"Jeff VanderMeer - Three Days in a Border Town" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

You laugh. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm a ghost. But I'm a ghost who needs a room for the night.
Where can I find one?"

He stares at you, appraises you. It's been a long time since anyone looked at you so intensely. You fight
the urge to turn away.

Finally, he points down the street. "Walk that way two blocks. Turn left across from the bakery. Walk
two more blocks. The tavern on the right has a room."

"Thank you," you say, and you touch his arm. You can't say why you do it, or why you ask him, "What
do you know of the City?"

"The City?" he echoes. A wry, haunted smile. "The ghost of it passes by us sometimes, in the night." His
eyes become wider, but you don't think the thought frightens him. "Its ghost is so large it blocks the sky.
It makes a sound. A sound no one can describe. Like...like sudden rain. Like..." As he searches for
words, he is looking at the sky, as if imagining the City floating there, in front of him. "Like distant drum
beats. Like weeping."

You're still holding his arm. Your grip is very tight, but he doesn't notice.

"Thank you," you say, and release him.

As soon as you release him, it's as if the border town becomes real to you. The sounds of shoes on the
street or pavement. The trickling tease of whispered conversations become loud and broad. It is a kind
of illusion, of course: the border town comes alive at dusk, after the heat has left the air and before the
cold creeps in.

What did the Book say about border towns:
Every border town is the same; in observing unspoken fealty to the City, it dare not replicate the City too
closely. By necessity, every border town replicates its brothers and sisters. In speech. In habits. If every
border town is most alive at dusk, then we may surmise that the City is most alive at dawn.
You find the tavern, pay for a room from the surly owner, climb to the second floor, open the rickety
wooden door, hurl your pack into a corner, and collapse on the bed with a sense of real relief. A bed,
after so long in the desert, seems a ridiculous luxury, but also necessity.

You lie there with your arms outstretched and stare at the ceiling.

What more do you know now? That the dogs in this place are uneasy. That a messenger-courier believes
the ghost of the City haunts this border town. You have heard such rumors elsewhere, but never
delivered with such conviction, hinting at such frequency. What does it mean?

What do you want it to mean?



You don't sleep well that night. You never do in enclosed spaces now, even though the desert harshness
has expended your patience with open spaces, too. You keep seeing a ghost city superimposed over the
border town. You see yourself flying through like a ghost, approaching ever closer to the phantom City,
but becoming more and more corporeal, until by the time you reach its walls, you move right through
them.