"Ellison-SensibleCity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Gropp's eyes were large, and Mickey could see the whites.

"What'sa matter, Loo . . . Harold?"

"You see that town out there?" His voice was trembling.

Mickey looked to his right. Yeah, he saw it. Horrible.

Many years ago, when Gropp was briefly a college student, he had taken a
warm-body course in Art Appreciation. One oh one, it was; something basic and
easy to ace, a snap, all you had to do was show up. Everything you wanted to
know about Art from aboriginal cave drawings to Diego Rivera. One of the
paintings that had been flashed on the big screen for the class, a sleepy 8:00
AM class, had been The Nymph Echo by Max Ernst. A green and smoldering painting
of an ancient ruin overgrown with writhing plants that seemed to have eyes and
purpose and a malevolently jolly life of their own, as they swarmed and
slithered and overran the stone vaults and altars of the twisted, disturbingly
resonant sepulcher. Like a sebaceous cyst, something corrupt lay beneath the
emerald fronds and hungry black soil.

Mickey looked to his right at the town. Yeah, he saw it. Horrible.

"Keep driving!" Gropp yelled, as his partner-in-flight started to slow for the
exit ramp.

Mickey heard, but his reflexes were slow. They continued to drift to the right,
toward the rising egress lane. Gropp reached across and jerked the wheel hard to
the left. "I said: keep driving!"

The Firebird slewed, but Mickey got it back under control in a moment, and in
another moment they were abaft the ramp, then past it, and speeding away from
the nightmarish site beyond and slightly below the superhighway. Gropp stared
mesmerized as they swept past. He could see buildings that leaned at obscene
angles, the green fog that rolled through the haunted streets, the shadowy forms
of misshapen things that skulked at every dark opening.

"That was a real scary-lookin' place, Looten . . . Harold. I don't think I'd of
wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we'd've gone real
fast . . . "

Gropp twisted in the seat toward Mickey as much as his muscle-fat body would
permit. "Listen to me. There is this tradition, in horror movies, in mysteries,
in tv shows, that people are always going into haunted houses, into graveyards,
into battle zones, like assholes, like stone idiots! You know what I'm talking
about here? Do you?"

Mickey said, "Uh . . ."

"All right, let me give you an example. Remember we went to see that movie
Alien? Remember how scared you were?"