"Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

excited. The last time the girl was here I was able to question her about her sadness. She was lost, she told
me. She could not find the valley which breathed and the bright stone of her dead father. It is the same. I
know it, I feel it! We must summon her again. We must go beyond the Stone Falls again. I need your help.

Who knows where and when this war will end? My eldest son will be called up soon, and Steven soon
after. I shall have more freedom to explore the wood, and deal with the girl.

Edward, you must come. With kind regards,

George Huxley. December '41.




PART ONE

Mythago Wood
One




In May 1944 I received my call-up papers and went reluctantly away to war, training at first in the Lake
District, then shipping over to France with the 7th Infantry.

On the eve of my final departure I felt so resentful of my father's apparent lack of concern for my safety
that, when he was asleep, I went quietly to his desk and tore a page out of his notebook, the diary in which
his silent, obsessive work was recorded. The fragment was dated simply 'August 34', and I read it many
times, dismayed by its incomprehensibility, but content that I had stolen at least a tiny part of his life with

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 Mythago Wood

which to support myself through those painful, lonely times.

The entry began with a bitter comment on the distractions in his life - the running of Oak Lodge, our
family home, the demands of his two sons, and the difficult relationship with his wife, Jennifer. (By then,
I remember, my mother was desperately ill.) It closed with a passage quite memorable for its incoherence:

A letter from Watkins - agrees with me that at certain times of the year the aura around the woodland could reach as far as
the house. Must think through the implications of this. He is keen to know the power of the oak vortex that I have
measured. What to tell him? Certainly not of the first mythago. Have noticed too that the enrichment of the pre-mythago
zone is more persistent, but concomitant with this, am distinctly losing my sense of time.

I treasured this piece of paper for many reasons, but particularly for the moment or two of my father's
passionate interest that it represented - and yet, it locked me out

of its understanding, as he had locked me out at home. Everything he loved, everything I hated.

I was wounded in early 1945 and when the war finished I managed to stay in France, travelling south to