"Eric Frank Russell - The Rhythm of the Rats" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

My whole attention remained riveted upon the trees until shortly a being stepped
forth and posed upon the path, full in the light of the moon. Tall and terribly thin, he
wore a bi-colored jerkin of lurid yellow and red with a peaked and feathered cap to
match. Even his up-pointed slippers were colored, one yellow, one red. A slender
flute was in his hands, one end to his mobile lips, the other aimed straight at my
window. His long, supple fingers moved with marvelous dexterity as he subjected
me to a musical stream of irresistible invitation.
His face! I looked upon it and did not cease to look upon it all the time I tore at
the casement's latch, heaved upon its chain, struggled desperately to burst the lock
asunder. I wanted to get out, how madly, insanely I wanted to get out, to run free
beneath the moon, to dance and prance, to mope and mow, to gabble and
gesticulate and vault the hills while mothers mourned.
Unknown to me, my own voice alternately moaned my mortification and shouted
my rage at being thwarted while I lugged and tugged in crazy endeavor to tear the
window wide open. My ears were incapable of hearing my own noises, or any others
for that matter. I was concentrating tremendously and exclusively upon that magnetic
tune coming from outside and the moonlit visage of he who was producing it. A
pane of glass broke into a hundred shards and blood flowed on my hand, yet I saw
nothing but the face, heard nothing but its song.
It was an idiot face with enormous laughing eyes. A drooling, drooping,
loose-hung, imbecilic countenance in which the optics shone with clownish
merriment. It was the face of my friend, my brother, my mother, my boon
companion, my comrade of the night, my only joyful ally in this sullen and hostile
world. The face of he without whom I would be utterly alone, in ghastly solitude, for
ever and ever, to the very end of time. I wanted him.
Heavens, how hungrily I wanted him! Beating at the window, I screamed my
desperate need for him.
There were feet moving below somewhere within the house, and heavy feet
coming upstairs, hurriedly, responding to a sudden urgency. If my ears heard them
they did not tell me. I stood in the full, cold glare of moonlight and hammered futilely
at my prison bars and drank in that idiot face still uttering its piping call to come
away and play.
Just as someone pushed open my bedroom door the flute-player made one swift
and graceful step backward into the trees. At the same moment there came from the
side of the house to my left a tremendous crash like that of an ancient and
overloaded blunderbuss. Leaves, twigs and bits of branches sprang away from the
trees and showered over the yellow-red figure.
The music ceased at once. To me its ending was as awful as the loss of the sun,
leaving a world swamped in darkness. Verily a light-o'-laughter had become
extinguished and there was nothing around me but the gray-brown souls of the
immeasurably sad.
I clawed and scrabbled at the casement in futile effort to bring back the magic
notes but while the torn leaves still were drifting the fluter receded farther into the
shadows and was gone. Once, twice there was a gleam of color, yellow and red, in
the tree gaps higher up the hill. After that, no other sign. He had escaped to a haunt
unknown; he had gone with his calling pipe and his sloppy face and his great,
grinning eyes.
Hansi came behind me, snatched me away from the window, threw me on the
bed. His big chest was heaving but his features were as though set in stone. Having
reached its extreme my emotional pendulum was now on its back-swing, a revulsion