"Charles De Lint - Spiritwalk" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

out the window over the garden, her guitar on her lap, the quilt bunched up under her knees. Up by the
headboard, Julie Simms leaned forward from its carved wood to look over Sara's shoulder at what could
be seen of the garden from their vantage point.

"It sure looks big enough," she said.

Sara nodded. Her eyes had taken on a dreamy look.

In was 1969 and they had decided to form a folk band-Sara on guitar, Julie playing recorder, both of
them singing. They wanted to change the world with music because that was what was happening. In San
Francisco. In London. In Vancouver. So why not in Ottawa?

With their faded bell-bottomed jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they looked just like any of the other
seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into
coffeehouses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was longтАФSara's a cascade of
brown ringlets, Julie's a waterfall spill the color of a raven's wing; they wore beads and feather earrings
and both eschewed makeup.

"I used to think it spoke to me," Sara said.

"What? The garden?"

"Um-hmm."

"What did it say?"

The dreaminess in Sara's eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.

"I can't remember," she said.
It was three years after her parents had diedтАФwhen she was nine years oldтАФthat Sara Kendell came to
live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was
huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city
block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.

She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that lay spread like
a maze from the northwest tower near Bank StreetтАФwhere her bed-room was locatedтАФall the way
over to her uncle's study overlooking O'Connor Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent
her time in the Library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were
walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display
cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.

There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of
birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; Kabuki
masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanesenetsuke and
porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; Kachina dolls and a brass riddle, half the
size of a normal instrumentтАж

The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through
one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her
most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter