"(ss) Return Engagement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)

Shawn had come back here, looking for the threads he had lost in childhood. He was still seeking them. He walked on through the stubble left from the harvested barley . . . and something seemed to whisper in his veins.

There was the feeling in him that he should go on. He went, past the sagging barn and down the lane towards the orchard. The pump at the old well creaked and gave forth water that was reddened with rust, but cold and tingling on his palate. He stopped to pluck an apple from an unpruned tree and munched on it.

And now the tingling was stronger, and there was a faint singing of the blood in his ears, as if a horn were being blown somewhere. It became louder as he crossed a stile into the meadow.

The grass was faintly damp. There was the smell of clover in the air, over the faint, rich musk of the earth itself. He moved across it, listening to the bending of the grass and the soft scuttling sounds of the little creatures that lived in it. From a pond beyond the orchard lane, the croaking of frogs reached him, the eerie call of a screech owl, the chirping of crickets.

The bugling of the strange excitement in his mind was stronger now.

He headed for the little dip near the centre of the meadow. As a boy, he had lain there in the sunlight out of the wind and read Princess of Mars and Haggard and Dunsany, or crouched in the moonlight at times when he was too restless to sleep and too filled with unremembered plans. It was too damp now for a man of forty-five to return to the earth, but the spot drew him.

And then he saw the thing, centred in the spot towards which he was headed, and his heart seemed to leap with shock and then with expectancy.

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He moved to it slowly.

He tried to tell himself it was something left behind by some wooing couple or as a practical joke by his neighbours. But he knew better.

It looked like a shell made of something milky-white. Half was almost buried in the grass. The other half of the opened shell was resting backwards against a rock. It seemed to be lined with a softness like the packed down of a milkweed pod. And it was perhaps eight feet long.

But it was the sweep of the lines and the rightriess of the form that held his eyes. There was a fluting of the milky substance that lifted something in him as he had felt it lift before at an ancient jade screen or a phrase of Mozart.

There was no mark to show how it had come there. It must have been after the rain, since the lining was dry and soft to his touch.

Inevitably, he thought of flying saucers. But he threw the idea out of his mind, like a man brushing dirt from himself. The ugliness of the times was reflected in the pitiful situation where men's dreaming of better things led only to the banality of the cults. And of all the cults, the flying saucer ones were the least alive with a spark of the - lilt.

Yet he knew without questioning that this thing had never been shaped on Earth.

And as if to confirm his idea, his eyes caught sight of a design that was revealed softly in the moonlight against the lid of the shell. He bent to see it, but it was still too dim.

Finally, as he had known he was going to do, he kicked off his wet shoes and stepped into the hollow of the padding, letting himself down gently until his eyes were near the carving.

Moonlight shone gently through the lid, making it hard to be sure of details. But somehow, his eyes filled with the figure. It was a woman - or rather, not a woman, since the features were planed as no human face could be. A strange woman, thinner than any human and more supple, from the dance in which she was frozen. The final proof of lack of humanity lay in the hair that rippled from her head and grew into a double

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crest on her back, spreading outwards across each of her shoulders, but standing well above her skin.

And suddenly, her hand seemed to move!

Shawn blinked. But it had been no illusion. The carved fingers opened and the arm moved towards him, just as the lid began to move inward to close the shell. There was a dancing cloud of motes that sprang from her hand and sped towards him. He lifted his arms, but it was too late. The gleaming motes struck his eyes, and they closed.

Gentle waves of sleep washed across his brain. He had only time to feel the shell lift somehow and ride upwards into the moonlight before the sleep claimed him completely . . .

There was a sense of the passage 'of time, eventually. His eyes would not open, but he lay somewhere that was not on Earth, and he could sense that hours had passed. Hours, he thought. Not days or weeks, but only hours.

Around him, there was a stirring. He could sense that the shell was gone, and there was an alien but earthy odour in his nostrils. Now sounds came - voices — but no voices he had ever heard. There was a silvery quality to them, like the voices of children mysteriously robbed of the harsh overtones of childish screams. These were almost liquid. Yet he could sense a frenzy and worry in them. In the background, there was a chanting, and the heart inside him seemed to be crying as it ended.