"Farewell Summer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

CHAPTER Twenty

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, DOUG WOKE TO THAT terrible boredom that only sleep ensures.

It was then, listening to Tom's chuffing breath, deep in an ice-floe summer hibernation, that Doug lifted his arms and wiggled his fingers, like a tuning fork; a gentle vibration ensued. He felt his soul move through an immense timberland.

His feet, shoeless, drifted to the floor and he leaned south to pick up the gentle radio waves of his uncle, down the block. Did he hear the elephant sound of Tantor summoning an ape-boy? Or, half through the night, had Grandpa, next door, fallen in a grave of slumber, dead to the world, gold specs on his nose, with Edgar Allan Poe shelved to his right and the Civil War dead, truly dead, to his left, waiting in his sleep, it seemed, for Doug to arrive?

So, striking his hands together and wiggling his fingers, Doug made one final vibration of his literary tuning fork and moved with quiet intuition toward his grandparents' house.

Grandpa, in his grave of sleep, whispered a call.

Doug was out the midnight door so fast he almost forgot to catch the screen before it slammed.

Ignoring the elephant trumpet behind, he barefooted into his grandparents' house.

There in the library slept Grandpa, awaiting the breakfast resurrection, open for suggestions.

Now, at midnight, it was the unlit time of the special school, so Doug leaned forward and whispered in Grandpa's ear, "1899."

And Gramps, lost in another time, murmured of that year and how the temperature was and what the people were like moving in that town.

Then Douglas said, "1869."

And Grandpa was lost four years after Lincoln was shot.

Standing there, watching, Douglas realized that if he visited here night after night and spoke to Grandpa, Grandpa, asleep, would be his teacher and that if he spent six months or a year or two years coming to this special long-after-midnight school, he would have an education that nobody else in the world would have. Grandpa would give his knowledge as a teacher, without knowing it, and Doug would drink it in and not tell Tom or his parents or anybody.

"That's it," whispered Doug. "Thank you, Grandpa, for all you say, asleep or awake. And thanks again for today and your advice on the purloineds. I don't want to say any more. I don't want to wake you up."

So Douglas, his ears full up and his mind full brimmed, left his grandpa sleeping there and crept toward the stairs and the tower room because he wanted to have one more encounter with the night town and the moon.

Just then the great clock across town, an immense moon, a full moon of stunned sound and round illumination, cleared its ratchety throat and let free a midnight sound.

One.

Douglas climbed the stairs. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Reaching the tower window, Douglas looked out upon an ocean of rooftops and the great monster clock tower as time summed itself up.

Six. Seven.

His heart floundered.

Eight. Nine.

His flesh turned to snow. Ten. Eleven.

A shower of dark leaves fell from a thousand trees.

Twelve!

Oh my God, yes, he thought.

The clock! Why hadn't he thought of that?

The clock!