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

CHAPTER Twenty-One

THE LAST VIBRATION OF THE GREAT CLOCK BELL faded.

A wind swayed the trees outside and the pekoe curtain hung out on the air, a pale ghost.

Douglas felt his breath siphon.

You, he thought. How come I never noticed?

The great and terrible courthouse clock.

Just last year, hadn't Grandpa laid out the machinery's blueprint, lecturing?

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill, he'd said. Shake down all the grains of Time-the big grains

of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes-and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine at the town's center dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

The clock!

That was the thing that bleached and ruined life, jerked people out of bed, hounded them to schools and graves! Not Quartermain and his band of old men, or Braling and his metronome; it was the clock that ran this town like a church.

Even on the clearest of nights it was misted, glowing, luminous, and old. It rose above town like a great dark burial mound, drawn to the skies by the summoning of the moon, calling out in a grieved voice of days long gone, and days that would come no more, and all was beginning and there was no end.

"So it's you," whispered Douglas.

Midnight, said the clock. Time, it said, Darkness. Flights of night birds flew up to carry the final peal away, out over the lake and into the night country, gone.

Doug yanked down the shade so Time could not blow through the screen.

The clock light shone on the sidings of the house like a mist breathing on the windows.