"Mark Morris - The Other One" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Mark)

The Other One
a short story by Mark Morris

Foreword

I usually glibly refer to "The Other One" as my Jack the Ripper story.
It's a story about paranoia and alienation and was my attempt to write
something that captured the dislocating terror of nightmare. It's perhaps
one of my least accessible stories, but also the one that I'm happiest
with. It's one of the few occasions where I've managed to capture the
exact mood I was aiming for. All of this may be because it's the story of
mine that I've found easiest to write. Usually writing is a bloody hard
grind, but this story flowed from my head on to the page so quickly that
at times I couldn't get the words out fast enough. I wrote it long-hand,
over a four-day period in Bolsover whilst dog-sitting for my mum who had
gone on holiday. The last 2,500 words I wrote in a single sitting, in the
course of which I somehow managed to produce a sentence which to this day
Nicholas Royle (editor of Darklands 2 where this story first appeared)
claims is one of the scariest lines he's ever read.

The television was gone. They must have come in the night and taken it. It
was so unfair of them to do that, they must have done it purely out of
spite.
He was angry but tried not to show it. The best thing to do was not to
give them the satisfaction of knowing that they'd upset him. He would act
as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't even noticed. He sat up in
bed, rubbing his eyes and yawning, pretending to be still half-asleep.
Then nonchalantly he pushed back his single blanket, set his feet on the
floor, stood up and wandered over to the radio.
When he switched it on all he heard was static. He moved his head closer
to the speaker, his movements slow and cautious, fearful of receiving
another electric shock. Not that he'd had one for a while now, but you
could never be too careful. They were cunning as well as spiteful. They
hated him far more than he'd ever hated anybody.
Beneath the static he could hear someone speaking. Making sounds at any
rate, singing or howling wordlessly. He listened more intently and thought
he heard someone say his name. Alarmed, he turned the radio off.
He wondered whether to disable the radio but decided not to. They'd know
they'd got to him if he did. Besides, it would probably provoke them, not
that they really needed an excuse. The radio couldn't do him much harm
when it was silent, not like the microwave which he'd secretly
incapacitated. He wondered how long it would be before they found out what
he'd done, and how they'd react. Whatever happened it would have been
worth it. He was damned if he was going to allow them to cook him slowly
from the inside.
He walked down the corridor to the little bathroom on the right. The
corridor was narrow, and the lights set into the ceiling bulbous and
blank, like the eyes of fish. It had taken him a long time before he was
able to hide the nervousness he felt walking down here. Even now he found
the thought that he could reach out with both hands and touch a wall at