"Henry Kuttner - The Dark World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

nothing but rest in mat smelly little jungle village, waiting and waiting and waiting."

I could see and smell it now. I could feel again the fever that had raged so long through me as I
lay in the tabooed hut.

My mind went back eighteen months to the last hour when things were normal for me. It was in the
closing phases of World War II, and I was flying over the Sumatran jungle. War, of course, is
never good or normal, but until that one blinding moment in the air I had been an ordinary man,
sure of myself, sure of my place in the world, with no nagging fragments of memory too elusive to
catch.

Then everything blanked out, suddenly and completely. I never knew what it was. There was nothing
it could have been. My only injuries came when the plane struck, and they were miraculously light.
But I had been whole and unhurt when the blindness and blankness came over me.

The friendly Bataks found me as I lay in the ruined plane. They brought me through a fever and a


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raging illness with their strange, crude, effective ways of healing, but I sometimes thought they
had done me no service when they saved me. And their witch-doctor had his doubts, too.

He knew something. He worked his curious, futile charms

with knotted string and rice, sweating with effort I did not understand—then. I remembered the
scarred, ugly mask looming out of the shadow, the hands moving in gestures of strange power.

"Come back, O soul, where thou are lingering in the wood, or in the hills, or by the river. See, I
call thee with a toemba bras, with an egg of the fowl Rajah moelija, with the eleven healing
leaves...."

"Yes, they were sorry for me at first, all of them. The witchdoctor was the first to sense
something wrong and the awareness spread. I could feel it spreading, as their attitude changed.
They were afraid. Not of me, I thought, but of—what?

Before the helicopter came to take me back to civilization, the witch-doctor had told me a little.
As much, perhaps, as he dared.

"You must hide, my son. All your life you must hide.

Something is searching for you—" He used a word I did not understand. "—and it has come from the
Other World, the ghostlands, to hunt you down. Remember this: all magic things must be taboo to
you. And if that too fails, perhaps you may find a weapon in magic. But we cannot help you. Our
powers are not strong enough for that."

He was glad to see me go. They were all glad.

And after that, unrest. For something had changed me utterly. The fever? Perhaps. At any rate, I