire and damnation but worse."
"Water," Damascus said again as if it were a sacred word. "We gonna die right here
without water. We out of the fire but we gonna die."
Yes, Jeb thought, yes, you gonna die. A lynching might take the people's minds off him.
Might take his own mind off what he had seen: that once-flat field beyond the bowed trees
swollen like a pregnant woman, fire and lava spewing forth in molten red-and-black fury,
drowning the Monroe farm, the Belton farm, his own Weston Farm, the Church of the
Redemption, Reverend Smith's parsonage, the old red brick schoolhouse where he had labo
and grunted over the useless sums and readers, the run-down shacks of the sharecroppers an
beyond all of that, beyond to the horizon and the unknown behind that.
"You too," Clayton said. "You another. You don't care."
But Jeb did care: that was what had broken him. Casting his mind back, he still could n
understand how it had happened, even though there was a word for it: Volcano. He had lea
about volcanoes in that very same schoolhouse, old Miss So and So peering over her spins
spectacles as he and Tommy Lee Adams passed dirty pictures in the back of the classroom
thought about Mary Lu's boomers. Miss So and So had said there were no volcanoes in the
Southern U.S., not since the geological evolution. But ever so stupid Mary Lu had started to
when she heard about the hot lava and would not stop until Miss had promised that volcano