"Night Warriors - 02 - Death Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

It was a thing out of a nightmare. While mankind slept it stalked the dream-world, driving men to madness and death. The demon's bloodlust was terrible: its rage was unstoppable.

Decimating the realms of dreams was not enough Ч the creature hungered for the waking world. Hidden in a child's nightmares, it emerged in a riot of slaughter. None could stand against it.

And then the Night Warriors arose, summoned by the demon's evil. Powerless in our world, in dreams they are virtual gods. In dreams they will confront the demon Ч unless it finds and destroys their sleeping selves...










He reached for the doorknob. Jennifer said, 'Vandalized and burgled, all in one week.' He turned slowly to smile at her, a glutinous movement like a man wading through syrup.
And then the door was racketed open as if an express train were hurtling through it, and John was ripped across the chest by something that felt like red-hot wires, and was slammed against the bureau, hitting his head and falling to the floor.
Jennifer was screaming, too, high and piercing. And the huge black monstrosity raked her open from shoulders to thighs, blood bursting everywhere.
The huge black thing rushed away again. All John could do was lie on his side on the blood-sprayed carpet, whimpering with pain. When he opened his eyes, he saw his son's bare feet, close to his face.
'Lenny,' he whispered. 'For God's sake, Lenny, save me.'










One



John discovered the scratches soon after Lenny had gone to sleep that night. Six deep parallel gouges in the corridor wall, a little above head-height, straight through the new floral wallpaper and right into the plaster, V-shaped and narrow, like marks made by a lino-cutter or a thin-bladed chisel.
'Goddamn it,Т he swore, touching the torn wallpaper with his fingertips. The decorating had been finished only last Wednesday, and he had lectured Lenny for five minutes about treating the walls and the fresh white paintwork with respect. This house was their new beginning, the opening of a fresh and happy chapter in their lives. For Lenny to have defaced it so soon was just as upsetting as if he had said that he hated Jennifer, and that he hated their new life together.
This wasn't childish carelessness. This wasn't wear and tear. This was a gesture of hostility and rejection, and John felt more annoyed with Lenny than at any time in the past three years.
'Goddamn it,' he repeated. The scratches were too forceful to have been done by accident. Lenny hadn't just run a toy car too enthusiastically along a flower-patterned racetrack; or smashed a Transformer robot too violently into a make-believe cliff. This was deliberate. Premeditated, tongue-between-teeth, and deliberate.
John took three deep breaths. Then he walked the length of the corridor to Lenny's bedroom at the end. It was hot in there, and dark, and smelled of rubbery new carpet. Lenny's bed stood against the far wall. Lenny himself was lying on his back with his mouth open, his cheeks flushed, one hand still holding the Gobot he had been playing with when he fell asleep.
John stood over the bed for a while, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Lenny was nine - which meant that he was still young enough to do some really ridiculous things, but old enough to inflict some serious damage when he did them. He was curly-headed and blond and almost pretty, except for that wide, impish grin. He looked so much like his mother that John sometimes found the tears pricking the corners of his eyes even though he hadn't been thinking about Virginia at all.
'Lelly,Т Virginia had called him, because of the way he had tried to pronounce his own name when he was very small.
John had allowed Lenny to grieve openly for his mother, the same way that he had allowed himself to grieve openly for her. Some people (especially his own mother) had thought that he'd allowed Lenny to grieve too much. There had been a bad eighteen months of tantrums, wildness, uncontrollable violence. Once, after Lenny had thrown paint around at school, John had almost believed that he had lost his son altogether, that Lenny would spend the rest of his life screaming and kicking and refusing to understand that people die whether you want them to or not, and that can sometimes include your own mother.
However, he had tried to be patient with Lenny, and he had persuaded Lenny's teachers and his friends to be patient, too. Gradually, Lenny's behavior had improved; and John would never forget the day that
Lenny had come home from school and put his arms around him and said nothing at all, and John had known that at last Lenny had come to terms with losing his mother.
These days, John didn't allow Lenny to throw tantrums. He expected cooperation, and friendship, and trust. The memory would always be there, but the grieving had to be put behind them; life had to go on. Last May, John had found a new job as production manager for the Philadelphia News and had sold their old house in Newark; and late in October he had met Jennifer and soon asked her to marry him.
John wondered if Lenny might have resented all of this upheaval, without outwardly admitting it. Maybe Lenny felt that, by selling the house in which they had lived together, by changing his job, and by falling in love with Jennifer, John had somehow betrayed Virginia and tried to erase her memory. After all, they couldn't visit the grave anymore, not regularly, not like they used to when they still lived in Newark.
Maybe that was what the scratches in the wall were all about: a dumb protest against his new life. A mark to show that even if John didn't care about Virginia anymore. Lenny did.
Lenny began to snore a little. John was still angry with him, but he didn't really want to wake him. Lenny's eyes were shifting under his eyelids in REM sleep. He was dreaming, about something. Baseball? Star Trek? His mother? John didn't want to wake him in the middle of a dream.
All right, young man, he thought. This can wait until morning. But don't expect me to feel any better about it then.
A shadow fell across the doorway. It was Jennifer, looking for him.