"James Herbert - Soul Catcher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert James)

being brought from Walla Walla.

The manhunt began yesterday with discovery at the exclusive Six Rivers boys' camp that
young Marshall was missing and that a so-called kidnap note had been left behind. The
note reportedly was signed by Hobuhet with his pseudonym "Katsuk" and threatened to
sacrifice the boy in an ancient Indian ceremony.

***
The note left at Cedar Cabin, Six Rivers, by Charles Hobuhet-Katsuk:

I take an innocent of your people to sacrifice for all of the innocents you have murdered.
The Innocent will go with all of those other innocents into the spirit place. Thus will
sky and earth balance.

I am Katsuk who does this to you. Think of me only as Katsuk, not as Charles Hobuhet. I
am something far more than a sensory system and its appetites. I am evolved far beyond
you who are called hoquat. I look backward to see you. I see your lives based on
cowardice. Your judgments arise from illusions. You tell me unlimited growth and
consumption are good. Then your biologists tell me this is cancerous and lethal. To
which hoquat should I listen? You do not listen. You think you are free to do anything
that comes into your minds. Thinking this, you remain afraid to liberate your spirits
from restraint.

Katsuk will tell you why this is. You fear to create because your creations mirror your
true selves. You believe your power resides in an ultimate knowledge which you forever
seek as children seek parental wisdom. I learned this while watching you in your hoquat
schools. But now I am Katsuk, a greater power. I will sacrifice your flesh. I will
strike through to your spirit. I have the root of your tree in my power.

***
On the day he was to leave for camp, David Marshall had awakened early. It was two weeks
after his thirteenth birthday. David thought about being thirteen as he stretched out in
the morning warmth of his bed. There was some internal difference that came with being
thirteen. It was not the same as twelve, but he couldn't pin down the precise difference.

For a time he played with the sensation that the ceiling above his bed actually fluttered
as his eyelids resisted opening to the day. There was sunshine out in that day, a light
broken by its passage through the big-leaf maple which shaded the window of his upstairs
bedroom.

Without opening his eyes, he could sense the world around his home -- the long, sloping
lawns, the carefully tended shrubs and flowers. It was a world full of slow calm.
Thinking about it sometimes, he felt a soft drumbeat of exaltation.

David opened his eyes. For a moment, he pretended the faint shadow marks in the ceiling's
white plaster were a horizon: range upon range of mountains dropping down to drift-piled
beaches.

Mountains . . . beaches -- he'd see such things tomorrow when he went to camp.