"Alan Dean Foster - Impossible Places" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

He dropped the clean washrag but was too dizzy and tired to go back for it. Shoving the door aside, he
nearly fell twice as he stumbled over to the bed.
“Nina.” His voice was a dry croak, a rasping echo of what once had been. His swarthy machismo had
evaporated along with his strength.
He tried to pour a glass of water, but his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t control it. The icy
liquid shocked his hand and wrist. Frustration provided enough strength for him to heave the glass against
the far wall, where it shattered melodiously. Exhausted by the effort he sank to his knees next to the bed,
his forehead falling against his forearms as he sobbed helplessly. He lifted his eyes, hardly able to gaze
upon her shrunken face anymore.
Emotions colder than the water rushed through his veins. For an instant he was fully alive, wholly
aware. His vision was sharp, his perception precise.
There was hair in the bed. Always hair in the bed, no matter how much they’d swept, how hard they’d
brushed and dusted, no matter how many times they changed the sheets. Brown, curly hair. His hair. It
was there now.
One of the hairs was crawling out of her nose.
He knelt there, the bed supporting him, unable to move, unable to turn away from the horror. As his
eyes grew wide a second hair followed the first, twisting and curling as if seeking the sunlight. He began
to twitch, his skin crawling, the bile in his stomach thickening.
A hair appeared at the corner of her beautiful right eye, twisting and bending, working its way out.
Two more slid out of her left ear and fell to the bed, lying motionless for a long moment before they too
began to curl and crawl searchingly, imbued with a horrid life of their own.
With an inarticulate cry he stumbled away from the bed, away from the disintegrating form. More hairs
joined the others, emerging from the openings of her body, from nostrils and ears, from between her once
perfect lips, falling to the sheets, brown and curling and twisting. He reached up to rub at his disbelieving
eyes, to grind away the nightmare with his own knuckles, and happened to glance at his hands. There
were at least half a dozen hairs on the back of the right one, moist and throbbing.
Screaming, he stumbled backwards, frantically wiping his hands against his dirty pants. Staggering out
of the room, he stumbled back toward the lodge. After weeks of unending rain the sun had finally
emerged. Steam rose around him as accumulated moisture was sucked skyward. The mist impeded his
vision.
Thin lines crisscrossed his line of sight. The lines were moving.
Crying, babbling, he flailed at his own eyes, delighting in the pain, digging at the hair, the omnipresent
hair, the memories of him and what had been done. He felt the crawling now, no more than a slight
tickle, but everywhere. On the surfaces of his eyes, in his ears, his nose, pain in his urethra and anus,
tickling and scratching and burning, burning. He fell to his knees, then onto his side, curling into a fetal
position as he dug and scratched and screamed at himself, at his wonderful body which was betraying
him without reason, without explanation.

The doctor’s assistant gagged when he saw the body in the garden, and the Indians muttered to
themselves and drew back. The doctor, who was an old man, thin and toughened from forty years of
practicing medicine in that part of the jungle known as the Infierno Verde, forced himself to bend over
and do his job. There wasn’t much left to examine.
The smell led them to the rear building. This time the Indians wouldn’t enter at all, and the doctor had
to use all the strength in his elderly frame to drag his reluctant assistant with him. Up till now the young
man had made good on his internship. Eventually he would return to a fine hospital in Lima where he
would issue papers and prescribe pills at excessive fees for wealthy Limineros, while the doctor would
remain in his sweltering office in Maldonado, treating insulting ungrateful tourists for diarrhea and locals
for promised payment that the government sometimes sent and sometimes didn’t.
The corpse on the bed had been that of a woman. If possible (and until he had actually seen it the
doctor would not have thought it was), it was in a state of even more advanced desiccation than the one