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

We are like bees, my people -- broken into many pieces, but the pieces remain dangerous.

In that instant, he realized that this creature on his hand must be much more than Changer
-- far, far more than Kwatee.

It is Soul Catcher!

Terror and elation warred with him. This was the greatest of the spirits. It had only to
sting him and he would be invaded by a terrible thing. He would become the bee of his
people. He would do a terrifying thing, a dangerous thing, a deadly thing.

Hardly daring to breathe, he waited.

Would Bee never move? Would they remain this way for all eternity? His mind felt drawn
tight, as tense as a bow pulled to its utmost breaking point. All of his emotions lay
closed up in blackness without inner light or outer light -- a sky of nothingness within
him.

He thought: How strange for a creature so tiny to exist as such spirit power, to be such
spirit power -- Soul Catcher!

One moment there had been no bee on his flesh. Now, it stood there as though flung into
creation by a spray of sunlight, brushed by leaf shadow, the shape of it across a vein,
darkness of the spirit against dark skin.

A shadow across his being.

He saw Bee with intense clarity: the swollen abdomen, the stretched gossamer of wings,
the pollen dust on the legs, the barbed arrow of the stinger.

The message of this moment floated through his awareness, a clear flute sound. If the
spirit went away peacefully, that would signal reprieve. He could return to the
university. Another year, in the week of his twenty-sixth birthday, he would take his
doctorate in anthropology. He would shake off this terrifying wildness which had invaded
him at Janiktaht's death. He would become the imitation white man, lost to these
mountains and the needs of his people.

This thought saddened him. If the spirit left him, it would take both of his souls.
Without souls, he would die. He could not outlast the sorrows which engulfed him.

Slowly, with ancient deliberation, Bee turned short of his knuckles. It was the movement
of an orator gauging his audience. Faceted eyes included the human in their focus. Bee's
thorax arched, abdomen tipped, and he knew a surge of terror in the realization that he
had been chosen.

The stinger slipped casually into his nerves, drawing his thoughts, inward, inward. . . .

He heard the message of Tamanawis, the greatest of spirits, as a drumbeat matching the
beat of his heart: "You must find a white. You must find a total innocent. You must