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

"And what are you?"

"I am Katsuk."

"What are you?" The question thundered at him.

He put down terror, thought: Thunder is not angry. What frightens animals need not
frighten a man. What am I?

The answer came to him as one of his ancestors would have known it. He said: "I am one
who followed the ritual with care. I am one who did not really expect to find the spirit
power."

"Now you know."

All of his thinking turned over, became as unsettled as a pool muddied by a big fish.
What do I know?

The air around him continued full of dappled sunlight and the noise and spray from the
creek. The mushroom-punk smell of a rotten log filled his nostrils. A stately, swaying
leaf shadow brushed purple across the bee on his hand, withdrew.

He emptied his mind of everything except what he needed to know from the spirit poised
upon his hand. He lay frozen in the-moment-of-the-bee. Bee was graceful, fat, and funny.
Bee aroused a qualm of restless memories, rendered his senses abnormally acute. Bee. . .
.

An image of Janiktaht overcame his mind. Misery filled him right out to the skin.
Janiktaht -- sixty nights dead. Sixty nights since she had ended her shame and
hopelessness in the sea.

He had a vision of himself moaning beside Janiktaht's open grave, drunk with anguish, the
swaying wind of the forest all through his flesh.

Awareness recoiled. He thought of himself as he had been once, as a boy heedlessly happy
on the beach, following the tide mark. He remembered a piece of driftwood like a dead
hand outspread on the sand.

Had that been driftwood?

He felt the peril of letting his thoughts flow. Who knew where they might go?
Janiktaht's image faded, vanished as though of its own accord. He tried to recall her
face. It fled him through a blurred vision of young hemlocks . . . a moss-floored stand
of trees where nine drunken loggers had dragged her to . . . one after another, to. . . .

Something had happened to flesh which his mind no longer could contemplate without being
scoured out, denuded of everything except a misshapen object that the ocean had cast up on
a curve of beach where once he had played.
He felt like an old pot, all emotion scraped out. Everything eluded him except the spirit
on the back of his hand. He thought: