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

that the real Judai was gone. Looking into that restlessly seething smoky
blindness, he was sure of that, and revulsion surged through him as he
strained at his own body for the will to blast this hell-tenanted beauty into
nothingness, and could not stir. Helpless in the frozen grip of his own
horror, he watched.
She-it stood straight before him, staring blankly. And he was aware of a slow
seepage from the gray pits of the eyes. Smoke was curling out into the room in
delicate whirls and
plumes. Sickness came over him as he realized it, and an extravagant terror,
for it was not the sweet-smelling, clean smoke of fire. There was no
physically perceptible odor to it, 'тАв but from the unspeakably evil stench his
very soul shuddered away. He could smell evil, taste it, perceive it with more
senses than he knew he possessed, despite the intangibility of the swirling
stuff that billowed now in deepening waves from under the lash-fringed lids
that once had been Judai's. Once before he had been dimly aware of this, when
he had looked" back as he left, the night before, to see that vague gray
veiling a woman's milk-whiteness in obscurity that was somehow-unpleasant.
Even that remote hinting at what he saw now in full strength had been enough
to send a warning shudder through him. But now-now it billowed about him in
thickening deeps through which he could scarcely make out the pale shape of
the figure before him, and the grayness was seeping through his body and mind
and soul with a touch more dreadful than the touch of every ugly thing in
creation. It was not tangible, but it was slimier and more unclean than
anything he could have named. Not upon his flesh but upon his soul that wet
slime crawled.
Dimly through the swirl of it he saw the lips of Judai's body move. A ghost of
a voice fluted into the grayness, a sweet, rich, throbbing thread of sound. So
lovely had been Judai's voice that even the horror which stirred it now into
speech could not evoke discords from a throat that had never uttered any sound
but music.
"I am ready to take you now, Northwest Smith. The time has come to discard
this body and these ways of seduction! and pyt on a man's strength and
straightforwardness, so that l| may complete what I came to do. I shall not
need it long, bul your force and vitality I must have before I surrender them
ufjjj to mighty----. And then I may go forth in my true form td$ bring the
worlds under great---'s reign."
Smith blinked. There had been a gap in her words where he should have heard a
name, but it had not been a gap of silence. Her lips had moved, though no
sound came forth, and the air shook with a wordless cadence so deeply stirring
that he felt involuntary awe--if it were possible to feel awe at the utterance
of a word without sound.
That sweetly murmurous voice was whispering through the fog that had thickened
now until he could scarcely see the outlines of the figure before him.
"I have waited so long for you, Northwest Smith-for a man with a body and a
brain like yours, to serve my needs. I - take you now, in great---- 's name.
In that name, I bid you surrender your body. Go!"
The last word cracked through the mist, and abruptly blindness swept over him.
His feet no longer pressed the floor. He was wallowing in a fog of such
revolting horror that his very soul writhed within him for escape. Slimily the
gray stuff seeped through his being, crawling and sliding and oozing, and the