"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

This book is a work of fiction, and the incidents and characters are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is coincidental.


Dark Cornersis copyright © 2001, Barry B. Longyear. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the
publisher. Story-specific copyright information can be found in theAcknowledgements section of this
book.


ISBN: 1-931305-05-6


Scorpius Digital Publishing

PO Box 19423

Queen Anne Station

Seattle, WA 98109

www.scorpiusdigital.com


Cover painting by Paul Clift

Cover design by Bridget McKenna

DARK CORNERS


Barry B. Longyear
To

Harlan Ellison
“Vini vidi nates calce concidi.”




First…
Dark Corners.
I was young, perhaps six or seven, in a room the size of a small bedroom. Something — some horror
that I knew — would be coming soon to get me, to destroy me. I wasn’t strong enough to defeat it and I
wasn’t swift enough to outrun it. I knew this. Besides, I knew that if I tried either, the horror would hurt
me all the more.

Listening, I couldn’t hear anything moving in the hall outside. My heart was beating so painfully hard, I
could hear nothing else. I wiped my palms on my upper sleeves, my breaths coming shallow and rapid,
my entire body trembling.