Читать книгу Imajica - Clive Barker, Clive Barker - Страница 29

Pie’oh’pah sat on the step of his trailer, and stared up at the night sky. In their beds behind him, his adopted wife and children slept. In the heavens above him, the stars were burning behind a blanket of sodium-tinted cloud. He had seldom felt more alone in his long life than now. Since returning from New York he had been in a state of constant anticipation. Something was going to happen to him and his world, but he didn’t know what. His ignorance pained him, not simply because he was helpless in the face of this imminent event, but because his inability to grasp its nature was testament to how his skills had deteriorated. The days when he could read futurities off the air had gone. He was more and more a prisoner of the here and now. That here, the body he occupied, was also less than its former glory. It was so long since he’d corresponded the way he had with Gentle, taking the will of another as the gospel of his flesh, that he’d almost lost the trick of it. But Gentle’s desire had been potent enough to remind him, and his body still reverberated with echoes of their time together. Though it had ended badly he didn’t regret snatching those minutes. Another such encounter might never come.

He wandered from his trailer towards the perimeter of the encampment. The first light of dawn was beginning to eat at the murk. One of the camp mongrels, back from a night of adventuring, squeezed between two sheets of corrugated iron and came wagging to his side. He stroked the dog’s snout, and tickled behind its battle-ravaged ears, wishing he could find his way back to his home and master so easily.