"Aldridge, Ray - Filter FeedersV1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldridge Ray)

Linda struggled to look at Teresa directly. "No, no. Don't be afraid. You'll stay only if you choose it. Thomas is gentle, less dangerous than the oyster he considers himself to be."

"Why would you think I'd stay? Do you think I want to die?" The idea was grotesque, she had forgotten about the bottle of Nembutal.

Linda sighed, "Maybe I'm wrong about you. Maybe you're not like me. Maybe you've been able, a time or two, to live within the moment. Maybe you haven't spent all your life grieving for the past, fearing the future. If you think you can really live the rest of your life, then that's fine."

A slow weary tide of sadness began to rise in Teresa's heart.

"But let Thomas show you what he does," Linda said. "If you want to leave after that, I wish you well. Though I fear for poor Thomas."

"Poor Thomas?"

"Yes." Linda's voice was very faint now. "He lives only through us. All his life is borrowed." Her body trembled beneath the quilt. "Leave me, now. I've been pretty lucid for a woman in my condition, but it won't last. If you decide to stay, send him to me. I want to finish."

When she reached the deck, Thomas had gone forward, to sit crosslegged with his back against the mainmast. The moonlight was brighter now, and he seemed no more intimidating than any other very handsome man. Perhaps Linda was just a lunatic, in the last stages of some mania-inducing disease?

But Thomas shared her delusion, or so it seemed.

Teresa went up the sidedeck and leaned against the lifelines. How strange, she thought. Here she was with a man who believed himself to be some sort of soul-eating life-draining monster. And for some reason Teresa wasn't swimming for the shore. It wasn't like any horror movie she'd ever seen. "Linda said we should be sorry for you. Poor Thomas, she said."

An ordinary human might have shrugged, but of course Thomas did not. "I do not understand her concern. I am as I am."

"Right. Well, listen, this has been interesting, but I'd better go. Got to look for a new job tomorrow; I'll be a busy girl. Could you take me ashore? You could drop me at the sandspit. Nobody lives there, yet."

"You are humoring me," said Thomas. "It is charming, but unnecessary. You may take the dinghy. Or, if you wish, I will show you what I am."

She retreated a step, but he made no threatening movement. "I don't think so," she said. "I mean, it's a terrific offer and all . . . I could relive my crappy life and then die, it sounds like great fun, really, but. . . . "

He looked away, out across the harbor toward the darkened sandspit that divided the harbor from the pass into the Gulf. "Then return to your room and your bottle of stale Nembutal." His faint smile never wavered.

Suddenly, she believed, and she wasn't even very curious about the source of his knowledge. "Is it . . . is it like some sort of super drug? One taste and I'm hooked for life?"

"For death, do you mean ? In a way. Life is the most completely addictive drug. Those who are addicts can never get enough. They feel, all the time, as you will feel if you remember your life through me."

"And I can't change? I can't learn to feel as they do?"

"I don't know," he said. "Sometimes people do change. My impression is that you will not."

His words, spoken in that soft formal voice, seemed inevitable, and they finished the erosion of her will. Were Thomas suddenly to sprout long fangs and lunge at her throat, she thought, she wouldn't even attempt to stop him.

"Why did you help me? With the Sailorman," she asked, but without any real curiosity.

"You did not deserve to own so ugly a memory."

A time passed, and the breeze died.

"Show me," she said.

Thomas glanced up. "See," he said, pointing. "The moon is about to go behind a cloud."