"Charles L. Grant - Raven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

frowned again.
Okay, so if it isn't a storm, but it feels like a storm, what are we talking about here?
"Male menopause," he muttered, chuckling, and climbed the stairs, unlocked the door and reached around the
frame to turn the living-room light on. Now that he was here, he would have to find something to bring back to keep
Julia from ragging him for the rest of the night. But what? The account books, or a clean shirt, or what the hell did it
matter? He'd gotten his air, cleaned out his lungs, spooked himself royally, and decided that the Holgates were too
stupid to care about and too stupid to live. Julia's razor tongue he could live with, for a while.
A car pulled into the lot.
He turned the light back off and closed the door, feeling like a jerk.
The owl called as he started back.
Deep in the woods, something squealed, screamed, and died.




The moon died a few seconds later.
He saw it happen.
Standing on the stoop, hand ready to open the door, he looked up and saw the smoke. Cloud smoke. Drifting across
the face of the moon.
A gust of wind rattled the trees across the road.
 A band of dead leaves slipped under the fence and scrab-bled toward him, vanishing under the chassis of a large,
unfamiliar automobile parked beside Kenny's van.
The moon died, slipping into the black slowly, crater by crater, star by star.
Something flew over the restaurant, the single flap of its wings like a sheet snapped in the wind.




They sat in the back corner booth, two women and a man, Julia taking their order, one hip cocked. She glared at him
as he came down the steps from the restaurant; he shrugged and moved around the bar's comer where it made a
rounded right turn to let the customers there look outside without having to leave their stools. Eight feet later it ended,
the rest rooms back there, a trapdoor leading down to the storeroom, and a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. He
pushed in and sighed at the warmth, the feel of steam.
"Willie?"
The small kitchen was mostly stainless steel and tile, a huge freezer, three ovens, a cozy alcove in the far corner
where Willie had a shelf he used as a desk when he needed to study and had some free time, a marked calendar on the
wall, a schedule of meals, a list of things Neil needed to order. Fluorescent lights embedded in the acoustical ceil-ing.
A center island of cabinets overhung with pots and pans and utensils he'd never been sure were any use, and topped
by a six-foot-long butcher's block scarred with blade marks and faintly stained with juice and blood.
"Hey, Willie."
A door looked out toward the cabins hidden by the fence and a wandering stand of black oak. Along the
flag-stones, marking the way, he and Willie had set electric lamps on three-foot black posts. They were out now as he
peered through the pane, shading his eyes against the room's glare. It didn't take him long; Willie was on one knee by
the gateless opening in the fence. In one hand he had a shoe box, in the other a trowel he used to scoop something up
from a patch of dead weeds.
Oh lord, he thought, and stepped away, waited, and when Willie walked back in, cheeks red and lips trembling, he
said, "What is it now?"
Ennin gasped in surprise, sputtered, hunched and hur-ried to his alcove where he dropped the box onto the desk.
He muttered something, shrugged, pushed past Neil to a sink where he began to wash his hands.
"Willie, what was it?"