"Laymon, Richard - InTheDark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

The "come and play with me" sounded sort of like the eager request a child might make. _Will you come out and play?_
Of course, "come" was also a rather vulgar euphemism for an orgasm. "Play with me" also carried some strong sexual implications. Maybe this was an invitation -- payment enclosed -- to mess around with its sender.
_He wants to fuck me._
The idea blasted away Jane's composure. Anger, humiliation, fear, revulsion, and an unexpected surge of desire seemed to hit her all at once, stealing her breath, making her heart race, surging heat through her body.
"The bastard," she muttered. Here's fifty bucks, now come and play with me.
Maybe that isn't what he means, she thought.
_And maybe it is._
She suddenly looked up. She turned her head, scanning the entire room.
She saw nobody. What she saw were countless hiding places: in among the rows of bookshelves, down low behind the tables and chairs, behind any of the several shoulder-high card catalogs, behind the photocopy machine.
_In front of my desk._
She pushed her feet against the rung of her chair and raised herself off the cushion. Hands pressed against the desk top, she leaned forward and gazed past the edge.
Nobody there.
She settled down onto her seat again.
I oughta get out of here, she thought.
Then she thought, How dangerous can a guy be if he's giving me fifty bucks?
Also, he must be familiar with literature. The "look homeward, angel" business was definitely an allusion to the Thomas Wolfe novel -- one of Jane's favorites.
She read that part of the note again. "For further instructions, look homeward, angel."
Further? He sees this note as the initial instruction. He has more for me. Maybe the _further_ instructions will be given face to face.
Maybe not.
Maybe I'm supposed to go home and look in my mailbox for the further instructions. Look homeward. Maybe I'll find an envelope with another note inside -- and another fifty dollars.
_Maybe I'll find it in the book._
_Tucked inside a copy of _Look Homeward, Angel_._
The library's copy, if not checked out or misplaced, should be on a shelf in the fiction section.
In the upstairs stacks.
I need to go up there anyway, she reminded herself. I'll just take a quick look at the book.
_What if he's waiting for me there?_









Chapter Two


Jane folded the note around the fifty dollars and tucked it back inside the envelope. Her hands were trembling. She felt a little crawly in her stomach. As she walked into her office, she wondered if she _really_ planned to go upstairs all by herself when there was a real possibility that the author of the note might be lurking there.
What am I _supposed_ to do, leave?
Leave without shutting off the upstairs lights, without making sure everyone has cleared out? No way.
She crouched beside her office desk and slipped the envelope into her purse. Then she stood up. From the top drawer of the desk, she took her switchblade knife.
She'd found the knife a day before her seventeenth birthday, while hiking in the woods near Mount Tamalpias. The point of its slim, three-inch blade had been buried in a redwood trunk. She'd worked it loose and kept the knife.
It made quite a nice letter opener.
She released the lever at the base of the blade, then folded the blade into the handle, where it clicked into place.
If I need to take something like this with me, she thought, I shouldn't be going at all.
She looked at the office phone.
Call the police? That'd be very cute. Explain that somebody gave me fifty bucks, so now I'm afraid to go upstairs and turn off the lights.