"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

 The Discovery of
Running Bare
Jonathan Carroll

An elegant expatriate American who makes his home in Vienna,
Jonathan Carroll wishes only to assure us that this little item - which
bridges Johnny Preston’s 1960 hit ‘Running Bear’ (awoopa-awoopa) and
the early seventies novelty single ‘The Streak’ (booga-da-booga-da) - is
not directly autobiographical, although he did once live next to a
graveyard where a mysterious figure known only as The Phantom ran
naked after midnight. ‘We used to have to keep our dog in, to stop him
lifting his leg at funerals,’ he remembers. Carroll’s first novel was The
Land of Laughs, and he has subsequently published The Voice of Our
Shadow, Bones of the Moon, Sleeping in Flame, A Child Across the Sky,
Outside the Dog Museum and others, all a distinctive blend of
sophisticated urban mores, metaphysical fan-tasy, and scary black
comedy.

****



H
e was as nervous as a cat under a full moon. He couldn’t keep still, couldn’t
keep down behind the tombstones like the others around him. Unaware of
it, he kept peeping and chirping to himself like a baby bird. Once in a while
he’d even hum a line of the song - ‘Run-ning Bear loved Little White Dove .
. .’ Then he’d pop up for a look, hoping to be the first tonight to see their
own Running Bare.

‘Get down, Bob!’ A voice below him whispered savagely. ‘You’re
going to scare the bastard away!’

‘Shut up! No one’s going to scare him away. He’ll come. Damn well
better come!’

Joe Balding, crouched below, chuckled quietly. It was Joe who’d
convinced him to join the others for their nightly appointment in the town
cemetery with the mysterious stranger who ran naked through the
tombstones clad only in hightop sneakers and an Elvis Presley mask.
Everyone else had been coming for days to look. Since the first sighting, it
was all anyone could talk about. Who was he? Why did he veer left last
night and not right? Why did he wear an Elvis mask and black sneakers?
Why these things? Who was that masked man?

Two weeks before, Mary Helen Cline and Gene Dreevs had been
rolling around as usual in the cemetery. In the middle of very intense
kissing, both of them heard someone running hard nearby. Leaping up as
one because they were sure it was Mary Helen’s mother, they were the first
to see the nude man running to beat Hell across the open moonlit