"Gene Wolfe - The island of Dr. Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

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THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH
AND OTHER STORIES
Gene Wolfe

Winter comes to water as well as land, though there are
no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue
yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque,
and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you
walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come
in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wet-
ting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the
sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried
write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.
Then you go home, knowing that 'behind you the Atlan-
tic is destroying your work.
Home is 'the big house on Settlers Island, but Settlers
Island, so called, is not really an island and for that rea-
son is not named or accurately delineated on maps.
Smash a barnacle with a stone and you will see inside the
shape from which the beautiful barnacle goose takes its
name. There is a thin and flaccid organ which is the
goose's neck and the mollusc's siphon, and a shapeless
body with tiny wings. Settlers Island is like that.
The goose neck is a strip of land down which a county
road runs. By whim, the mapmakers usually exaggerate
the width of this and give no information to indicate that
it is scarcely above the high tide. Thus Settlers Island
appears to be a mere protuberance on the coast, not re"
quiring a nameand since the village of eight or ten
houses has none, nothing shows on the map but the spider
line of road terminating at the sea.
The village has no name, but home has two: a near and
a far designation. On the island, and on the mainland
nearby, it is called the Seaview place because in die ear-
liest years of the century it was operated 'as a resort hotel.
Mama calls it The House of 31 February; and that is
on her stationery and is presumably used by her friends
in New York and Philadelphia when they do not simply
say, "Mrs. Baboock's." Home is four floors high in some
places, less in others, and is completely surrounded by a
veranda; it was once painted yellow, but the paint
outsideis mostly gone now and The House of 31 Feb-
ruary is grey.
Jason comes out the front door with the little curly
hairs on his chin trembling in the wind .and his thumbs