"part1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keith Brooke - Lord of Stone)

as she pressed it to her lips.

She paused to touch the corner of her mouth. It was swollen,
engorged with blood. He did not remember striking her - had
it been him?

Someone turned the radio up louder, its music insistent,
shrill. Bligh tried to come to terms with what was happening
to him. The steady pressure in his head was frightening, a
sure sign that he really was insane. He felt himself to be
right on the edge of some mental precipice. It would not take
much ...

"I hear voices," he said quietly. He had to explain, had to
find the words from somewhere. "My head ... I can't keep
track of it all. I see bodies, too. All day, all night. They
talk to me." He drank more wine and focused on its heat in
his belly. "I'm mad," he said. "Mad."

He drank some more.

Later, the old man started his chant again. Nobody paid him
any attention at first, but gradually the people stopped
talking and silenced the radio. In their ones and twos they
turned to watch, then started to clap out his complex rhythm.
Bligh felt no anger now, only a mellow sense of well-being
that centred in his gut and rippled outwards.

He did not object when Lila rose from where she had been
sitting, head on his shoulder, hand on his thigh. He watched
as she found the movements of her dance once again, her eyes
locked unblinking on his. He drank some more from the jug of
wine.

After a few minutes, she started to wail that twisting note
that had reached right inside Bligh earlier in the evening.
She wrapped her arms around her body, pulling at her clothes,
teasing, and all the time her eyes were fixed on Bligh's.

It crept up on him stealthily.

Sitting, watching, drinking ... then suddenly he was out in
the cleared dirt space with Lila, crying aloud, the old man's
chant pulling Bligh's body about as if he was a marionette
jerked by some mad puppeteer's wires. He clutched at his
head, trying to interrupt the pattern and stop, but still his
body jerked and twisted and that awful chant pounded through
his head. All he knew was the fire, the insane twitching of
his body, the undying, timeless rhythm battering the inside
of his skull.