"Simmons,.Wm.Mark.-.3.-.Habeas.Corpses.v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons William Mark)

Add to either scenario the subsequent contaminants and blood-borne pathogens from my encounters with Kadeth Bey's tanis leaf extract and the demon-laced blood of Elizabeth BсthoryЧwell, the "either/or" factor became rather hazy. And while the distinctions seemed important to some, I had to wonder: in the end did it really matter? My wife and daughter were still dead and the Las Vegas Demesne was booking odds on me attaining the same status within the month.
But this wasn't the night to think about depressing things like vampire vendettas and daymares concerning misplaced hearts, it was an evening made for romance! A sliver of moon hung over the graveyard like a leprous grow-light in Death's terrarium. The wind had freshened, bringing the odor of distant rain and nearby rot. I could see a storm was finally brewing and that meant tonight had to be "The Night."
If Lupщ and J.D. ever got back from Blockbusters, that is.
I reached into my pocket, fished past my grandmother's ring, and retrieved a small vial of Mentholatum. I rimmed my nostrils with ointment before continuing to the far end of my property.
One minute I was alone, the next I was outnumbered three to one.
You might think that the ability to see into the infrared spectrum would give me all sorts of advantages. But infravision is worth diddly-squat when the creatures coming at you have no body heat. The dead were a dozen yards away before I finally saw them.
Three corpses shambled toward me; their clumsy, unbalanced rhythms reminiscent of a trio of winos in fully soused search-mode for the nearest liquor store. The one in the middle looked freshly dead while his wingmen had been in the ground a great deal longer. They stumbled to a stop against the waist-high stone wall that separated the cemetery from my backyard.
Unfortunately this wasn't a dream: the stench of dust, dirt, mold, and chemically retarded decomposition continued its forward momentum, slamming past the menthol barrier and up into my nostrils like a slow-motion train wreck. I sneezed and set a brown paper bag on the ground.
"Yo, Csщjthe," the big one on the left said. It sounded more like he was sneezing, in turn. The proper pronunciation of my last name, "Chay-tay," requires a tad more articulation than most decomposing tongues and palettes can muster.
I stood about a foot back from the stonework on my side and tried to breathe shallowly. "Boo," I greeted, "Cam."
Boo grinned; Cam nodded. Boo was scary when he grinned. Cam was scarier because he couldn't. In "The Mending Wall" Robert Frost wrote that "good fences make good neighbors." I wonder if Bob knew how well that analogy extended to graveyards.
In point of fact, however, it wasn't the cemetery wall that kept the dead off my property. My real privacy fence was the line of consecrated salt along the base of the crumbling concrete partitions that bordered my property on three sides. Don't get me wrong. I get along pretty well with a lot of the deceased-but-not-quite-departed. But some of them just aren't real clear on the issue of boundaries. Hey, if they're out of the groundЧmajor clue!
Until Mama Samm came and put a hoodoo barrier around my property I had endured a nightly parade of rotting corpses to my back door. Some wanted help in matters of unfinished business, others were just lonely. Still, there had to be some limits. Now I just replaced the salt every month or so. More often when it rained.
"This here's The Professor," Boo said, indicating the cadaver between them. Cam sort of nodded. A suicide, Cameron had propped a double-barreled shotgun under his jaw and tripped both triggers as his last living act. While the mortician's art has come a long way the funeral was still a closed casket affair. Cam isn't geared for post mortem small talk.
The Professor didn't look anything like Russell Johnson so I politely refrained from asking after Gilligan or Mary Ann. He did, however, look as if he was in a state of shock. It's really hard to tell with the freshly dead; they all have that look of mild surprise or severe disappointment.
"You're not real," he said.
I've been told that I have "issues" but that wasn't what he meant.
"Well, of course he ain't the real Baron Samedi," Boo said. "Don't matter, though. He's still ourЧwhatchamacallemЧbuddy-man."
I sighed. "Ombudsman. Except I ain't. Aren't. I'm not," I corrected. It didn't matter that I wasn't the Vodoun Loa of the Dead: half of the corpses in the cemetery still believed it, the other half didn't care. There's something in my tainted blood that draws them to me like moths to the flame.
"Aww, he's just modest," Boo continued. Cam just nodded.
"He's not real," The Professor insisted. "You're not real!"
"Huh?" said Boo.
"I am asleep. This is a dream!"
"A dream?" I looked around. "Looks more like a nightmare to me."
"Hey!" said Boo.
A moldy green hand rose up and gripped the top of the crumbling wall. "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake," intoned a new voice. In life it might have been deep and resonant, in death it sounded wheezy and clotted, as if the speaker were missing a lung and had something stuck in his throat. Something like roots and leaves and cemetery earth. " . . . some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. The prophet Daniel, chapter twelve, verse the second," the new corpse finished, dragging itself more or less erect to lean against the stone barrier.
"Well, hell, Preacher," Boo exclaimed in a wounded voice, "which ones are we?"
I think the new arrival was attempting an expression of contemptЧsomething hard to pull off when you don't have the complete palette of skin and muscles to work with.
"He's got a point, Jerome," I said to the cadaver whose Pentecostal proclivities had earned him the nickname "Preacher." "Ole Boo, here, has never given evidence of having any shame whatsoever."
Cam wheezed as though he was laughing. The Professor squeezed his eyes shut and looked as if he was wishing himself back into his bed.
"Atheists," Jerome scolded.
"Now hold on there, Preacher," Boo puffed, "that ain't entirely true. By strict definition I'm an agnostic and Cameron, here, was Unitarian. I'm bettin' that The Professor is one of them secular humanists. Right, Doc?"
"Organized religion is nothing but codified mythology mixed with superstition," The Professor said, still careful to keep his eyes squinched shut.
"A rational mind," I observed, "dedicated to logic and the scientific precepts."
"Yes," he said, easing one eye open.
"Boy, are you in deep doo-doo!"
"How about you, boss?" Boo asked.
I considered the rows of aged and crumbling headstones. "I don't know anymore."
"If you so-called agnostics would read the BibleЧ"
"'O that thou wouldst hide me in the grave,'" I interrupted, "'that thou wouldst keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldst appoint me a set time, and remember me.' The Book of Job, chapter fourteen, verse the thirteenth."
They all stared at me as if I had grown an extra head.
Reaching down, I pulled an old book out of the sack. "eBay's gotten pricier of late, Jerome, but I got you the K№bler-Ross." I handed it to born-again dead man.
"Josephus?" he queried, taking the old tome with trembling hands. "I know there's a copy in the West Monroe library."
"I'm not kyping library books for you, Jerome."
"I'll give it back when I'm done."
I shook my head. "You don't take care of them. It's not your fault, considering your present address, but I think it's best if we get you your own copies."
"What you need books for, Preacher?" Boo shifted his grasp on The Professor's arm as he tried to pull away. "Can't you just pray to God for your answersЧyou bein' so righteous and all?"
"Now, boys," I soothed, "we're all just doing the best we can to figure out how it all works."
"And some of us," Boo added, "are trying to figure out why we're not already in heaven instead of slumming with the sinners on the slag heap of the dead."
Jerome turned on his heel and stalked off in a huff. Well, actually, it was more of a shamble-off-in-a-huff kind of thing.