"Gene Wolfe - The Ziggurat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

them; silence had meant he could return and visit Jan's bed when he had driven the
sitter home. Now Jan feared that he would want to bargain -- his name on her paper
for a little more pleasure, a little more love before they parted for good. Much as she
wanted him to sign, she did not want him to sign as much as that. Girls here, boys
over there. Had he grown so hideous?
Women need a reason, he thought, men just need a place.
For Jan the reason wasn't good enough, so she had seen to it that there would be no
place. He told himself it would be great to hug the twins again -- and discovered that
it would.
He fluffed Jan's pillow anyway, and dressed it in a clean white pillowcase.
She would have found someone by now, somebody in the city to whom she was
being faithful, exactly as he himself had been faithful to Jan while he was still married
in the eyes of the law, to Pamela.
The thought of eyes recalled the watcher on the hill.
 14:12 Somebody is on the hill across the creek with some kind of signaling device.


That sounded as if he were going crazy, he decided. What if Jan saw it? He added,
maybe just a flashlight, although he did not believe it had been a flashlight.
A lion's face smiled up at him from the barrel of the red pen, and he stopped to
read the minute print under it, holding the pen up to catch the gray light from the
window. "The Red Lion Inn/San Jose." A nice hotel. If -- when -- he got up the nerve
to do it, he would write notes to Jan and Brook first with this pen.


The coyote ate the food I put out for him, I think soon after breakfast. More food
tonight. Tomorrow morning I will leave the back door cracked open awhile.
14:15 I am going up on the hill for a look around.


He had not known that until he wrote it.


The hillside seemed steeper than he remembered, slippery with snow. The pines
had changed; their limbs drooped like the boughs of hemlocks, springing up like
snares when he touched them, and throwing snow in his face. No bird sang.
He had brought his flashlight, impelled by the memory of the colorless signal from
the hill. Now he used it to peep beneath the drooping limbs. Most of the tracks that
the unseen watcher had left would be covered with new snow by this time; a few
might remain, in the shelter of the pines.
He had nearly reached the rocky summit before he found the first, and even it was
blurred by snow despite its protection. He knelt and blew the drifted flakes away,
clearing it with his breath as he had sometimes cleared the tracks of animals; an oddly
cleated shoe, almost like the divided hoof of an elk. He measured it against his spread
hand, from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. A small foot, no bigger
than size six, if that.
A boy.
There was another, inferior, print beside it. And not far away a blurred depression
that might have been left by a gloved hand or a hundred other things. Here the boy
had crouched with his little polished steel mirror, or whatever he had.