"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 3 - Dog Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Joanna could almost see her tap her forehead, indicative of her frequently voiced suspicion that
Joanna's roommate hailed from the far side of the Twilight Zone. "Is he psychic?"
"Y-yes," said Joanna slowly. He wasn't, exactly, but it was one of the simpler explanations.
She heard Ruth sigh. "I didn't used to believe in it," she said. "But after you were gone last
fall ... I don't know. And there's something about Antryg ... Maybe it's just that he believes it
himself, until you get to believe it, too."
"There is that," Joanna agreed. She recalled Antryg's application for his bartending job at
Enyart's. He'd seen no incongruity in listing "wizard" as a former occupation. "Not that I was
ever paid for it, you understand," he had hastened to explain to Jim, the manager, who nodded and
gave him the job. Jim had lived in L.A. a long time.
"The thing is," Ruth went on, "Jim says he sees auras-personal auras around people, that kind of
stuff. And he says Antryg has the damnedest one he's ever seen. So I was wondering ... "
She hesitated again, and Joanna felt, as clearly as if someone, something, had come up and laid a



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clawed hand upon her shoulder from behind, that she knew what Ruth was going to say.
And the cold fear of it shrank in her viscera, as it had one night two years ago, when she'd
returned to the locked apartment and found a cigarette stub on the edge of the bathroom sink.
"The riverbed ... " She heard the ghost-quick intake of Ruth's shaken breath.
"You've been there?"
Joanna shut her eyes. So Ruth knew about it. That meant it really was real.
She felt cold.
It hadn't been precisely a dream. It had come to her waking and in daytime, like the sudden
recollection of something dreamed days ago, only she knew she had never actually dreamed any such
thing. In a vision-flash of quasi-memory, she had seen herself walking along the bed of one of Los
Angeles' notorious cement-paved rivers, something she knew down to the molecules of her bone
marrow she had never done and would never do. But the memory was so vivid, it nearly blinded her:
the heat of the May sun beating on her tousled, too-curly blond hair, the scuff of her sneakers in
the thin yellow-gray dust, the Hispanic graffiti on the concrete retaining walls that rose around
her, and the pale pinks and greens of the sixties tract houses visible above them. One house,
defiant heliotrope, stood out among them like a biker at a CPA convention.
The very clothes she'd had on at the moment of the vision-the slightly newer jeans and white
tuxedo shirt, currently lying half-folded over the edge of the bed, which she'd worn to
Galaxsongs' office that morning-had clothed her in the ... dream? vision? Please don't let it be a
premonition ...
And more vivid than any of the rest was the memory of the fear that lifted like heat shimmer from
the cement.
She couldn't recall what she'd been afraid of, though she dimly sensed it had to do with something
on the ground: tracks, writing, something drawn among the dry, spreading rings of parching bull-
thorns on the earthquake-cracked pavement of the wash.
But it was the fear that came back to her most clearly now, five hours later, sitting in her
dining-room-cum-office on the phone with Ruth, the sun klieg-light bright outside the half-drawn
drapes on the windows and the heavy, throbbing heartbeat of rising rush hour leaking faintly in
from Victory Boulevard outside.
"Joanna?" Ruth sounded worried at the long silence.
Joanna took a deep breath, telling herself firmly that there was nothing to be afraid of in that