"Let's All Kill Constance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray Douglas)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I STOPPED just outside the crimson doors, for as clearly as if he were calling, I heard Father Rattigan shout, "Lamentable!"

Which made me pull out Rattigan's Book of the Dead.

I had only looked for names, now I looked for a place. There it was under the Gs: Grauman's. Followed by an address and a name: Clyde Rustler.

Rustler, I thought, my God, he retired from acting in 1920 after working with Griffith and Gish and getting involved with Dolly Dimples's bathtub death. And here was his name-alive?-on a boulevard where they buried you without warning and erased you from history the way dear Uncle Joe Stalin rubbed out his pals, with a shotgun eraser.

And, my heart thumped, there was red ink around his name and a double crucifix.

Rattigan— I looked at the dark beyond the red door-

Rattigan, yes, but Clyde Rustler, are you here, too? I reached and grasped one brass handle and a voice behind me announced bleakly: "There's nothing inside to steal!"

A gaunt homeless guy stood to my right, dressed in various shades of gray, speaking to the universe. He felt my gaze.

"Go ahead." I read his lips. "You got nothing to lose."

Plenty to win, I thought, but how do you excavate a big Chinese tomb filled with black-and-white flicker film clips, an aviary of birds shuttling the air, fireworks ricocheting a big ravenous screen, as swift as memory, as quick as remorse?

The homeless man waited for me to self-destruct with remembrance. I nodded. I smiled.

And as quickly as Rattigan, I sank into die theater's darkness.