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

to strike the sun. Instead I dressed quickly. My clothes from last night were still damp. I put on tennis
shorts and a jacket, then turned the pockets of my damp coat out to find the clot of papier-mвchй that had
fallen from the dead man's suit only a few hours ago.
I touched the pieces with my fingernail, exhaling. I knew what they were. But I wasn't ready to face
up to it yet.
I am not a runner. But I ran . . .
Away from the canal, the cage, the voice talking darkness on the train, away from my room and the
fresh pages waiting to be read which had started to say it all, but I did not want to read them yet. I just ran
blindly south on the beach.
Into Lost World country.
I slowed at last to stare at the forenoon feedings of strange mechanical beasts.
Oil wells. Oil pumps.
These great pterodactyls, I said to friends, had arrived by air, early in the century, gliding in late
nights to build their nests. Startled, the shore people woke to hear the pumping sounds of vast hungers.
People sat up in bed wakened by the creak, rustle, stir of skeletal shapes, the heave of earthbound,
featherless wings rising, falling like primeval breaths at three a.m. Their smell, like time, blew along the
shore, from an age before caves or the men who hid in caves, the smell of jungles falling to be buried in
earth and ripening to oil.
I ran through this forest of brontosauri, imagining triceratops, and the picket-fence stegosaurus,
treading black syrups, sinking in tar. Their laments echoed from the shore, where the surf tossed back
their ancient thunders.
I ran past the little white cottages that came later to nest among the monsters, and the canals that had
been dug and filled to mirror the bright skies of 1910 when the white gondolas sailed on clean tides and
bridges strung with firefly lightbulbs promised future promenades that arrived like overnight ballet
troupes and ran away never to return after the war. And the dark beasts just went on sucking the sand
while the gondolas sank, taking the last of some party's laughter with them.
Some people stayed on, of course, hidden in shacks or locked in some few Mediterranean villas
thrown in for architectural irony.
Running, I came to a full halt. I would have to turn back in a moment and go find that papier-mвchй
mulch and then go seek the name of its lost and dead owner.
But for now, one of the Mediterranean palaces, as blazing white as a full moon come to stay upon the
sands, stood before me.
"Constance Rattigan," I whispered. "Can you come out and play?"
It was, in fact, a fiery white Arabian Moorish fortress facing the sea and daring the tides to come in
and pull it down. It had minarets and turrets and blue and white tiles tilted precariously on the sandshelves
no more than one hundred feet from where the curious waves bowed to do obeisance, where the
gulls circled down for a chance look, and where I stood now taking root.
"Constance Rattigan."
But no one came out.
Alone and special in this thunder-lizard territory, this palace guarded that special cinema queen.
A light burned in one tower window all night and all day. I had never seen it not on. Was she there
now?
Yes!
For the quickest shadow had crossed the window, as if someone had come to stare down at me and
gone away, like a moth,
I stood remembering.
Hers had been a swift year in the Twenties, with a quick drop down the mine shaft into the film
vaults. Her director, old newsprint said, had found her in bed with the studio hairdresser, and cut
Constance Rattigan's leg muscles with a knife so she would no longer be able to walk the way he loved.
Then he had fled to swim straight west toward China. Constance Rattigan was never seen again. If she