"Gene Wolfe - The man in the Pepper Mill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

"If you don't know what you want, you can tell me in the morning. Let's wait till then. I think that would be
better."

It was on the tip of Tippy's tongue to say that nothing didn't cost anything, but he knew he could not get the
words to come out without crying, and he was already old enough to be shamed by his tears.

"You can go out and play now, if you want to."

He went up to his room instead, passing the closed door of the room that had been Catherine's when she
was Cathy. "I didn't hate you," he whispered to her blank and silent door. "We just fought about stuff
sometimes. I never did hate you." He knew it was the truth, and that truth carried no force or authority
whatsoever.

He went into his own room, shut the door, and opened his window. The house was air-conditioned so he was
not supposed to; but he did it anyway, needing to see the world beyond the house, and the rose and purple
glory of sunset, without the intervention of glass.

There were other houses all around; he counted them to find out how many he could see from his window.
Thirteen. Many had two stories, like his. After school he had gone to several and touched them, and they had
been perfectly solid, brick and wood and concrete and stone.

He wanted to go down to the kitchen and look yet again at Catherine's dollhouse, still standing untouched on
the kitchen table; but his mother was probably putting dishes into the dishwasher, so it was impossible.

Awakened by a flash of light, he sat up in bed, certain it had happened again. Slipping from beneath the
blankets, he went to the window. A house across the street had lights on, and he could see others, dark but
quite definitely there. He raised the sash, admitting warm night air that was nicer than the cold refrigerator air
of the house. Nothing moved outside but the wind, and even the wind was kind.

Smiling to himself, he went back to bed and slept; and when he woke up again it was not like that at all.

He knew. The world had vanished, and another had been substituted for it. Outside, something enormous
moved with inaudible steps. Briefly he saw its eye fill the window and whispered, "Cathy! Cathy!" Then it was
gone. Light flashed, then the light was gone too.

He got out of bed, shivering. The house was dark, and the light switches were only paint on the walls.

In his mother's bedroom his mother lay upon her back with both arms above the blanket, their smooth white
flesh as hard as plastic. Light flashed at her window; he looked out, but could see nothing. A man with
painted-on hair who was not quite his father lay beside his mother; touched, he shimmered and winked out.

The stairs were still there, and the banister and the front hall rug; but the TV would not come on, and the
clicker was gone. It was funny, he thought, how some things changed when other things did not. The kitchen
was about the same, with a lot of his toys (borrowed by Cathy without permission) still scattered on the table.
Cathy's dollhouse was gone, except for being all around. It could not be inside itself, after all.

He went out the back door.

The whole back yard was gone, as he had expected, the toys huge now, the Red Power Ranger (still on its