"Reed-TheSingingMarine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Kit)

parts. By the time the woman reaches the cave mouth and gestures, he's ready to
plunge in without question: anything to escape the humidity that is pressing
down on him and steaming in his throat and in the space between his regulation
cap and his skull.

She turns as if she's already explained this: "You understand why I can't go in
there."

He shakes his head. The shadowed opening at her back lures him; he wants to
throw himself down on the worn stone floor and sleep until December.

"The dogs."

He blinks sweat out of his eyes, saying politely, "Ma'am?"

She says impatiently, "I can't go in because of the dogs."

"Dogs." Does he hear anything? Smell anything different? The place is still and
if there's anything living inside, there is no hint of it. "Are you sure there
are dogs in there?"

She turns that neatly feline face at an angle that makes it impossible for him
to read her intentions. "Don't worry. There are only three of them. They have
big eyes." When she looks up again her eyes gleam. "And they have what you want.
Watch out for the last one, though," she adds. "He can make you or break you."

"It will be dark."

She shakes her head. "It's lighted. They were going to turn this into Luray
Caverns until they found out the air was toxic."

"Toxic!"

"It won't bother you," she says with such sublime assurance that he believes
her. "And what you find will solve all your problems." She lays out the details.

This is how the singing Marine finds himself descending into Deep Caverns while
his companion reclines like a figure carved in the rock at its mouth and waits
for him to come back with the tinderbox. "My mother m-m-m . . ." Not his mother.
Gerda. For the first time since he came back to himself after the business with
the linden tree, the song sounds right. The faces of his platoon recede and he
is alone, singing in the cavern.

It is as she told him. At the widest point he finds three little niches opening
off the tunnel like side chapels in a subterranean place of worship, but instead
of religious statuary or mummified corpses they contain bits of blackness that
stalk back and forth inside like furred furies; when the animals see the Marine
they lunge for him and are hurled back into their niches as if by invisible
barriers. Glowering, they mount their mahogany chests like reluctant plaster
saints returning to their pedestals.