"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Spirit Dump" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Roger grinned at him and shrugged. "Suze told us about this place," he said, "So we thought we'd
check it out."
 Paul stared at him for a moment, then stamped on up to the edge of the cliff and peered over, forcing
himself to not just look, but to see.
The mass of spiritual debris lay upon the barren slope, stretching a hundred yards in either direction,
but with the largest concentration directly below him. And there were dozens of new additions since his
last visit-- most of them small, most of them thin and gray and relatively harmless-looking, but still,dozens
. More, he thought, than had been added in all the years he had been coming here.
"What have you been throwing down there?" he bellowed.
"Nothing much," someone answered.
"A hangover," someone else said, evoking laughter from two or three others. Paul saw that it was one
of the strangers, a big, overweight man with ragged black hair. He was holding an open can of beer.
"A hangover? For Christ's sake, a hangover goes away by itself!"
"Yeah, well, I'd rather have it doing it down there than in me," the fat man retorted.
"And how do you know it will? Maybe it'll just sit down there and fester!" Paul shouted.
"So what?"
"So d'you want this to fill up? What happens then?"
The fat man shrugged.
"Damn it, you get down there and get that hangover back!" Paul ordered.
The fat man snorted. "You're crazy," he said.
"Get down there!"
"Make me."
Paul charged.
The fat man sidestepped and swung an arm to fend off his attacker; Paul, half-blind with fury and the
pain of his headache, stumbled directly into the blow.
At first he didn't know what had happened; he knew he was falling, that the grass had gone out from
underneath his feet, but he thought he would land on his back on the meadow.
Then he realized that it was taking too long, and an instant later he slammed backward into the bare
dirt and rolled, involuntarily.
He tried to catch himself, but all he managed to do was to turn his roll into a slide; he still wound up at
the bottom of the slope.
At the bottom of the slope, and underneath the contents of the dump.
Despair washed over him, thick gray drowning despair, as he lay on his back, trying to gather his
senses. He stared up at a sky gone the color of mud and a sun gone dim and brown, and the futility of it
all filled him, pressed down on him. Simply to breathe took an effort, and it was horribly tempting to just
stop, to let his breath out and forget to take another...
He reached up and pushed the thing off him, and the sun was bright again, the sky blue. His head still
hurt, and one foot stung oddly, but the suffocating hopelessness was gone.
Whoever had thrown that down here, he thought, had done the right thing.
He looked around. He was sitting on the bare dirt, near the bottom of the slope, and all around him
were the vague, indistinct shapes and colors of the dump's contents. Above, at the top of the slope,
Roger and half a dozen strangers were staring worriedly down at him.
It didn't look like a particularly difficult climb-- except that it went right through the center of the
dump.
Frowning, he looked around. Could he go down the slope the rest of the way, and around?
No; the dump extended well past him, down to the trees, almost as great a distance as that to the
meadow atop the ridge. And the walk around either end would be a good, long one, from the look of it.
So he would just have to climb straight up the slope.
"Are you all right?" Roger called.
"I'm okay," Paul called back.