"William Mark Simmons - Undead 3 - Habeas Corpses" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons William Mark)

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 Lup├й 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, Cs├йjthe," 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 groundтАФmajor 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
ourтАФwhatchamacallemтАФbuddy-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.