"Smith, Clark Ashton - The Flower Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

The Flower Devil

by Clark Ashton Smith

[From "Poems in Prose" Clark Ashton Smith, 1964: Arkham House Publishers.]


In a basin of porphyry, at the summit of a pillar of serpentine, the thing has
existed from primeval time, in the garden of the kings that rule an equatorial
realm of the planet Saturn. With black foliage, fine and intricate as the web of
some enormous spider; with petals of livid rose, and purple like the purple of
putrefying flesh; and a stem rising like a swart and hairy wrist from a bulb so
old, so encrusted with the growth of centuries that it resembles an urn of
stone, the monstrous flower holds dominion over all the garden. In this flower,
from the years of oldest legend, an evil demon has dwelt- a demon whose name and
whose nativity are known to the superior magicians and mysteriarchs of the
kingdom, but to none other. Over the half-animate flowers, the ophidian orchids
that coil and sting, the bat-like lilies that open their ribbиd petals by night,
and fasten with tiny yellow teeth on the bodies of sleeping dragonflies; the
carnivorous cacti that yawn with green lips beneath their beards of poisonous
yellow prickles; the plants that palpitate like hearts, the blossoms that pant
with a breath of poisonous perfume - over all these, the Flower-Devil is
supreme, in its malign immortality, and evil, perverse intelligence- inciting
them to strange maleficence, fantastic mischief, even to acts of rebellion
against the gardeners, who proceed about their duties with wariness and
trepidation, since more than one of them has been bitten, even unto death, by
some vicious and venefic flower. In places, the garden has run wild from lack of
care on the part of the fearful gardeners, and has become a monstrous tangle of
serpentine creepers, and hydra-headed plants, convolved and inter-writhing in
lethal hate or venomous love, and horrible as a rout of wrangling vipers and
pythons.

And, like his innumerable ancestors before him, the king dares not
destroy the Flower, for fear that the devil, driven from its habitation, might
seek a new home, and enter into the brain or body of one of the king's subjects-
or even the heart of his fairest and gentlest, and most beloved queen!