"Thomas M. Disch - Ringtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

hath present laughter. I wired ring to belt and started to record.
I woke the next morning in my own room, finger ring-
less and memory's tabula entirely rasa. No memory even of having come home.
Which meant that, as so often in the past, I'd been brought home and put to
bed by friendly elves. The elves had left behind, in exchange for yesterday,
two rings, a sealed eight-hour blank, and a second, fully recorded and set to
replay, molded in a lion's-head design. Beneath the rings was a note in my own
handwriting:
Once more, with feeling. Come at 6. Meanwhile enjoy your plunder.
After breakfast, for which I lacked my usual appetite, I decided to try out
the new ring. Like an informer's hand slipping a secret accusation into the
stone jaws of the Bocca del Leone, the needle of the Ringmaster entered the
lion's-head ring, and I found myself at the bottom of a well. The water was up
to my knees and rising. Rats squeaked nearby, while far above a witch cackled
with glee. Things quickly got worse.
I was lucky to have grown up before the entertainment industry had made cradle
robbing a temptation available to the working class. The equipment needed to
make recordings was still too bulky and expensive then, and Memory Lane was a
county fair compared to the bustling bazaar it's since become. It's no credit
to my parents, therefore, that my lousy childhood belongs to me and not to a
collector hungry for wonder and innocence.
There was a case in the news lately of parents who had been restaging Baby's
first Christmas every day of Baby's young life from age four through age
seven, when the IRS finally caught them. (They got ten years for tax evasion.
In Utah there's no law against robbing your own children's cradle.) This
recording was more like Baby's first Halloween. The hours I spent trapped in
rapport with that child's
terror were the supreme bad trip of my life. My own adult knowledge that I was
being tormented not by literal witches and ghosts but by everyday human
monsters was no proof against panic terror. When the ordeal was over and the
needle retracted from the ring, I lay a long time inert, reeling with the
aftershock. Slowly my heart's roller coaster eased to a stop, and I got off.
I swore revenge and washed my pants at the sink in the hallway.
It was dusk when I returned to New Soho Square. The painted brick of Number 33
had dulled from rose to sepia. The metal gates of the shops about the square
had been drawn down, giving the neighborhood a battered, embattled look.
Pigeons fluttered to their roosts in the junked cars stacked monumentally in
the basin of the defunct fountain at the center of the square. It seemed as
though nothing had changed for a hundred years. Machu Picchu has nothing on
Manhattan, if you catch it on the right day.
I loitered in the square some minutes, circling the stacked cars in the
fountain, establishing mood. Who knew but that this would be my last
recording? So it had better be good. My eyes' cameras panned across the
concrete stumps of benches toward the doorway of Number 33 and then, feet
assisting, zoomed in to the shallow foyer and the laminated plastic nameplate
of the Happenings Gallery, M. Ruyk, Proprietor. A ringed finger rang the bell.
Silence.
The door was locked. With the ease of borrowed expertise, I entered. The
gallery, on the third-floor landing, was double-locked. I entered again. The
place was an ice palace carved from white light-no walls for miles, no