Читать книгу One Night in Copan: Chronicles of Madness Foretold Tales of Mystery, Fantasy and Horror - W. E. Gutman - Страница 12

DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION

You can’t be free to become what you want when you’re starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery [in a society] where the free development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many.

Terry Eagleton

Across town, two derelicts identified by police as Floyd Horton, 39, and Cecil Glenville, 42, froze to death overnight in their dreams. They were found huddled on a bench at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on East 47^th Street, a stone’s-throw away from the United Nations building. They’d wrapped themselves in newsprint and plastic sheeting to ward off the cold but New York’s bitter winter night claimed them just the same. Their bodies had stiffened and turned blue when they were carted away.

Horton’s remains were cremated free of charge by the City. His ashes, as are those unclaimed by family or friend, now fatten the soil at an upstate experimental horticultural farm.

Glenville, who had a cousin in Connecticut, was buried in a pine box with a plain metal marker at the local potter’s field.

A week later, requesting anonymity, Glenville’s cousin had the body exhumed for reburial at the family crypt in Darien. When the coffin was unsealed, Glenville was found lying face down, his knuckles caked with blood, his fingernails torn off. His eyes were wide open, his mouth agape in silent horror. A crimson crust coated his nostrils and lips.

Cryogenics Unlimited, the outfit that keeps utopians on ice until the elusive Lazarus Factor is synthesized, was called in to inspect Glenville’s remains. Hard at work on the development of an enzyme that offers the dead another lease on life, technicians at Cryogenics Unlimited theorized that Glenville had somehow thawed and slowly stirred back to consciousness like a hibernating toad.

“Realizing he’d been entombed alive, [Glencille] must have suffered a massive heart attack,” read the coroner’s report. Glenville was cremated and not even the Lazarus Factor can help him now.

Floyd Horton, his misery reduced to phosphate-rich sublimates, endows long-stem pink roses with a very special blush.