"Elizabeth Hand - Winter's Wife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

WinterтАЩs Wife
ELIZABETH HAND

One of the most respected writers of her generation, Elizabeth Hand won
both the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award for her story тАЬLast
Summer at Mars Hill,тАЭ and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy
Award on a number of other occasions as well. Her books include the
novels Winterlong, Aestival Tide, Icarus Descending, Image of Support,
Waking the Moon, Glimmering, and Black Light. SheтАЩs also written a
num-ber of Star Wars novels, including Maze of Deception, Hunted, A
New Threat, and Pursuit, and movie novelizations such as Twelve
Monkeys, Anna and the King, Cat-woman, and The Affair of the Necklace.
Her acclaimed short fiction, which has ap-peared in most of the major
markets in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, has been collected in Last
Summer at Mars Hill, Bibliomancy, and Saffron & Brimstone. Her most
recent book is the novel Mortal Love. Coming up is a new novel,
Generation Loss. She lives with her family in Lincolnville, Maine.

In theтАФappropriately enoughтАФchilling story that follows, she
shows us what happens when all the money and influence and bright
shiny gadgets of the modern world come into conflict with ancient magic.
Magic old and slow and cold, and as immovable as rock.

****



W
INTERтАЩS real name was Roderick Gale Winter. But everyone in Paswegas
County, not just me and people who knew him personally, called him
Winter. He lived in an old school bus down the road from my house, and my
mother always tells how when she first moved here he scared the crap out
of her. It wasnтАЩt even him that scared her, she hadnтАЩt even met him yet; just
the fact that there was this creepy-looking old school bus stuck in the
middle of the woods, with smoke coming out of a chimney and these huge
piles of split logs around and trucks and cranes and heavy equipment, and
in the summer all kinds of chain saws and stuff, and in the fall deer and
dead coyotes hanging from this big pole that my mother said looked like a
gallows, and blood on the snow, and once a gigantic dead pigтАЩs head with
tusks, which my mother said was scarier even than the coy-otes. Which,
when you think of it, does sound pretty bad, so you canтАЩt blame her for
being freaked out. ItтАЩs funny now because she and Winter are best friends,
though that doesnтАЩt mean so much as it does other places, like Chicago,
where my mother moved here from, because I think everyone in Shaker
Harbor thinks Winter is their friend.

The school bus, when you get inside it, is sweet.

WinterтАЩs family has been in Shaker Harbor for six generations, and
even before that they lived somewhere else in Maine.