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

“What I started out to do.” -
The girl scrambled up in desperate haste.
“Wait!” she gasped, ‘~wait!” and clutched at his arm to steady herself. And he waited until the trembling had passed. Then she went on, “Come ujfto the Temple once more before you go.”
“All right. Not a bad idea. It may be a long time before my next—meal.”
And so again they crossed the fur-soft grass that bore down upon them in long ripples from every part of the meadow.
The Temple rose dim and unreal before them, and as they entered blue twilight folded them dreamily about. Smith turned by habit toward the gallery of the drinkers, but the girl laid upon his arms a hand that shook a little, and murmured, “Come this way.”
He followed ingrowing surprise down the hallway through the drifting mists and away from the gallery he knew so well.
It seemed to him that the mist thickened~ as they advanced,
~,and iii the uncertain light be could never be sure that the walls did not waver as nebulously as the blurring air.- He felt a curious impulse to step through their intangible barriers and out of the hail into—what?
Presently steps rose under his feet, almost imperceptibly, and after a while the pressure on his arm drew him aside. They went in under a low, heavy arch of stone and entered the strangest room he had ever seen. It appeared to be sevensided, as nearly as he could judge through the drifting mist, and curious, converging lines were graven deep in the floor.
It seemed to him that forces outside his comprehension
were beating violently against the seven walls, circling like
hurricanes through the dimness until the whole room was a
maelstrom of invisible tumult. -
When he lifted his eyes to the wail, he knew where he was. Blazoned on the dim Stone, burning through the twilight like some other-dimensional fire, the scarlet pattern writhed across the wall.
The sight of it, somehow, set up a commotion in his brain, and it was with whirling head and stumbling -feet that he answered to thepressure on his arm. Dimly be realized that he stood at the very center of those strange, converging lines, feeling forces beyond reason coursing through him along paths outside any knowledge he possessed.
Then for one moment arms clasped his neck and a warm, fragrant body pressed against him, and a voice sobbed in his ear.
“If you must leave me, then go back through the Door, beloved—life without you—more dreadful eve~i than a death like this. . . .“ A kiss-that stung of blood clung to his lips for an instant; then the clasp loosened and he stood alone.
Through the twilight he saw her dimly outlined against the Word. And he thought, as she stood there, that it was as if the invisible current beat bodily against her, so that she swayed and wavered before him, her outlines blurring and forming again as the forces from which he was so mystically protected buffeted her’ mercilessly.
And he saw knowledge dawning terribly upon her face, as
the meaning of the Word seej~ed slowly into her mind. The sweet brown face twisted hideously, the blood-red lips writhed apart to shriek a Word-in a moment of clarity he actually saw her tongue twisting incredibly to form the sylla-’ bles of the unspeakable thing never meant for human lips to frame. Her mouth opened initran impossible shape. . . she gasped in the blurry mist and shrieked aloud. . .. -
- Iv

Smith was walking along a twisting path so scarlet that he could not bear to look down, a path that wound and unwound and shook itself under his feet so that he stumbled at every step. He was groping through a.blinding mist clouded with violet and green, and in his ears a dreadful whisper rang—the first syllable of an unutterable Word. . . . Whenever he neared the end of the path it shook itself under -him and doubled back, and weariness like a drug was sinking into his brain, and the sleepy twilight colors of the mist lulled him, and— - -
“He’s waking up!” said an exultant voice in his ear.
Smith lifted heavy eyelids upon a room without walls—a room wherein multiple fl~ures extending into infinity moved to and fro in countless hosts
“Smith! N.W.! WaY~e up! “urged that familiar voice from somewhere near~
He. blinked. The myriad diminishing figures resolved themselves into the reflections of two men in a steer-walled room, bending over him. The friendly, anxious face of his partner, Yarol the Venusian, leaned above the bed.
“By Pharot, N.W.,” said the well-remembered, ribald voice, “you’ve been asleep for a week! We thought you’d never come out of it—must have been an awful brand of whisky!”
- Smith managed a feeble grin—amazing how weak he felt—and turned an inquiring gaze upon the other figure.
“I’m a doctor,” said that individual, meeting the questing
stare. “Your friend called me in three days ago and I’ve been working on you ever since. It must have been all of five or six days since you fell into this coma—have you any idea what caused it?” -
Smith’s pale eyes roved the room. He did not find what he sought, and though his weak murmur answered the doctor’а question, the man was never to know it.
“Shawl?”
“I threw the damned thing away,” confessed Yarol. “Stood it for three days and then gave up. That red pattern gave me the worst headache I’ve had since we found that case of black wine on the asteroid. Remember?”
“Where—?”
“Gave it to a space-rat checking out for Venus. Sorry. Did you really want it? I’ll buy you another.”
Smith did not answer, the weakness was rushing up about him in gray waves. He closed his eyes, hearing the echoes of that first dreadful syllable whispering through his head. . whisperfroma dream.. . . Yarol heard him murmur softly,
“And—I-qiever even knew—her namd