"C. L. Moore - The Cold Gray God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

concentration upon the ivory box. jj Then he heard such a deep breath rush
out through her 3 nostrils that it might have been life itself escaping, a
breath that thinned into a high, shuddering hum like the whine of wind through
wires. It was not a sound that any human creature could make.
Without realizing that he had moved, Smith leaped. Of their own volition his
muscles tensed into a spring of animal terror away from that high-whining
thing on the couch. He j ground himself half crouched a dozen paces away, his
gun ' steady in a lifted hand and his hair stiffening at the roots as he i
faced her. For by the thin, high, shuddering noise he knew \ surely that she
was not human. <
For a long instant he crouched there, taut, feeling his scalp , crawl with a
prickling terror as his pale eyes searched for < some reason in this madness
which had come over them both. ^ She still sat rigid, with lowered eyes, but
though she had not "тАв stirred, something told him unerringly that his first
instinct " had been right, his first intuitive flinching from her hand on :)
his arm-she was not human. Warm white flesh and fragrant тАв"; hair and subtle,
curving roundness of her under velvet, all this was camouflage to conceal-to
conceal-he could not i guess what, but he knew that loveliness for a lie, and
all down j his back the nerves tingled with man's involuntary shudder from the
unknown.
She rose. Cradling the ivory box against the sweet high curve of her bosom,
she moved slowly forward, her lashes making two dim crescents on her
exquisitely tinted cheeks. He had never seen her lovelier, or more hideously
repulsive. For in some obscure part of his brain he knew that the humanity
which she had clutched like a cloak about her was being dropped. In another
instant . . .
She paused before him, very near, so near that the muzzle of his
half-forgotten gun was pressed against the velvet that sheathed her body, and
the fragrance of her rose in a vague cloud to his nostrils. For one tense
instant they stood so, she with lowered lashes, cradling her ivory box, he
rigid with prickling revulsion, gun nosing her side, pale eyes set in a
narrow-lidded stare as he waited shudderingly for what must i ome next. In the
split second before her eyelids rose, he wanted overwhelmingly to fling up a
hand and shut out the sight of what lay behind them, to run blindly out of the
room and out of the house and never stop until the doors of The Spaceman's
Rest closed shelteringly upon him. He could not stir. Caught in a frozen
trance, he stared. The lashes fluttered. Slowly, very slowly, her lids rose.
The cold shock that jolted him into incredulity then made every detail of the
picture so clear that he was never to forget, no matter how hard he tried, the
vividness of that first glimpse into Judai's eyes. Yet for a full minute he
did not realize what he saw. It was too incredible for the brain to grasp.
With thickly beating heart he stood rigid, staring into (he weird face turned
to his.
From under those deep-curved lashes looked out no such luminous depths of
darkness as he had expected. There were no eyes behind Judai's creamy lids.
Instead he was looking into two lash-fringed, almond-shaped pits of gray
smoke, smoke that seethed and shifted and boiled within itself, unresting as
smoke from the fires of hell. He knew then that there dwelt in the curved and
milk-white body which had been Judai's a thing more evil than any devil hell's
fire ever spawned. How it came into that body he never knew, but he did know