"Laura Resnick - Enter the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

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Enter the Night
by Laura Resnick
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Copyright (c)1995 by Laura Resnick
First published in Orphans of the Night, April 1995

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Science Fiction


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Young, I was so very young the night the Ixtabay called to me. The
years have passed, my eyes have dimmed, my once-smooth face now bears a white
and bristly beard, and the laughter of my grandchildren echoes faintly in the
hollow well of my ears. But once I was young and heard her call.
The rains have come and gone many, many times since that mad moment I
entered the night of the Ixtabay, but when the village is silent in sleep,
when the hungry growl of the jungle cools to a soft murmur of satiation, when
my heart is open to the spirit voices that rule the night -- then do I hear
her again, calling to me across the void of the tens of thousands of nights
that I have endured without her.
****
Deep in the jungle, so deep that even today no paved road reaches it,
our village perched on the banks of the river. My grandfather's tiny,
unpainted house sat so close to the water that it looked like it might fling
itself into the current at any moment. My mother and I lived in it with him. I
remembered little of my father, who died when I was very small.
"He disappeared into the jungle one night. You see, the Ixtabay called
to him," Grandfather would say to me when my mother was not listening. "And,
not heeding my warnings, he went to her." Then Grandfather would sigh and
shake his head.
Once or twice, though, my mother heard him, and then her dark eyes
sparked with anger as she scolded him. "You must not flood the boy's ears with
such superstitious nonsense," she would snap. "His father got lost in the
jungle and crawled home half-alive, then died of fever three days later."
Grandfather would sigh and shrug and roll his eyes at me. As soon as
her attention was diverted, he would whisper, "He followed the Ixtabay into
the bush and, like all her lovers, went insane."
I didn't really know what the Ixtabay was, and it was several more