"Bimbos Of The Death Sun - 02 - Zombies Of The Gene Pool" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCrumb Sharyn)

Still, she wasn't sure she had ever got the old philosophy out of her system. She had consciously renounced it a few years later when she discovered that most of her real friends bickered endlessly and accomplished very little. Later she came to the uneasy realization that her concept of real and unreal people was very similar to the chauvinistic male's idea of women, the bigot's perception of other races, and, most troubling of all, similar to the way in which serial killers view their victims: they're not real, but I am. They don't matter, but I do. That was when the philosophy of exclusion had begun to frighten her.

Now, of course, she told herself that everyone had a soul and feelings, and that mundanes were very worthwhile people, but sometimes the old attitude came back anyhow. Just last week, Marion had been in line at the Chinese restaurant's lunch buffet, and the pixy-faced young woman in front of her had taken forever, staring at the rice and bean curd as if she couldn't remember what they were. Marion had caught herself thinking, Well, she's not real! The realization that she had thought that about someone even for an instant was an unsettling feeling. It gave her kinship with people she would rather not think of at all, and it made her wonder where such arrogance might have led. Did any of the Lanthanides share this view of reality? Now that she thought of it, it was just the opposite of Curtis Phillips' problem: Marion thought that most people weren't real and didn't matter; Curtis Phillips had fervently believed that demons were, and did.



"So tell me about Curtis Phillips," said Jay Omega, as if on cue. (Marion could never decide if Jay was real or not, but he was utterly unlike Jeremy, and that was enough.)

"Poor Curt," said Erik Giles, who had suddenly awakened. "He had such talent."

"When someone mentions Curtis Phillips, I always think of Richard Dadd," said Marion. She glanced at Jay to see if he recognized the name. It was obvious that he did not. Dadd was one of the things Marion had learned about in her "Middle Earth" period. "Richard Dadd was a mid-nineteenth-century English artist who became famous for his wonderfully complex paintings of fairy life. His paintingsЧsurrealistic in style and much ahead of their timeЧwere much admired, right up until the night that the artist cut his father's throat."

"Another practitioner of nonfiction?" asked Jay.

"Apparently so. He seemed to be having delusions about demons, and hearing voices ordering him to kill, so perhaps he was painting what he saw. He was tried and found insane, and they put him in Broadmoor, where he spent the remainder of his life painting increasingly bizarre landscapes peopled by demons." In lecture mode, Marion prattled happily on. "The asylum kept his paintings, and many of them are still on display there. They're worth a fortune."

"It sounds very like poor Curtis," Erik Giles agreed. "He didn't kill anyone, of course, but after the early success of his horror novels, his behavior became more and more erratic, and I believe there were a few episodes of violence with various editors."

"What sort of episodes?" asked Jay, possibly in search of inspiration.

"I believe he mailed a dead opossum to one of them. And he threatened another one with a razor. He confounded the local police a few times by confessing to murders."

"Murders?"

"Yes. President Kennedy, Janis Joplin, and, I believe, Joan of Arc. I'm told that every police department has cranks whose hobby is confessing. He once wrote to me saying that he had killed George Woodard and Pat Malone, but since Pat had been dead for a couple of years and I had a letter from George that same day, I dismissed it as wishful thinking."

"It sounds as if he needed psychiatric treatment," said Jay.

"He got it. That was when it was decided that he had to be institutionalized. I am told that he continued to write his fantasy stories even while he was in Butner, and in fact two of his short story collections were written there. In the end, of course, his personality became too fragmented for the discipline of composition, and he degenerated intoЧwell, I didn't go and visit him in those final years. I did go once in the mid-sixties, and he seemed lucid enough then."

"Did he seem well enough to be released?" asked Marion.

"Oh, no. He asked about Brendan and Peter, and I told him what they were doing, and then he told me about his demons and what they were doing. I never went back."

"Do you suppose the asylum owns the copyright to Curtis Phillips' later work?" asked Marion. "You know, the way Broadmoor owns the Dadd collection?"

"I don't know. I doubt it, though. Curtis was so well known before he was committed that I would have expected his family to take legal steps to administer his estate."

"It will be interesting to see if anyone turns up to represent his interests at the auction."

"Bunzie will know about all that. His people contacted us, because we all had to agree to let Bunzie's agent represent us in the book deal. He thought negotiations would be much simpler if we had only one representative working for the entire group."

"He has put a lot of work into this reunion," said Marion, taking another look at the brochure.

Erik Giles grinned. "He hates to see other people screw up. Besides, he can delegate most of the arrangements to his staff."

"I suppose he can," said Marion, but she made a mental note to observe Bunzie carefully. She tended to distrust altruistic people.

Jay Omega slowed the car. "Look! A 'Welcome to Tennessee sign. Shall we go in search of the Mountaineer Lodge, stop for dinner, or go and look at the lake?"