"Eric The Pie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Life, that's what it's all about,' said Eric, and sliced Deborah open, all the way down to her light brown pubic hair.

She looked down and saw her own bloodied intestines, pouring into her lap. There was a fetid smell like nothing she had ever smelled before, blood and digestion and bile. Then she saw Eric plunge his whole head into the gaping cavity of her body, his whole head, and felt the unbearable tearing of his teeth. He was after her living liver. He was after her pancreas, and her stomach, and her kidneys. He was trying to eat her alive, from the inside out.

She felt herself fainting; she felt herself dying. She felt her whole world tinged with black. She did the only thing that she was capable of doing, which was to throw herself backward. Her chair fell; she fell; Eric fell. He bellowed with rage, his head still buried in the bloodiness of her body. The goat, nearнly dead now, swung heavily against them on its Calvary of chains.

Deborah lay with her head against the concrete floor, quivнering with agony and approaching death. Eric sucked and bit and tore at her liver, almost drowned in blood. Deborah turned her face and saw that her fall had loosened her right arm; that her right arm was free.

She also saw the hook that swung on the end of a chain, backwards and forwards.

She didn't care whether she could summon up the strength or not. She was going to do it, no matter what. She was dying; and words like 'impossible' didn't mean anything any more.

She snatched at the chain, once, twice, then caught it. Eric bloodily guzzled, oblivious. With a trembling, blood-smeared hand, she grasped the hook, and lifted it as high as she could. She could't scream; she couldn't cry out. She was almost dead. She probably was dead, pathologically speaking.

But she dug the hook in between Eric's bare buttocks as deeply as she could; and she felt sphincter and muscle and tisнsue tear, and inside her body Eric screamed. A muffled, wet, bubbling scream.

His face rose out of the gaping lips of her abdomen like the scarlet mask of the devil himself. His eyes were wide, bloody-black liver clung to his teeth. A fine spray of blood blew out of his nostrils. He roared, hopped, twisted, and tried to pull the hook out of himself. But as he did so, Deborah seized the goat, and the goat fell on top of her, and all of Eric's weights and chains and counterbalances went furiously haywire.

Eric was yanked, shrieking, up to the ceiling, where he dangled and writhed and prayed and wept.

Deborah died. The day died. But Eric circled around all night and still he didn't die. He spun slowly around and around, feeling a pain that was almost dreamlike in its intenнsity. He slept, and he woke, and the pain still dominated everything.

Near to dawn, he tried to shake himself free, jerking up and down on his hook, until at last it tore through and skin and he dropped heavily onto the garage floor. He lay shivering and weeping, bruised and maimed and unable to move.

The day passed him by. He heard cars. He heard Mr Bristow with his spanners, whistling and humming to himнself. He slept, shivered, mumbled.

Late in the evening, he felt something tug at his left eyelid. Something sharp, something painful. He tried to brush it away, but when he opened his eyes he knew that he wouldn't have the strength to keep it away for long.

It was a massive grey sewer-rat, one of the biggest he had ever seen. It wasn't attacking him, it was simply feeding. It stared at him and he knew with a terrible certainly that Eric the Pie had met his Simple Simon; that he would soon become nothing more than pellet-shaped droppings, in some unexнplored outfall; that you are what you eat.

For the very first time in his life, Eric understood the sin of being predatory, and he prayed for forgiveness while one rat, then another rat, then many rats, turned his body into a thrashing, rolling cloak of bloodied fur.