"Moore, C L - Scarlet Dream UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

Smith went on at her side, looking round with new eyes upon the lovely, pellucid land, too beautiful and frightening for anything outside a dream. All about them the hungry grass came hurrying in long, converging waves as they advanced. Were the trees, then, flesh-eating too? Cannibal trees and vampire grass—he shuddered a little and looked
ahead. . -
The Temple stood tall before them, a building of some
nameless material as mistily blue as far-off mountains on the Earth. The mistiness did not condense or clarify as they approached, and the outlines of the place were mysteriously bard to fix in mind—he could never understand, afterward, just why. When he tried too hard to concentrate on one
pifticular corner or tower or window it blurred before his eyes as if the fOcus were at fault—as if the whole strange, veiled building stood just on the borderland of another dimension.
From the immense, triple arch of the doorway, as they approached—a triple arch like nothing he had ever seen before, so irritatingly hard to focus upon that be could not be sure just wherein its difference lay—a pale blue mist issued smokily: And when they stopped within they walked into that twilight dimness he was coming to know so well.
The great hail lay straight and veiled before them, but after a few steps the girl drew him aside and under another archway, into a long gallery through whose drifting haze he could see rows of men and women kneeling against the wall with bowed heads, asif in prayer. She led him down the lineto the
-end, and he saw then that they knelt before small spigots
curving up from the wall at regular intervals. She dropped to
her knees before one and, motioning him to follow, bent her head and laid her lips to the up-curved spout. Dubiously he followed her example.
Instantly with the touch of his mouth on the nameless
substance of the spigot something hot and, strangely, at once salty and sweet flowed into his mouth. There was an acridity about it that gave a curious tang, and the more he drank the more avid he became. Hauntingly delicious it was, and.
warmth flowed through him more strongly with every draft.
Yet somewhere deep within him memory stirred unpleasantly . . . somewhere, somehow, he had known this hot, acrid, salty taste before, and—suddenly suspicions. struck him like a bludgeon, and he jeited his lips from the spout as if it burnt. A tiny thread of scarlet trickled from the wall. He passed the back of one hand across his lips and brought it away red. He knew that odor, then. -
The girl knelt beside him with closed eyes, rapt avidity in every line of her. When he seized her shoulder she twitched away and opened protesting eyes, but did not lift her lips from the spigot. Smith gestured violently, and with one last long draft she rose and turned a half-angry face to his, but laid a
finger on her reddened lips. -
He followed her in silence past the kneeling lines again. When they reached the ball outside he swung upon her and gripped her shoulders angrily.
“What was ‘that?” he ‘demanded.
Her eyes slid away. She shrugged.
“What were you expecting? We feed as we must, here. You’ll learn to drink without a qualm—if it does not come for you too soon.” -
A moment longer he stared angrily down into her evasive, strangely lovely face. Then he turned without a word and strode down the hallway through the drifting.mists toward the’
door. He heard her bare feet pattering along behind hurriedly, but he did not look back. Not until he had come out into the glowing day and half crossed the grasslands did he relent, enough to glance around. She paced at his heels with bowed
head, the orange hair swinging about her face and unhappiness eloquent in- every motion. The submission of her
touched him suddenly, and he paused for her to catch up, smiling down half reluctantly on the bent orange head.
She lifted a tragic face to his, and there were tears in the
sherry eyes. So he had no choi& but to laugh and lift her up
against his leather-clad breast and kiss the drooping mouth into smiles again. But he understood, now~ the faintly acrid bitterness of her kisses.
“Still,” he said, when they had reached the little white shrine among the trees, “there must be some other food than—that. Does no grain grow? Isn’t there any wild life in the woods? Haven’t the trees fruit?”.
She gave him another sidelong, look from tinder dropped lashes, wa~ily.
“No,” she said. “Nothing but the grass grows here. No’
living thing dwells in this land but man—and it. And as for the fruit of the trees—give thanks that they bloom but once in a lifetime.”

“Better not to—speak of it,” she said.
The phrase, the constant evasion, was beginning to wear on Smith’s nerves. He sai~ nothing Of it then,. but he turned from her and went down to the beach, dropping to the sand and striving to recapture.last night’s languour and peace. His hunger was curiously satisfied, even from the few swallows he had taken, and gradually the drowsy content of the day before began to flow over him in deepening waves. After all, it was a lovely land. .
That day drew dreamily to a close, and darkness rose in a mist from the misty lake, and he came to find in kisses that tasted of blood a certain tang thatbut pointed their sweetness.
And in the morning he woke to the slowly brightening day, swam with the girl in the blue, tingling waters of the lake— and reluctantly went up through the woods and across the ravenous grass to the Temple, driven by a hunger greater than his repugnance. He went up with a slight nausea rising within him, and yet strangely eager. . . .
- Once more the Temple rose veiled and indefinite under the glowing sky, and once more he plunged into the ete~nal twilight of its corridors, turned aside as one who knows the
way, knelt of his own accord in the line of drinkers along the wall....
With the first draft that nausea rose within him almost’ overwhelmingly, but when the warmth’ of the drink had spread through him the nausea died and nothing was left but hunger and eagerness, and he drank blindly until the girl’s hand on his shoulder roused him.
A sort of intoxication had wakened within him with the burning of that hot, salt drink in his veins, and he went back across the hurrying grass in a half-daze. Through most of the pellucid day it lasted, and the slow dark was rising from the lake before clearness returned to him. -


ifi


And so life resolved itself into a very simple thing. The days glowed by and the blurred darknesses came and went.
Life held little any more but the bright clarity of the day and’ the dimness of the dark, morning journeys to drink at the Temple fountain and the bitter kisses of the girl with the
orange hair. Time had ceased for him. Slow day followed slow day, and the same round of living circled over and over, and the only change—perhaps he did not see it then—was the
- deepening-look in the girl’s eyes when they rested upon him,
her growing silences. --