"Bradbury, Ray - Dorian In Excelsis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

Before us stood a golden door.

"And behind the door?" I asked.

"What always lies behind any golden door?" my host responded. "Touch."

I reached out to print the door with my thumb.

"What do you feel?" my host inquired.

"Youngness, youth, beauty." I touched again. "All the springtimes that ever were
or ever will be."

"Jeez, the man's a poet. Push."

We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.

"Is this where Dorian is?"

"No, no, only his students, his disciples, his almost Friends. Feast your eyes."

I did as I was told and saw at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a
lineage of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled
mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find
yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The
young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to
pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of
appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid
and more beautiful . . .

I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian
Fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his
demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.

I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.

"Yes, aren't they," he said.

"I think it's time to leave," I said.

"Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They're all . . . busy. I am Moses," said
the sweet breath at my elbow. "And I hereby tell the Red Sea to part!"

And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more terrifying
with its gasps, its cries, its slippages of flesh, its slapping like waves, its
repeated whispers for more, more, ah god, more!

I ran but my host grabbed on. "Look right, left, now right again!"