"Pat Murphy - Rachel In Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

Expertly, the woman closes one of Rachel's eyes. With her open eye, Rachel watches the hypodermic
needle approach. She feels a sharp pain in her eyelid. In her mind, she is howling, but the only sound she
can manage is a breathy sigh.

The woman sets the hypodermic aside and begins methodically spraying Rachel's fur with a cold,
foulsmelling liquid. A drop strikes Rachel's eye and burns. Rachel blinks, but she cannot lift a hand to rub
her eye. The woman treats Rachel with casual indifference, chatting with the man as she spreads Rachel's
legs and sprays her genitals. "Looks healthy enough. Good breeding stock."

Rachel moans, but neither person notices. At last, they finish their torture, put her in a cage, and leave the
room. She closes her eyes, and the darkness returns.

Rachel dreams. She is back at home in the ranch house. It is night and she is alone. Outside, coyotes yip
and howl. The coyote is the voice of the desert, wailing as the wind wails when it stretches itself thin to
squeeze through a crack between two boulders. The people native to this land tell tales of Coyote, a god
who was a trickster, unreliable, changeable, mercurial.

Rachel is restless, anxious, unnerved by the howling of the coyotes. She is looking for Aaron. In the
dream, she knows he is not dead, and she searches the house for him, wandering from his cluttered
bedroom to her small room to the linoleumtiled lab.

She is in the lab when she hears something tapping: a small dry scratching, like a windblown branch
against the window, though no tree grows near the house and the night is still. Cautiously, she lifts the
curtain to look out.

She looks into her own reflection: a pale oval face, long blonde hair. The hand that holds the curtain aside
is smooth and white with carefully clipped fingernails. But something is wrong. Superimposed on the
reflection is another face peering through the glass: a pair of dark brown eyes, a chimp face with
redbrown hair and jug-handle ears. She sees her own reflection and she sees the outsider; the two
images merge and blur. She is afraid, but she can't drop the curtain and shut the ape face out.

She is a chimp looking in through the cold, bright windowpane; she is a girl looking out; she is a girl
looking in; she is an ape looking out. She is afraid and the coyotes are howling all around.

Rachel opens her eyes and blinks until the world comes into focus. The pain and tingling have retreated,
but she still feels a little sick. Her left eye aches. When she rubs it, she feels a raised lump on the eyelid
where the woman pricked her. She lies on the floor of a wire mesh cage. The room is hot and the air is
thick with the smell of animals.

In the cage beside her is another chimp, an older animal with scruffy dark brown fur. He sits with his
arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth, back and forth. His head is down. As he rocks,
he murmurs to himself, a meaningless cooing that goes on and on. On his scalp, Rachel can see a gleam
of metal: a permanently implanted electrode protrudes from a shaven patch. Rachel makes a soft
questioning sound, but the other chimp will not look up.

Rachel's own cage is just a few feet square. In one corner is a bowl of monkey pellets. A water bottle
hangs on the side of the cage. Rachel ignores the food, but drinks thirstily.

Sunlight streams through the windows, sliced into small sections by the wire mesh that covers the glass.
She tests her cage door, rattling it gently at first, then harder. It is securely latched. The gaps in the mesh