"Bruce Holland Rogers - The Apple Golem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Fixedly and certainly, she looked back.
She was a flesh thing now, he realized. Not an apple thing.
And slowly she opened her jaw, curled back her lips, and Baltasar saw that the inside of her mouth
was pink and lined with row after row of teeth. Tiny, white teeth.
Her hands closed around his wrist. She had a strength he had not guessed at. She had never resisted
him.
"No!" he said, but the word was only a word, for she was no longer what she had been, and before he
could summon the other words he knew, the ones that might destroy her even if he could not control her,
she was bending toward him for a kiss. A very hungry kiss.
***


What binds one may bind the other.
***


Day by day, she called to him. Day by day, he was compelled to come to her from his place among
the apple trees and submit. For a time, he still had a will of his own, still remembered the words that
might release him, but he could not speak them. He had no tongue.
***


There are still places where no one goes. Perhaps, one day, wandering in the woods, you will go to
one of them. Losing your way, you will find yourself in deeper and deeper forest, and then find a little
clearing where apple trees grow wild and bear their hard and bitter fruit. A stone hut stands there.
Perhaps you will knock and find the woman who lives there. If she smiles, it will be a tight-lipped smile.
She will not speak. Most likely, she will not answer your knock at all.
Out of the corner of your eye, you may see something moving beneath the tangled apple branches.
Look fast enough, and you will glimpse a thing that you will be sure you cannot have really seen.
But if you were sure you had, indeed, seen it, and if you wanted a name for it, you could call it this:
bone golem.
It had another name once, but that was long ago.
Da├Я ist die alte, alte Liebesgeschichte:
This is the old, old story of love.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. ( http://www.alexlit.com/ )

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