"Robert R McCammon - They Thirst" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

said with a smile that was more like a grimace, Do your schoolwork now.
It was three days since he had gone. Now demons laughed and danced in the
fire, and some terrible, intangible thing had entered the house to sit in the
empty chair before the hearth, to sit between the boy and the woman at their
evening meals, to follow them around like a gust of black ash blown by an
errant wind.
The corners of the two-room house grew cold as the stack of wood slowly
dwindled, and the boy could see a faint wraith of mist whirl from his mother's
nostrils whenever she let out her breath.
"I'll take the axe and get more wood," the boy said, starting to rise from his
chair.
"No!" cried his mother quickly, and glanced up. Their gray eyes met and held
for a few seconds. "What we have will last through the night. It's too dark
out now. You can wait until first light."
"But what we have isn't enough-"
"I said you'll wait until morning!" She looked away almost at once, as if
ashamed. Her knitting needles glinted in the firelight, slowly shaping a
sweater for the boy. As he sat down again, he saw the shotgun in the far
corner of the room. It glowed a dull red in the firelight, like a watchful eye
in the gloom. And now the fire flared, spun, cracked; ashes churned, whirled
up the chimney and out.
The boy watched, heat striping his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose,
while his mother rocked in the chair behind him, glancing down occasionally at
her son's sharp profile.
In that fire the boy saw pictures coming together, linking into a living
mural: he saw a black wagon drawn by two white horses with funeral plumes,
their cold breath coming out in clouds. In that wagon a simple, small coffin.
Men and women in black, some shivering, some sobbing. Others following the
wagon, boots crunching through a crust of snow. Muttered sounds. Faces layered
with secrets.
Hooded, fearful eyes that stared out toward the gray and purple rise of the
Jaeger Mountains. The Griska boy lay in that coffin, and what remained of him
was now being carried by the procession to the cemetery where the lelkesz
waited.
Death. It had always seemed so cold and alien and distant to the boy,
something that belonged not to his world, nor to the world of his mama and
papa, but rather to the world that Grandmother Elsa had lived in when she was
sick and yellow- fleshed. Papa had used the word then-dying. When you're in
the room with her, you must be very quiet because she can't sing to you
anymore, and all she wants to do now is sleep. To the boy death was a time
when all songs ceased and you were happy only when your eyes were closed. Now
he stared at that funeral wagon in his memory until the log collapsed and the
tendrils of flame sprang up in a different place. He remembered hearing
whispers among the black-garbed villagers of Krajeck: A terrible thing. Only
eight years old. God has him now.
God? Let us hope and pray that it is indeed God who has Ivon Griska.
The boy remembered. He had watched the coffin being lowered by a rope and
pulley into the dark square in the earth while the lelkesz stood intoning
blessings and waving his crucifix. The casket had been nailed shut and then
bound with barbed wire. Before the first shovelful of dirt was thrown, the