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

"Can you get back up?"
"Sure," he said. He got to his feet-- or tried to.
There was something clinging to one leg, something sharp and rusty brown, something that stung, that
seemed to twang every nerve and tendon in his ankle. He winced, reached down, and plucked it off.
It burned his hand, and he flung it quickly aside.
Then he started climbing.
He knew, from his very first step, that he was going to be wading through decades, maybe centuries of
accumulated psychic detritus; he tried to brace himself for it, but he really didn't know how. Nothing he
had ever done had prepared him for something like this.
A green like rotting cheese roiled up his leg, and a rush of envy swept over him. Roger was safe up
there, the smug bastard...
He tore the envy away and took another step, and a rush of guilt flooded him-- how could he think ill
of Roger, who hadn't meant any harm?
He hesitated with that one, and tried an experiment. He reached down and tore off a few fragments--
just little ones, like sickly, gray-black cottonballs.
He hadn't been sure it was possible, but in fact it was easy; easier, he thought, than it should have
been. He was sure he was doing something wrong here, that this was immoral somehow, but he forced
himself.
He collected about a dozen pieces, then wadded them up and stuffed them in his pocket.
He knew he shouldn't be doing it, it was a really terrible idea...
Then his hand came out of his pocket and he smiled; the idea no longer troubled him at all.
"What are you doing there, Paul?" Roger called.
Paul had just tried to squeeze between two very large, nasty-looking things, and in doing so had run
his leg right onto a hot red spike of anger. He snapped his head up and glared at Roger.
"What the hell does it look like I'm doing?" he bellowed. "Fat lot of help you are!"
He shook his leg free of the bad temper and took another step.
This was really very boring. Tiresome. Maybe he should just settle down somewhere and rest until it
got more interesting. Climbing up the slope wasn't any fun...
He waded on, through depression, ennui, anger, envy, guilt, shame, greed-- and some surprises.
Lust, for one. That, he thought, was probably a relic of a more straitlaced era. It was all he could do to
keep his hands out of his pants until he had scrambled up past it.
And pride. Sinful pride, a huge, seething mass of it. He wondered if whoever dumped it had kept any;
the sheer quantity was amazing.
Maybe it had grown, since being dumped. Could it do that?
Any number of questions piled into his mind, and he realized he'd stepped on a lump of curiosity. He
kicked it aside, and lost his balance. He put out an arm to catch himself.
And mindless panic swept over him, abject terror. He froze.
He was near the top, but suddenly he was scared to go any farther.
"Paul?"
He looked up, and Roger's face was there, hanging above him like some looming horror about to
pounce. The dirt was soft and crumbling beneath him; at any moment, he knew he would plummet back
down the slope, he would break his neck against one of those trees at the bottom, he'd slash himself on
the thorns and lie there bleeding and crippled, and Roger would just laugh, Roger had planned it all, the
whole thing, he'd put Suze up to it, her depression wasn't real at all.
They were all in it.
He started to take a step back down the slope, away from his enemy up there, that monster that had
pretended to be a friend, that had lured him into this trap.
Monster-- that was it. Roger wasn't human at all. He was some kind of demon. He'd planned it all,
he'd probably created the spirit dump in the first place just to trap people. He lured his prey out here with
his phony cures, then trapped them in the dump where he could torture them, where he could suck out