"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

could
only remain on sufferance. Without the willing warm, he would starve
and
die. They fed him. They were to blame for him.
Dead blood, heavy with Tuinol and Dilaudid, smote his brain, washing
away
the ghosts. He had to be careful; this city was thronged with the truly
dead, loitering beyond the ken of the warm, desperate for attention
from
those who could perceive them. When he was feeding, they crowded
around.
Having been dead, however briefly, he was a beacon for them.
He yowled and threw the meat-sack off him. He sat up in the bed, nerves
drawn taut, and looked at the dead girl. She was ghost-white flesh in
black underwear. The flowering neck wound was the least of the marks on
her. Scarifications crisscrossed her concave tummy. Pulsing slits
opened
like gills in her sides, leaking the last of her. The marks of his
talons,
they were dead mouths, beseeching more kisses from him.
Since arriving in America, he'd been careful to take only those who
asked
for it, who were already living like ghosts. They had few vampires
here.
Drained corpses attracted attention. Already, he knew, he'd been
noticed.
To prosper, he must practice the skills of his father-in-darkness.
First,
to hide; then, to master.
The Father was always with him, first among the ghosts. He watched over
Johnny and kept him from real harm.
Sid, Belsen-thin but for his Biafra-bloat belly, was slumped in a ratty
chair in front of blurry early early television. He looked at Johnny
and
at Nancy, incapable of focusing. Earlier, he'd shot up through his
eyeball. Colors slid and flashed across his bare, scarred-and-scabbed
chest and arms. His head was a skull in a spiky fright wig, huge eyes
swarming as Josie and the Pussycats reflected on the screen of his
face.
The boy tried to laugh but could only shake. A silly little knife, not
even silver, was loosely held in his left hand.
Johnny pressed the heels of his fists to his forehead, and jammed his
eyes
shut. Blood-red light shone through the skin curtains of his eyelids.
He
had felt this before. It wouldn't last more than a few seconds. Hell
raged
in his brain. Then, as if a black fist had struck him in the gullet,
peristaltic movement forced fluid up through his throat. He opened his
mouth, and a thin squirt of black liquid spattered across the carpet