"duane,.dianne.-.spider.man.-.octopus.agenda" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

who had actually started up the coal mining industry.

That had been a long time ago, near the end of the last century. The
town and the industry had been very successful, and for many years the
town's people had come to depend on "Welleston money" for their
livelihoods. But things shifted. Things always shifted.

And that was why Welleston spent thirty years as a crumbling ghost
town, and another thirty as the memory of a ghost town. And why Jim
was now sitting in a tacky little box of a portable guardroom at 2:30
in the morning. Once again he was blinking in the harsh, faintly
flickering glare of fluorescent light, trying to do a crossword puzzle
that didn't interest him, trying to stay

awake. Trying to be a security guard for something which was no
longer a coal mine.

The room was just slightly larger than a walk-in closet. It had walls
the color of adhesive tape, and no floor except the plain,
poured-concrete base that it had been plumped down on. It was damp;
even on a hot summer's night it was damp, and the screens on the
window, though they looked effective, weren't quite fine-meshed enough,
or well enough fitted to the windows, to keep out the blackflies. The
insects happily descended on Jim as a kind of movable feast, and left
itching red welts on any part of him that wasn't covered (as well as
some that were). So, for most of the night, Jim tended to sit with the
light turned off, to avoid attracting them. Should one or another of
his bosses turn up (one of the rarest of occurrences, particularly
after they had met the blackflies) his excuse came easily: having that
fluorescent tube turned off helped his night-vision, and made it easier
for him to see what was going on outside. Not that anything much ever
did go on outside here, except for the sound of the occasional crazed
moose or deer crashing through the woodland surrounding the place.

The quiet was endemic in Dolgeville and its environs. The township was
a remote place, buried well away from any really big town. Nestled
deep in the foothills at the southern end of the Adirondacks, it sat in
an undulating landscape of granite- boned hills clothed in conifer and
hardwood forest. Even when the coal mining had been at its height,
very few people had ever come there except on business. Since that
business had mostly involved coal in one form or another, society had
been limited to those who dug the coal and their families, those who
main mined or replaced the machinery for those who dug the coal, and
those who came to truck the coal away. There had been a constant
grubbiness about everything and everybody, a fine

black dust that got under your nails and into your pores and into the
grooves of your fingerprints. In those days, the whole world had
looked the same: gray and dingy, with the exception of a brief period
in autumn when the trees flamed through the coal dust and then dropped