"Diane Duane - Feline Wizards 2 - Majesty's Wizardly Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

flee, this time getting it right and going back the way he had come.
He ran splashing through the stinking mud, and, for all the screaming
in his head, ran mute: ran pell-mell back toward sanity, toward the
light, and (without knowing how he did it) finally out into the bare-
bulb brilliance of the Underground station, where he collapsed, still
silent, but with the screaming ringing unending in his mind,
insistently expressing what the shocked and gasping lungs could not.

Later those screams would burst out at odd times: in the middle of
the night, or in the gray hour before dawn when dreams are true,
startling his mother and father awake and leaving Patel sitting
frozen, bolt upright in bed, sweating and shaking, mute again. After
several years, some cursory-psychotherapy which did nothing to reveal
the promptly and thoroughly buried memory causing the distress, and a
course of a somewhat overprescribed mood elevator, the screaming
stopped. But when he and his wife and new family moved to the
country, later in his life, Patel was never easy about being in any
wooded place in the wintertime, at dusk. The naked limbs of the
trees, all held out stiff against the falling night and moving,
moving slightly, would speak to some buried memory which would leave
him silent and shaking for hours. Nor was he ever able to explain, to
Sasha, or to his parents, or anyone else, exactly what had happened
to his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his
family and friends thought he had been robbed and assaulted, perhaps
indecently: they left the matter alone. They were right: though as
regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more
wrong.

Patel fled too soon ever to see the men who came down along Cooper's
Row after a little while, talking among themselves: men who paused
curiously at the sight of the dropped book, then stooped to pick it
up. One of them produced a kerchief and wiped the worst of the mud
away from the strange material which covered the contents. Another
reached out and slowly, carefully peeled the slick, thin white stuff
away, revealing the big heavy book. A third took the book from the
second man and turned the pages, marveling at the paper, the quality
of the printing, the embossing on the cover. They moved a little down
the street to where it met Great Tower Street, where the light was
better: as they paused there, a ray of sun suddenly pierced down
through the bleak sky above them, that atypical winter's sky here at
the thin end of summer. One of the men looked up at this in surprise,
for sun had been a rare sight of late. In that brief bright light the
other two men leaned over the pages, read the words there, and became
increasingly excited. Shortly the three of them hurried away with the
book, unsure whether they held in their hands an elaborate fraud or
some kind of miracle. Behind and above them, the clouds shut again,
and a gloom like premature night once more fell over the Thames
estuary ... a darkness in which those who had ears to hear could
detect, at the very fringes of comprehension, the sound of a slowly
stirring laughter.