"Steve Rasnic Tem - Tricks And Treats" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tem Steve Rasnic)

She wasn't prepared for what the kids finally came up with.

Each kid had wrapped his or her body in the stiff brown butcher's paper. Wide
rolls of tape were used to fasten the pieces together securely. When they were
all done they looked like a walking line of packages. Packages of meat.

And that was the way they went out on Halloween Street. And that was the way
they went out.

CLOWNS

The only ones that really scared her were the clowns. Clown masks always smiled,
but that made it even harder to guess at the faces underneath.

Sometimes you could tell from the eyes inside the holes: they'd be red or clark
above the impossible ugly smile. But sometimes you couldn't see the eyes.

Sometimes all you could see were the spaces where the eyes were missing.
Sometimes all you could see was the space where the mouth was missing.

She thought it must be terrible pretending to smile all the time. She thought it
must be terrible to be a smile.

But the clowns filled the streets during Halloween every year, more and more of
them every year, and the most hideous of all the clowns seemed to be on
Halloween Street this year. She saw clowns with large scars across their faces
and big ball noses chewed by something worse than a rat. She saw clowns with
vampire teeth sticking out from their messy red lips and clowns with mouths and
ears sewn shut by bright blue shoelaces. There were mad clowns and suicidal
clowns, crazed and sick and dead clowns. And half of them didn't carry treat
sacks. And half of those were much too large to be children in disguise.

Laugh, child! said a voice behind her. She turned and there was the fattest
clown she had ever seen, with rolls of brightly painted fat spilling out of his
baggy white pants.

Be happy! said another voice, and suddenly there was the thinnest clown she had
ever seen, his shirt torn away to show the white flesh like tissue covering the
narrow rib cage.

Smile... said a crawling clown with a head like a snake. Sing a merry tune..,
said a leaping clown with red axes for hands.

And she felt so scared she did begin to laugh, laughing so hard until she peed
her pants and then laughing some more. Laughing so hard that when a clown no
more than six inches tall and with an orange rat's tail hanging out of the back
of his pants handed her a tube of black grease paint she took it, and drew her
own smile around her shrieking lips.