"Lawrence Watt - Evans - The Nightmare People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

SECOND EDITION
Dedicated to
Richard Tucholka
because heтАЩs partly responsible.
Chapter One:
Wednesday, August 2nd
1.
The air was hot and thick, heavy with moisture, and he lay unwillingly awake beneath its weight, his
bedsheet soaked in sweat. The ceiling was gray and blank above him when he opened his eyes. When he
closed them and tried to sleep, or pretended to try, he saw only a darker gray.

He thought he could almost hear the air moving about him, a slow, sluggish, viscous movement, like the
shifting of wet sand, and he wished that his clock-radio were an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, so
that at least he would have the ticking to mark off time for him. As it was he lay in an infinite timelessness,
feeling the perspiration ooze from his back into the mattress.

He forced a sigh out into the air above him and turned his head. The glowing red digits on the clock read
3:09 a.m.

There was no point in pretending he could sleep, he decided. It was too hot, too humid, the air too still
and the silence too deep.

He could sleep later, by daylight, after he had dragged someone from Maintenance up to fix the air
conditioner. He was almost two weeks ahead at work, and half the department was off at the beach
anyway. No one would care if he took Wednesday off and slept all day.

If his bedroom stayed this hot, however, he was not sure whether he would ever sleep again.

He wondered whether the outside air had cooled off enough to be better than the air in his apartment. He
had carefully hoarded what little coolness remained since his air conditioner had failed, but now, he
admitted reluctantly, it was gone. It was time to open the windows and gain whatever benefit the warm,
foul outside air might hold.

Wearily, he swung his legs off the bed and leaned forward, his arms resting on his thighs. Breathing
required a conscious effort.

After a momentтАЩs rest he stood up and took the one step necessary to reach the window. He stretched
out one hand, groping in the gray gloom, and found the drawcord of the drapes. He tugged, and the
drapes slid away from the window, revealing the streetlighted world beyond.

Something was blocking his view.

With a shock, he saw that eyes were staring in at him, glowing red eyes beneath a blue-black slouch hat,
eyes that were too large to be human, set in a dark, bony face, a face too long and narrow to be human.

He stared back, too surprised to react.

The misshapen red-eyed face parodied his surprise; the eyes widened like his own.

There were no whites, and the pupils were vertical black slits in scarlet that blazed like neon.