Night Freight (Bill Pronzini) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. 21)

Probably my best-known horror story, "Peekaboo" was written for a Charles Grant–edited anthology called Nightmares. Written backward, in a sense, because the plot evolved from the last line, which magically appeared one morning in my overheated brain, rather than devolved to it as is usually the case. It's one of those exercises in cauld grue that depends for its effects not so much on the author's imagination as on the reader's. The real horror here lies in what happens after the last line—and I'll bet that in nine out of ten cases, the reader's version is nastier and more terrifying than my own would be.