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

been opened in decades. As he pulls the door open, the ancient hinges scream and the flashlight goes out
again.

He shakes it until the beam returns showing a set of crumbling stone steps leading down into the depths,
trails of tattered cobwebs moving slightly with the dank air. “I wonder what made that noise?” he asks, as
the light dims and then returns. She stands on the tips of her toes and looks over his shoulder.

“Whatis down there?”
C’mon.

Let’s find out.




Then Came the Misty Man
If I don’t write it, I forget it, so I write it. It’s not real writing with a pen and paper. The only paper here
is for the toilets and they never let any of us have anything sharp like a pen. I understand that. Some of
the people in here are crazy. So I write this down on my left palm with an imaginary pen held by my right
hand. I’m doing that right now. It sounds silly, but when I write it down, I remember. When I don’t, I
forget. I have to remember. There is so little left.




Hicks is hitting me again. It’s unfair. No hospital attendant should ever act like that, hitting the patients. It
makes him mad seeing me write these things down. But I have to keep doing it or I’ll forget. Then I’ll
wake up all sore and bruised and not know why.

But it hurts, him hitting me. Sometimes it hurts so much my mind moves through the shadows into other
lands, other worlds, other times and dimensions. It’s really true. I know because I wrote it down on my
hand. One time when Hicks was hitting me, it hurt so bad my mind walked off into the shadows, and
there I met the Misty Man. I called him the Misty Man because I needed to write down something right
away and I’d never seen anything like that before, a thing made of vapors, lights, and shadows. The
Misty Man spoke to me then. He was in the shadows fleeing his own persecutor.

Ohhhhh. Hicks hit me hard that time. Real hard. I’m in for it this time. God, I don’t know why he hates
me so. I’m not like the ones who have to be fed or get their diapers changed. I feed myself, wash myself,
and go to the toilet alone. He should like me best of all. But I’m the one he likes to hit the most.

Maybe it’s because of who I was before the trial. This is, after all, a place for the criminally insane. The
sign on the gate says so. An unthinkable thing. Another unthinkable thing. There is no memory of what I
was supposed to have done because I wrote nothing down. It must have been bad though. Some of the
things they said about me at the trial. I don’t remember what they said. I didn’t write that down. I did
write down that they were bad things—

—kicked me. So hard.

Going away.