Читать книгу The City - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 19

During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.

He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics and suicide. He read novels, as well, but only those full of violence and vengeance and existential despair, and he sometimes was surprised to rise out of a kind of stupor, bitterly cursing the day he was born and the life in which he found himself.

One night, he woke past one o’clock in the morning, at once aware that he had been talking in his sleep, angry and cursing. A moment later, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Although faint, a foul odor filled him with revulsion, and he heard the floorboards creak as something moved restlessly back and forth.

He had fallen asleep half drunk and had left the bedside lamp set low. When he rolled off his side and sat up, he saw a shadowy form on the farther side of the room, a thing that, to this day, he will not more fully describe than to say that it had yellow eyes, that it wasn’t any child of Nature, and that it was no hallucination.

Although Malcolm is superstitious, neurotic in a charming sort of way, and undeniably eccentric, he recounts this incident with such solemnity, with such disquiet, that I’ve never doubted the truth of it. And I can’t hope to convey it as chillingly as he does.

Anyway, he knew that his visitor was demonic and that he had drawn it to him by the acidic quality of his anger and by his deep despair. He realized that he was in grave danger, that death might be the least he had to fear. He threw back the covers and got out of bed in his underwear, and before he realized what he was doing, he went to a nearby armchair and picked up his saxophone, where he had left it earlier. He says that his sister spoke to him, though she was not there with him, spoke in his mind. He can’t recall her exact words. All he remembers is that she urged him to play songs that lifted the heart and to play them with all the passion he could summon—music that made the air sparkle.

With the unwanted visitor circling him, Malcolm played for two hours, at first a lot of doo-wop but then also many numbers written long before the rock ’n’ roll period. Isham Jones tunes like “It Had to Be You” and “Swinging Down the Lane.” Loesser and Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul.” Watson and Monroe’s “Racing with the Moon.” Marks and Simons’s “All of Me.” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” He looked only indirectly at the yellow-eyed presence, afraid that a direct look would encourage it, and after an hour of music, it slowly began to fade. By the end of the second hour, it had been dispelled, but Malcolm continued to play, played passionately and to exhaustion, until his lips were sore and his jaws ached, until he was dripping perspiration and his nose was running nonstop and his vision was blurred by sweat and tears.

Banish-the-devil music. If only it had worked as well on my father—and those with whom he eventually became associated—as it did on that yellow-eyed fiend in the lakeside cabin.