"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

Chapter One
Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the
annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall mirror.

Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.

As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman faced the great glass
squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes. And there resemblance to past
hours ceased. She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure. She could not. For her
eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.

Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind
had shrieked its warning. Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her toes as if to
turn and leap away. Then gradually she straightened. She must force herself to go through with it. She
might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness, twice in one lifetime. It must
be now.

She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.

Somber eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools ploughed around by furrows that
today gouged a little deeper—the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal
deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in
their defense against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless, having been bleached finally and
completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white
rose.

As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands
to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly-gray hair
from two tumorous bulges—like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the
mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.

Then, by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of
that misshapen image. She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she. That profile, as if
seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering
metaphor paralyzed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.

In a vague way, she realized that she had discovered what she had set out to discover. She was ugly. She
was even very ugly.

The change must have been gradual, too slow to say of any one day: Yesterday I was not ugly. But even
eyes that hungered for deception could no longer deny the cumulative evidence.

So slow—and yet so fast. It seemed only yesterday that had found her face down on Matthew Bell's
examination table, biting savagely at a little pillow as his gnarled fingertips probed grimly at her upper
thoracic vertebrae.

Well, then, she was ugly. But she'd not give in to self-pity. To hell with what she looked like! To hell with
mirrors!

On sudden impulse she seized her balancing tripod with both hands, closed her eyes, and swung.