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

There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men wrestling,
leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh, undulant, a
writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin, flashes of
teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung themselves up
crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations and muffled cries.
I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by
their bestial moans.

"What, my God," I exclaimed, "does it all mean?"

"There. See."

And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty
feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching,
savoring, alert, one vast stare.

And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which
pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the
shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in
my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did not
exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then another
savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring the
sweaty air, hungering the passions.

And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that
immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium
airs.

"Dorian?" I guessed.

"Come meet him."

"Yes, but," I watched the wild convulsive shadows. "What are they doing?"

"Go find out. Afraid.? Cowards never live. So!"

He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive I could not
feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked
by my blond young friend. "Ready?"

"Lord, I must go home!"

"Not until you meet," said my host, "him."

He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place,
like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred
on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor
of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there
with that immense inhaled breath that rose and was quiet and began again.