Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 24

In the darkness there was a sound of drumming, warm broad hands slapping loose skins (skin maybe still growing on some animal’s hollow flank, not yet stretched over the dug-out wooden round of a drum). With the drumming the light returned, warm like torchlight, though there were no torches nor torchbearers to be seen, as if the hands that drummed were fanning flames. Like a river of pulsing fire away and down to her left, illuminating the gallery wall to the right of her and above . . . and the gallery was big, enormously hollow, like the halls of cathedrals in other countries maybe, that she might have seen in photos, on TV.

On the right wall and spreading up onto the ceiling above were bison, such a stampede of bison as she had never seen (even if she was really only seeing them projected on the lids of her closed eyes), magnificent in umber and ocher, humping their weighty shoulders out of the natural curve of the rock, bigger too, it seemed to her, than the ordinary buffalo still to be found here and about on the ranches or even ground up and packaged in the meat counters of the groceries around where Julie lived her daylight life. Among them too were antlers, not deer, she thought, but elk. And they looked at her in the same way as the bear had done before (where had the bear gone, then?). The eye of each animal person was upon her, like it knew her. Even though there were so many of them in this procession, which seemed at times perfectly orderly, as if every animal knew and followed the same purpose, and at other times seemed completely anarchic, as though all of them were caught up in a flood.

As the light faded, the panorama fractured into the pattern of brightly branching dots she’d seen before, though now and then from the vortex she could still pick out a horn, an antler or a clear bright eye. She moved beside the stream, her bare heels (what had happened to her shoes?) sinking into heel prints made by others long ago in what had once been clay. She was hurrying, before the light failed entirely, toward another narrow opening at the lower end of this great hall, into which the animal persons also seemed to swirl, and she felt somehow certain that on the other side of the slit portal there would be a human being, its head sprouted with horns.