"Bradbury, Ray - Death Is A Lonely Business" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

And knowing it was the wrong choice, I hurried along the dark rim of the old canal toward the
drowned circus wagons.
How the lion cages got in the canal no one knew. For that matter, no one seemed to remember how
the canals had gotten there in the middle of an old town somehow fallen to seed, the seeds rustling against
the doors every night along with the sand and bits of seaweed and unravelings of tobacco from cigarettes
tossed along the strand-shore as far back as 1910.
But there they were, the canals and, at the end of one, a dark green and oil scummed waterway, the
ancient circus wagons and cages, flaking their white enamel and gold paint and rusting their thick bars.
A long time before, in the early Twenties, these cages had probably rolled by like bright summer
storms with animals prowling them, lions opening their mouths to exhale hot meat breaths. Teams of
white horses had dragged their pomp through Venice and across the fields long before MGM put up its
false fronts and made a new kind of circus that would live forever on bits of film.
Now all that remained of the old parade had ended here. Some of the cage wagons stood upright in
the deep waters of the canal, others were tilted flat over on their sides and buried in the tides that revealed
them some dawns or covered them some midnights. Fish swarmed in and out of the bars. By day small
boys came and danced about on the huge lost islands of steel and wood and sometimes popped inside and
shook the bars and roared.
But now, long after midnight with the last trolley gone to destinations north along the empty sands,
the canals lapped their black waters and sucked at the cages like old women sucking their empty gums.
I came running, head down against the rain which suddenly cleared and stopped. The moon broke
through a rift of darkness like a great eye watching me. I walked on mirrors which showed me the same
moon and clouds. I walked on the sky beneath, and something happened. . . .
From somewhere a block or so away, a tidal surge of salt water came rolling black and smooth
between the canal banks. Somewhere a sandbar had broken and let the sea in. And here the dark waters
came. The tide reached a small overpass bridge at the same moment I reached the center.
The water hissed about the old lion cages.
I quickened. I seized the rail of the bridge.
For in one cage, directly below me, a dim phosphorescence bumped the inside of the bars.
A hand gestured from within the cage.
Some old lion-tamer, gone to sleep, had just wakened to find himself in a strange place.
An arm outstretched within the cage, behind the bars, languidly. The lion-tamer was coming full
awake.
The water fell and rose again.
And a ghost pressed to the bars.
Bent over the rail, I could not believe.
But now the spirit-light took shape. Not only a hand, an arm, but an entire body sagged and loosely
gesticulated, like an immense marionette, trapped in iron.
A pale face, with empty eyes which took light from the moon, and showed nothing else, was there
like a silver mask.
Then the tide shrugged and sank. The body vanished.
Somewhere inside my head, the vast trolley rounded a curve of rusted track, choked brakes, threw
sparks, screamed to a halt as somewhere an unseen man jolted out those words with every run, jump,
rush.
"Death is a lonely business."
No.
The tide rose again in a gesture like a seance remembered from some other night.
And the ghost shape rose again within the cage.
It was a dead man wanting out.
Somebody gave a terrible yell.
I knew it was me, when a dozen lights flashed on in the little houses along the rim of the dark canal.