"Barry N. Malzberg - Transfer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

But his victims! Ah, they have, so many of them, been waiting for murder so long, dreaming of it, touching
it in the night (as I touch the self-same beast), that this must be the basis of that acceptance which passes
through them at the moment of impact. They have been looking, these victims, for an event so climactic
that they will be able to cede responsibility for their lives, and here, in the act of murder, have they at last
that confirmation. Some of them embraced the beast with passion as he made his last strike. Others have
opened themselves to him on the pavement and pointed at their vitals. For the city, the very energy of that
city or so I believe this now through my musings, is based upon the omnipresence of death, and to die is
to become at last completely at one with the darkened heart of a city constructed for death. I become
too philosophical. I will not attempt to justify myself further.

For there is no justification. What happens, happens. The beast has taught me at least this much (along
with so much else). Tonight we come upon the city with undue haste; the beast has not been out for two
nights previous, having burrowed within with a disinclination for pursuit, unavailable even to summons, but
now at four in the morning of this coldest of all the nights of winter he has pounded within me, screaming
for release, and I have allowed him his way with some eagerness because (I admit this truly) I too have
on his behalf missed the thrill of the hunt.

Now the beast races down the pavements, his breath a plume of fire against the ice. At the first
intersection we see a young woman paused for the light, a valise clutched against her, one hand upraised
for a taxi that will not come. (I know it will not come.) An early dawn evacuee from the city, or so I
murmur to the beast. Perhaps it would be best to leave this one alone since she looks spare and there
must be tastier meat in the alleys beyond тАж but the creature does not listen. He listens to nothing I have
to say. This is the core of his strength, and my own repudiation is nothing as to his.

For listen, listen now: he sweeps into his own purposes in a way which can only make me fill with
admiration. He comes upon the girl then. He comes upon her. He takes her from behind.

He takes her from behind.

She struggles in his grasp like an insect caught within a huge, indifferent hand, all legs and activity,
grasping and groping, and he casually kicks the valise from her hand, pulls her into an alley for a more
sweeping inspection, the woman's skull pinned against his flat, oily chest, her little hands and feet waving,
and she is screaming in a way so dismal and hopeless that I know she will never be heard and she must
know this as well. The scream stops. Small moans and pleas which have pieced out the spaces amid the
sound stop too and with an explosion of strength she twists within his grasp, then hurls herself against his
chest and looks upward toward his face to see at last the face of the assassin about which she must
surely have dreamed, the bitch, in so many nights. She sees the beast. He sees her.

I too know her.

She works at the Bureau. She is a fellow clerk two aisles down and three over, a pretty woman, not
indifferent in her gestures but rather, as so few of these bitches at the Bureau are, kind and lively, kind
even to me. Her eyes are never droll but sad as she looks upon me. I have never spoken to her other
than pleasantries, but I feel, feel, that if I were ever to seek her out, she would not humiliate me.

"Oh," I say within the spaces of the beast, trapped and helpless as I look upon her, "oh, oh."
"No!" she says, looking upon us. "Oh no, not you, it can't be you!" and the beast's grasp tightens upon
her then. "It can't be you! Don't say that it's you doing this to me!" and I look upon her then with
tenderness and infinite understanding, knowing that I am helpless to save her and thus relieved of the