"Dan Simmons - Metastasis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

neck and even thinner body. Its skin was whiteтАФnot flesh white but paper white,
fish-belly whiteтАФand the arms were skin and tendon wrapped tightly around long
bone. The hands were pale and enor-mous, fingers at least six inches long, and as
Louis watched they unfolded and hovered over his mother's bed-clothes. As Louis
squinted he realized that the figure's head was not shaven but simply hairlessтАФhe
could see veins through the translucent fleshтАФand the skull was dis-turbingly broad,
brachycephalic, and so out of proportion with the body that the sight of it made him
think of pho-tographs of embryos and fetuses. As if in response to this thought, the
thing's head began to oscillate slowly as if the long, thin neck could no longer
support its weight. Louis thought of a snake closing on its prey.
Louis could do nothing but stare at the image of pale flesh, sharp bone and
bruise-colored shadows. He thought fleetingly of concentration camp inmates
shuffling to the wire, of week-dead corpses floating to the surface like in-flatable
things made of rotted white rubber. This was worse.
It had no ears. A rimmed, ragged hole with reddened flanges of flesh opened directly
into the misshapen skull. The eyes were bruised holes, sunken blue-black sockets in
which someone had set two yellowed marbles as a joke. There were no eyelids. The
eyes were obviously blind, clouded with yellow cataracts so thick that Louis could
see layers of striated mucus. Yet they darted to and fro pur-posefully, a predator's
darting, lurking glare, as the great head moved closer to his mother's sleeping form.
In its own way, Louis realized, the thing could see.
Louis whirled around, opened his mouth to shout, took two steps toward the bed
and the suddenly empty chair, stopped with fists clenched, mouth still straining with
his silent scream, and turned back to the mirror.
The thing had no mouth as such, no lips, but under the long, thin nose the bones of
cheeks and jaw seemed to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long
ta-pered snout of muscle and cartilage which ended in a per-fectly round opening
that pulsed slightly as pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanded
and con-tracted with the creature's breath or pulse. Louis staggered and grasped the
back of an empty chair, closing his eyes, weak with waves of headache pain and
sudden nausea. He was sure that nothing could be more obscene than what he had
just seen.
Louis opened his eyes and realized that he was wrong.
The thing had slowly, almost lovingly, pulled down the thin blanket and topsheet
which covered Louis's mother. Now it lowered its misshapen head over his mother's
chest until the opening of that obscene proboscis was scant inches away from the
faded blue-flower print of her hos-pital gown. Something appeared in the
flesh-rimmed open-ing, something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Small, fleshy
antennae tested the air. The great, white head bent lower, cartilage and muscle
contracted, and a five-inch slug was slowly extruded, wiggling slightly as it hung
above Louis's mother.
Louis threw his head back in a scream that finally could be heard, tried to turn, tried
to remove his hands from their deathgrip on the back of the empty chair, tried to
look away from the mirror. And could not.
Under the slug's polyps of antennae was a face that was all mouth, the feeding orifice
of some deep-sea para-site. It pulsed as the moist slug fell softly onto his moth-er's
chest, coiled, writhed, and burrowed quickly away from the light. Into his mother.
The thing left no mark, no trail, not even a hole in the hospital gown. Louis could see
the slightest ripple of flesh as the slug disappeared under the pale flesh of his
mother's chest.