"Manly Wade Wellman - Can These Bones Live" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

made itself a club thataway, and hiked it over the low skull and moved to close in on
me again.
No point in it for me to try to run away from such a thing, and well I knew it. Turn
and run from a haunt or a devil, it runs after you. If it catches you, then what? I
quick grabbed up the shovel where it leant on the walnut trunk. Compared to that
club the bony thing had, it was like a ball bat against a wagon tongue.
"What you want of me?" I said, but I felt I didn't have to be told that.
Bones like those, long worn bare and scattered apart and now joined and made to
live by words of power, they'd wake up hungry. They'd be starved for food. If they
got food, maybe they'd put flesh back on themselves, be themselves as they'd been
once before. What food was closer to hand than I was?
Man-eatersтАФsuch things were told of by old Indians, wise men who'd sworn to
them. The wendigo, up in Northern parts. The anisgina, recollected in Cherokee tales
to make you shiver. Supposed to be all died out and gone these days, but when
bones rise up тАж
The bones came a-slaunching close. I heard them click.
I hiked up the shovel with both my hands, and held the blade edge forward like an
axe. I'd chop with that. The bones stood a second, the whole skeleton of them, tall
over me. In the glow of the moon those bones looked like frosty silver. My head
wouldn't have come put to those big cliffs of shoulders. The jaws opened and shut.
They made a snapping sound.
Because they wanted to bite a chunk out of me. Those teeth in the jaws, they were as
long and sharp as knives. They could break a man's arm off if they jammed into it.
But I didn't run. To run nair had helped me much in such a case. I'd stand my
ground, fight. If I lost the fight, maybe Hallcott could get away and tell the tale. I
bent my knees and made my legs springly. I hoped I could move faster and surer
than those big, lumbering bones.
Preacher Melick had said the Bible words to make them live, had said them without
a-thinking. And that song, I'd have been better off if I'd nair sung it. I watched the
thick, bony arms rise up and fetch the club down to bust my head.
That quick, I sidestepped and danced clear, and down came the big hunk of tree, so
hard on the ground it boomed there like a slamming door. I made a swing with my
own shovel, but the club was up again and in the way. My blade bounced off. Again
the club hiked up over me; it made a dark blotch against the moon. I set myself to
dodge again.
Then it was that Embro Hallcott, come back up just behind me, started in to sing in
his husky voice:


The toe bone's connected from the foot bone,
The foot bone's connected from the heel bone тАж
And quick on from there, about the shin and thigh and hip bones, about the back
bone and the shoulder bone. I stood with my shovel held up in both hands, and
watched the thing come apart before my eyes.
It had dropped that club that would have driven me into the ground like a nail. It
swayed in broken-up moonlight that shone through tree branches. It fell to pieces
while I watched.
I looked at the bones, down and scattered out now. The skull stared up at me, and
one more time it gave a hungry snap of those jaws. I heard:
The neck bone's connected from the jaw bone,