"Theodore Sturgeon - Shottle Bop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

superstition!
And then the liquid I'd just put away, lying warm and comfortable in my stomach, began to f
Then I think it be-gan to swell. I tried to get up and couldn't. The room seemed to come apart
throw itself at me piecemeal, and I passed out.

Don't you ever wake up the way I did. For your own sake be careful about things like that. D
swim up out of a sodden sleep and look around you and see all those things fluttering and drif
and flying and creeping and crawling around youтАФpuffy things dripping blood, and filmy, leg
creatures, and little bits and snatches of pasty human anat-omy. It was awful. There was a hum
hand afloat in the air an inch away from my nose; and at my startled gasp it drifted away from
fingers fluttering in the disturbed air from my breath. Something veined and bulbous popped
from under my chair and rolled across the floor. I heard a faint clicking, and looked up int
gnashing set of jaws without any face attached. I think I broke down and cried a little. I kno
passed out again.
The next time I awokeтАФmust have been hours later, because it was broad daylight and my cl
and watch had both stoppedтАФthings were a little better. Oh, yes, there were a few of the horr
around. But somehow they didn't bother me much now. I was practically convinced that I w
nuts; now that I had the conviction, why worry about it? I dunno; it must have been one of
ingredients in the bottle that had calmed me down so. I was curious and excited, and that's ab
all. I looked around me and I was almost pleased.
The walls were green! The drab wallpaper had turned to something breathtakingly beautiful. T
were covered with what seemed to be moss; but never moss like that grew for, human eyes to
before. It was long and thick, and it had a slight perpetual movementтАФnot that of a breeze, bu
growth. Fascinated, I moved over and looked closely. Growing indeed, with all the quick magic
spore and cyst and root and growth again to spore; and the swift magic of it was only a part of
magical whole, for never was there such a green. I put out my hand to touch and stroke it, b
only felt the wallpaper. But when I closed my fingers, on it, I could feel that light touch of it in
palm of my hand, the weight of twenty sunbeams, the soft resilience of jet-darkness in a clo
place. The sensation was a delicate ecstasy, and never have I been happier than I was at
moment.
Around the baseboards were little snowy toadstools, and the floor was grassy. Up the hin
side of the closet door climbed a mass of flowering vines, and their petals were hued in to
indescribable. I felt as if I had been blind until now, and deaf, too; for now I could hear
whispering of scarlet, gauzy insects among the leaves and the constant murmur of growth.
around me was a new and lovely world, so deli-cate that the wind of my movements tore pe
from the flowers, so real and natural that it defied its own impossibil-ity. Awestruck, I turned
turned, running from wall to wall, looking under my old furniture, into my old books;
everywhere I looked I found newer and more beautiful things to wonder at. It was while I was
on my stomach looking up at the bed springs, where a colony of jewellike lizards had nested, th
first heard the sobbing.

It was young and plaintive, and had no right to be in my room where everything was so happ
stood up and looked around, and there in the corner crouched the translucent fig-ure of a little g
She was leaning back against the wall. Her thin legs were crossed in front of her, and she held
leg of a tattered toy elephant dejectedly in one hand and cried into the other. Her hair was long
dark, and it poured and tumbled over her face and shoulders.
I said, "What's the matter, kiddo?" I hate to hear a child cry like that.
She cut herself off in the middle of a sob and shook the hair out of her eyes, looking up and p
me, all fright and olive skin and big, filled violet eyes. "Oh!" she squeaked.
I repeated, "What's the matter? Why are you crying?"