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

ONE

A cool night in late September, a Wednesday, and clear- the moon pocked
with grey shadows, and a scattering of stars too bright to be masked by
the lights scattered below; the chilled breath of a faint wind that
gusted now and then, carrying echoes of nightsounds born in the trees,
pushing dead leaves in the gutters, rolling acorns in the eaves,
snapping hands and faces with a grim promise of winter.

A cool night in late September, a Wednesday, and dark.

... and so the boy, who really wasn't a bad kid but nobody really knew
that because of all the things he had done, he looked up in the tree ...

And from the Hudson River to a point midway across New Jersey, the land
climbed in easy steps toward the Appalachian chain. The forests were
gone and so were most of the pastures, replaced by communities that grew
in quick time into small towns and small cities, pieces of a jigsaw fit
too close together.
One piece was Ashford, a piece not the largest, settled on

2

the first of those low curving plateaus, its drop facing south, low
hills at its back. From the air it was indistinguishable from any of its
neighbors-just a concentration of lights, glints on the edge of a long
ebony razor.

... and he saw the crow sitting on the highest branch in the biggest
tree in the world. A big crow. The biggest crow he had ever seen in his
life. And the boy knew, he really and truly knew, that the crow was
going to be the only friend he had left in the world. So he talked to
the crow and he said ...

The park was in the exact center of town, five blocks deep and three
long blocks wide, surrounded by a four-foot stone wall with a concrete
cap worn down in places by the people who sat there to watch the traffic
go by. At the north end was a small playing field with a portable
bandstand erected now behind home plate, illuminated by a half-dozen
spotlights aimed at it from the sides; and the folding chairs, the lawn
chairs, the tartan blankets and light autumn jackets covered the
infield, protecting the large audience from the dust of the basepaths
and the spiked dying grass slowly fading to brown.

A student-painted banner fluttered and billowed over the handstand's
domed peak, unreadable now that twilight had gone, but everyone knew it
proclaimed with some flair the approach of Ashford Day in just over a
month. The concert was a free preview of the events scheduled for the
week-long celebration-a century-and-a-half and still going strong.