"Laidlaw-TheBlackBus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laidlaw Marc)

MARC LAIDLAW

THE BLACK BUS

DRIVER APPROACHED THE main gates, hunched low against the cold clouds and the
eerie onrush of music that crept out over the escarpments of the amphitheater,
thin groping notes like the claws of wintry trees made of black sound. Colored
lights, auroral, pulsed against the clouds in time to the music, reminding him
of something older than memories of childhood Hell-dreams. He imagined his
grandfather's evangelical words driving down at him like a pelting brimstone
hail, and thought how the old man would see the theater as a concession erected
around the mouth of Hell, into which the damned were lured with music and
screams which passage through the gates had transfigured into wild, seductive
laughter. He pulled up his collar against the storm of invisible coals, and
wished he could have stayed in the bus. But it had broken down completely, the
prognosis was terrible, and he needed help.

He glanced back at the old bus, cold now in the mountain moonlight and the
distant moth-battered glare of the stadium lights, far out at a corner of the
lot among a dozen other buses not quite as full of memories, though equally
lurid: paisleys, spirals, fractal swirls in luminous paints. An anachronism, a
retrograde voyager, an affront to the new serious spirit of reform. Do drugs! --
it seemed to tell all the little children who followed its progress on the back
roads, delighting in its psychedelic colors. Run from home and join the circus!
Following the Group was the same thing.

Turning back toward the gates, he saw another bus pulling in before the
amphitheater, brakes squealing and then a gasping hiss of air as it stopped
almost directly in his path. Gleaming black, with a long row of square windows
all seemingly cut from warm yellow parchment. Its black surface was weirdly
textured in diamond-shapes, oblique facets that turned light back on itself:
like a stealth-bus, invisible to enemy detection. He walked around it
cautiously, watching it over his shoulder, expecting the front door to open --
anxious, in fact, to see the driver sitting up in the high seat at the top of
the steps.

"Tickets," said a voice, and he whirled to find himself in the shadow of the
gate. A flashlight caught and held his hands in glare, making the hairs stand
out like abrupt shards of spun glass, the blemishes suddenly malign. He jerked
his hands out of the light and plunged them into his pocket as if to spare them
such scrutiny, but actually searching for the plastic pass that had been his for
longer than he could remember.

The torch, its bearer still unseen, waved him in, opening a path into the cement
tunnel strewn with tom tickets, broken bottles, pools of piss with cigarette
butts disintegrating in them. He hurried, but the beam deserted him. Laughter,
and then a low growling that might have been nothing worse than some enormous
old man clearing his throat. He walked around the sound of breathing, kicked a