"Clive_Barker_Tortured_Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

"Yes."
"To find me?"
"To be with you. He said you were the only thing that would make me happy."

V
The Hospice of the Sacred Heart was an enormous edifice, its upper floors in darkness. But the Generals didn't have to wait long for a guide. After a few minutes a female dwarf--who introduced herself as Camille--came with candles. She escorted the uniformed trio through the echoing cloisters (which were heaped with huge mounds of dirt) and down two flights of steep stairs into Doctor Talisac's laboratory.
His workspace had been dug out of the earth so as to accommodate the scale of the Doctor's experimentation and still preserve the secrecy of his location. In place of tile there was hard trodden earth beneath the Generals' boots, and the walls were beaten dirt. The place stank of cold earth: which served to complete the scene. For if the stench was that of the grave, so were many of the sights before them. The dead were Talisac's raw materials, and they lay everywhere around, in various states of amputation. He was an uneconomic consumer. In many cases the corpses were lacking only a limb, or a portion of a limb; an eye, in one case, lips in another.
"So where is he?" Urbano demanded to know.
Camille pointed the way over a carpet of corpses to a dank corner of the immense chamber, where Talisac awaited them.
He looked, to the Generals' astonished eyes, like one of his own victims; a terrible, implausible experiment in the extremes to which a human carcass might be put.
He hung by his mouth from a device whose purpose was beyond the Generals' comprehension, his mouth hooked up, as though he were a fish. In his perversity, or his genius, or both, he had created some kind of external womb for himself. A semi-translucent bag hung from the lower portion of his abdomen, down between his spidery legs. There was life inside.
"A Mongroid," Camille whispered.
Montefalco took his eyes off the foul sight of the womb and its twitching contents, and addressed its owner.
"Talisac?" he said. "We need something from you."
Talisac turned his fluttering eyes in Montefalco's direction. When he spoke the maimed form of his mouth meant that what he said was virtually incomprehensible. It took Camille to translate it.
"He says: What? What do you need?"
"We need a fiend to put fear into the heart of the Devil himself." Montefalco said. "A beast amongst beasts. Something to scour the city of its monsters by being still more monstrous."
Talisac made a strange sound--which might have been laughter; shaking as he hung from his hooks. The creature in his womb responded to its parent's movement by spasming.
"How the hell did he come by that thing?" Bogoto murmured to Urbano behind his hand.
"Don't whisper," Camille snapped. "He hates it."
"He was wondering how Talisac got himself pregnant?" Urbano said.
This time Talisac pressed his lips into service, in order that he answer for himself. The reply was a single word:
"Science." he said.
"Really?" Urbano said, sufficiently reassured to step over some of the mutilated bodies to examine Talisac more closely. "Well I'm pleased to hear that. I would have been distressed if there's been some sexual impropriety here."
Again, Talisac laughed, though none of the Generals were in the mood to see the humour of the situation. His laughter spent, he spoke again. This time Camille's services as a translator were required.
"He has a golem he thinks would suit your purposes very well," the dwarf said. "He only asks one thing in return..."
"And what's that?" Montefalco said.
"That you shouldn't attempt to hurt any of his children."
"Meaning that?" Montefalco said, nodding towards the twitching womb.
"Es." said Talisac. "Is my ur chile."
"What did he say?" Urbano said to Camille.
"He said it was his child," Camille replied.
Montefalco shrugged.
"No harm will come of this Mongroid, if we are given a fiend of our own." Montefalco said. "I will personally guarantee that."
"Good." said Camille. Then, without Talisac speaking again, she added: "He would prefer if you did not come here again together. Only General Montefalco."
"You'll get no argument from me on that account." Bogoto said, waving the horror away as he retreated. "If he gives us our monster, then he can give birth to a thousand little brats as far as I'm concerned. Just keep them the hell away from me."

VI
Lucidique lay on the blood and sweat stained bed beside her lover, and watched the moon through the window.
"This can't last for long, you know. This thing between us."
"Why not?"
"For two such as us to find some happiness together?" she said. "It's against nature. You killed my father. I should hate you."
"And you put me through hell at Agonistes' hands. I should hate you."
"What a pair we make."
"Maybe we should go back out into the desert." Kreiger said, "We'd be safer there."
Lucidique laughed. "Listen to you. Safer! Isn't the world supposed to be afraid of us? Not the other way round."
"I just want to hold on to this...hope that I feel."
Lucidique reached across the bed and ran her blade along Kreiger's arm. "We can't leave Primordium," she said.
"Why not? It's going up in flames, sooner or later. Let it burn."
"But love, we started the fire, you and me. We should stay and watch it to the end."