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

Speaking just for myself, though, there are lots and lots of sisters in this world who are bitten by their
younger brothers who don’t become beasts ravaging and terrorizing the countryside.”

Several spontaneous growls of enraged agreement erupted from the circle. Lyle noticed Ralph looking
angrily at the floor between his feet as his massive head nodded. His lower fangs were visible. Lyle
studied the man, trying to see if Ralph had made himself up to look that way, but all of the evidence
suggested that he was almost a werewolf trying very much to look like a human. Suddenly Ralph glanced
at Lyle and Lyle averted his eyes and concentrated his attention on the speaker.

“I was nine when my brother bit me,” said Allyson. “He was seven. He’d been a little strange ever since
a huge dog bit him when our family was camping in Maine that one summer when he was five. He had the
disease, of course, but I’d never seen him turn so I didn’t know what was going on. I just thought he was
being a little brother.” After a sympathetic chuckle from the circle, Allyson bowed her head and became
quite melancholy. “In fact I’d never seen him turn until I was brought in to identify his body four years
ago. He had been killed while attacking someone who was armed. Until he died my brother hid his
disease from all of us. Of course, it wasn’t any big accomplishment to hide it from me. By then I was, as
we say in L.A., up to my own knees in fleas.

“It was about three months after my brother bit me, almost on my tenth birthday, when I turned for the
first time. It was after fourth grade gym in the shower room. I’d been feeling sick all day and had been
excused from gym early. While I was by myself in the shower, it happened. The bone pain, the stretching
of my skin, all of the awful hair. It hurt and surprised me so much I screamed. The janitor heard me and
came running in. By then I was fully turned and I-I mean, he was the first, you know, what for legal
reasons we’re supposed to keep just between us and our sponsors.” Again Allyson paused to control
her tears while Lyle struggled with what she had said. Did she mean she had offed the janitor? Her next
words gave him chills.

“After I cleaned up the mess I looked at myself in the mirror, the taste still in my mouth. You all know
how it felt.” Ralph and the newcomer, Waldo, grunted violently while the rest raised their eyebrows and
nodded. “I had never felt so strong, so alive. I crawled in among the steam pipes down in the furnace
room and slept off the first of many, many binges.”

Ted stood and whispered something to Allyson. She nodded in return and looked back at the circle, a
note of embarrassment in her voice. “It’s just been pointed out to me that my words might cause some of
you to want to go out again, and forgive me if I’ve called up any euphoric memories.”

Lyle glanced to his left and saw a string of drool dribbling from Ralph’s open mouth. The backs of his
hands appeared to have gotten a shade darker. Waldo had his arms wrapped around himself and
appeared to be holding on very tightly. When Allyson resumed her talk she concentrated on all of the
horrors of a young girl, sensitive about her appearance and desperate to make friends and be popular,
afflicted with a disease that would, without notice, turn her into a hideous creature that craved human
flesh. She talked about when her parents found out and pulled her out of school. From then until she was
seventeen she was kept under lock and key. Shortly after her seventeenth birthday the police found her
parents dead, their throats torn out, the barred windowless room where she had been kept was empty.

By day she took classes and worked at odd jobs until she graduated into a well paying position as a
paralegal. By night she moved through the shadows of the inner city, seeking prey. On one of her nightly
prowls she was taken down by officers from the University Division, L.A.P.D. They were assisted by a
wildlife expert with a tranquilizer gun.