"Jeff VanderMeer - A Heart For Lucretia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

grinding and metal frames for ships in enormous caverns and stockpiles
of
small arms and old-style lasers and meerkats walking on ceilings and
ghosts, images which reflected from the floor, that could not be real
and
more meerkats--meerkats in every size and color, crawling all over the
engines of war, the tubes, the metal frames.
Fires burned everywhere--in rods and in canisters, on walls and floors;
yellow fires, orange fires, blue fires, tended by meerkats more
sinister
than their fellows. Meerkats with frozen smiles and cruel claws and
mouths
which like traps, shut. The acrid smell of fire came to Gerard through
the
elevator walls, a bitter taste on his tongue. Around some fires
meerkats
threw squirming creatures the size of mice into the flames and, once or
twice, larger, metallic objects, their alloys running together and
melting
like butter to grease a pan.
Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it
from
his mind. Lucretia needed a heart. Lucretia needed a heart.
The weight of earth and rock above him and to all sides made him dizzy
and
nauseous, but still deeper they went, silent and fearful, into the
blackness beneath their feet.

At the fifteenth floor, they were greeted by a man who resembled the
people in the pits: the same lifeless eyes and fixed jaw. But this man
was
alive and he indicated that Gerard was to follow him down the corridor.
The corridor led into a maze of tunnels, all lit by a series of soft,
reddish panels set into the ceiling. The smell was dank--a sharp, musty
scent as of close quarters and many residents over many generations.
The
original reliefs carved into the walls had been defaced or done over,
so
that meerkat heads jutted from human bodies and gish became a weird
series
of sharp, harsh lines. Unease crept up on Gerard as they walked and,
when
he looked down, he saw that Flesh Dog's hackles were up and its fangs
bared: a startling white against the black-blue of his muzzle.
By the time they reached their destination, Gerard was thoroughly lost
and
could no more have retraced his steps than conjured a heart out of thin
air. He clung to his rucksack, and to the thought that Lucretia still
needed him.
They were led into a large room which had partitions to hide other