"Eric Frank Russell - The Rhythm of the Rats" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

The Rhythm of the Rats
Eric Frank Russell
The village of despair lay in a fold of tree-shrouded hills. Its name shall not be
spoken, neither shall its nationality be told. There are those among us whose
curiosity knows no restraint; others who are magnetically drawn by the dreadful. One
must tell the tale in manner calculated to protect the foolish from their follies or not
tell it at all. Suffice to say that the village was placed far off the beaten track even of
foot-walking tourists, and its brooding inhabitants did not speak English on those
rare occasions when they spoke at all.
There were sixty houses in the village, one-third of them straggling alongside the
cattle-track which served as its main road, the rest climbing the heights behind and
lurking half-hidden in a welter of pine firs and mountain ash. All these abodes were
of timber, highly ornamented, and would have been considered picturesque had they
not oozed an elusive but easily sensed aura of overwhelming sadness.
Quiet, slow-moving folk lived in this forgotten hamlet, passing each other silently
in the course of their daily tasks, fix-faced, fix-eyed, unemotional in the manner of
those long emptied of human passions. Spiritual wells run dry forever.
Shadow-people almost without substance.
I found this place by veritable accident. A plane crashed amid pines close behind
the ruined castle of the Giant Ghormandel. Flung headlong into flexible pine which
caught me, waved me to and fro before it dropped me into a bed of ferns, I was the
sole survivor.
The plane crackled and spat and flared furiously a little lower down the hill.
Adjacent tree trunks exploded like cannon under pressure of boiling sap and resin.
Ferns withered, turned brown and paperlike, became flames. Rabbits scuttled in all
directions, weasels with them. Birds whirred away squawking. Smoke poured
cloud-high. Blackened bodies posed roasting in the fuselage, and the pilotтАФstill in
his cockpitтАФsat with bowed and steaming head. It was terrible.
To tell the truth, the scene sickened me far more than did the narrowness of my
own escape. That sudden, unwanted cremation amid the trees, with the castle ruins
grinning like rotten teeth, and the dark, unfriendly green of the hills, the scowling
skies all made a scene such as one carries for the remainder of one's life. It was a
picture of death, red and rampant.
There was nothing I could do to help anyone, nothing at all. The plane's
complement already was far beyond human assistance. Somewhat bruised and
considerably shocked, but otherwise unharmed, I made my way down the hillside
and found a tiny brook which I followed as it meandered through a thickly forested
area that still sloped, though gradually. The atmosphere grew heavier, more morbid
as I descended. By the time the village was near the air had become thick,
oppressive and lay like a weight upon my mind. It created that unpleasant sensation
of an impending headache that never manages to arrive.
A smell of wood-smoke came from the village although no chimney was visibly
active. Not the pleasing, aromatic scent which greets one in wood-burning
communities, but rather an acrid odor suggesting the combustion of rotting bark and
dried fungi.
Four people saw me as I came by the end pair of houses. Two men, two women,
all middle-aged. Their attire was well cared for in the matter of stitching and patching
but the colors had long faded toward dark browns and grays. It was sartorial
companionship for the colors of their souls, all browns and grays. The two men
bore shepherds' crooks; the women carried brass-bound wooden buckets. All four