Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 29

Once, Julie had been riding up an escalator while Jamal (was it Jamal?) was riding down. She didn’t know him then, not really, but the same impulse struck them both at the same time, so that they reached their hands across the gap between the up stairs and the down. Their fingertips brushed with a feathery tingle, for one light instant before the machinery carried them each away on a separate orbit. As if some other life had swung just close enough to hers for that faint touch, then veered off. She didn’t look back after they had passed. The escalators ran in a well of glass walls, and the afternoon sun came pouring through, bathing everyone in a flood of golden light.

The herd of animal persons swirled into the opening at the end of the great hall, which she was now approaching—she was guided by a force she felt inside her, though that force was not her own. Her bare feet fit securely into heel prints that led her through the portal now. The horned being she’d expected to see was not there. She touched the back of her own head with her fingers, and saw again the image of Julie at the bottom of the shaft, lying in the bluish-white glow of her cell-phone screen. Where had the animal persons gone? She had seen them all streaming through the opening into this small round chamber, but now they were nowhere to be found. Her vision fractured, and the pattern of dots streamed in a spiral—she thought that the dots must be the eyes of the animal persons, which had lost their bodies but were still regarding her.

Then they were gone, and her vision steadied. On the curving wall before her she did see a series of little horned heads—no, they were handprints, negative images, a black paint surrounding the pallor of the stone, so that the hands seemed to glow a little, like the phosphorescent plastic stars stuck to the ceiling above her bed at home. One print seemed to attract her hand magnetically, the left one, and when she laid it there it fit so perfectly there was no line around it. Her left hand disappeared entirely into darkness as complete as the velvet black of a starless sky; it sank a little way into soft stone.