Читать книгу A Graveyard for Lunatics - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 19

14

On our way back into the commissary I saw that Manny’s table still stood empty and waiting. I froze, staring at his place.

“Damn fool,” I whispered.

Roy shook the box behind me. It rustled.

“Sure am,” he said gladly. “Move.”

I moved to my place.

Roy placed his special box on the floor, winked at me, and sat at the far end of the table, smiling the smile of the innocent and the perfect.

Fritz glared at me as if my absence had been a personal insult.

“Pay attention!” Fritz snapped his fingers. “The introductions continue!” He pointed along the table. “Next is Stanislau Groc, Nikolai Lenin’s very own makeup man, the man who prepared Lenin’s body, waxed the face, paraffined the corpse to lie in state for all these years in the Kremlin wall in Moscow in Soviet Russia!”

“Lenin’s makeup man?” I said.

“Cosmetologist.” Stanislau Groc waved his small hand above his small head above his small body.

He was hardly larger than one of the Singer’s Midgets who played Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.

“Bow and scrape to me,” he called. “You write monsters. Roy Holdstrom builds them. But I rouged, waxed, and polished a great red monster, long dead!”

“Ignore the stupefying Russian bastard,” said Fritz. “Observe the chair next to him!”

An empty place.

“For who?” I asked.

Someone coughed. Heads turned.

I held my breath.

And the Arrival took place.