"Janet Morris - Crusaders In Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

as it had while Michael had been drinking. As full as it had been when Zeno
first brought the bowl, sloshing milk against its rim, to place it on the
floor before Michael in the first place.
Zeno had stopped listening to the Devil, who was yelling. He said quietly,
"Sir Nick, do you realize what this means? The bowl... the quantity of milk in
the bowl was unchanging throughout the entire interval of not-drinking,
drinking, and regurgitating. And after."
When Zeno again looked up at the Devil, the face he saw was as red as the sky
above New Hell when Paradise was trying to set.
"No. Tell me. What does it mean?" said the Devil, spittle riding his words as
he expelled them from purpling lips.
"It means that your informant was correct ... at least partially correct; In
some places - for example, where Michael and the bowl are, but not here, only
a few feet away on either Side, where you and I are - space-time is becoming
anomalously subject to different laws."
"No shit," said the Devil as he rose from his chair in disgust "Michael!" The
call shook the very rafters of Zeno's cell.
And the familiar rallied to it - or tried to. It twitched its ears, it got up
on its hind legs, it sought to back away from the bowl. But for every moment
away from its bowl, it exhibited an equal and opposite movement toward the
bowl. To Zeno, the cat seemed trapped in a tape loop. First it went forward,
then it went back, but it never managed to execute more than a circumscribed
set of motions.
And the Devil, watching the familiar, began to rage. "Michael! Michael!" he
screamed as if the beast were his only child. And strode forward, toward the
bowl.
"No! Don't! Sir! Nick" Zeno called, and lunged for the Prince of Darkness,
hoping to stop the Devil from becoming stuck like a fly on flypaper, as the
familiar was now, in some temporal glitch.
The familiar was yowling, intermittently, whenever it reached a forward
instant in its forward/backward/forward/backward minuet...
Now the Devil was cursing so horribly that demons started appearing-coming out
of the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the very air. These were horrid
creatures and Zeno (seeing acid spittle drip on floorboards and begin to
smoke, spittle that dripped from gaping jaws which could chomp him in two),
covered his head with his hands and sank down to curl himself into as small a
ball as possible.
He heard noises his ears couldn't sort into sensible sounds. He heard the
ripping of the firmament and the fundament.
And then he peeked, spreading his fingers. Through them he saw Satan, not a
don now in human robes, but a gigantic fiery-eyed thing with horn and tail,
beset by a great serpent and by winged clocks with spear-like arms.
He saw chariots with wheels of flame and mushroom clouds on which they rode.
He saw creation and dissolution. He saw the sun swallow up the sky. He saw the
earth charred to a cinder, deep within the corona of that sun. And he saw a
cloud of gas in which angels darted - hundreds, thousands, wing brushing wing
as they worked. He saw a huge ball forming in the midst of pregnant gasses.
And around all of this wound the serpent, and in the serpent's coil the Devil
toiled.
And in the Devils arms Michael was cradled, fangs bared at a hungry sky as the