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

flood from her, but she didn't want to cry in front of her son.
"It's so cold in the mountains," Papa said softly, standing at the rim of the
firelight. He kicked out with the toe of one scarred boot, and a log shifted,
revealing a finger of flame. "So cold."
The boy watched him, seeing a glaze of ice from Papa's snow-whitened face
begin to melt in droplets. Papa suddenly closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and
shivered. "Ohhhhhhhhm," he breathed, and then his head came around, eyes
opening, looking into his son's face for silent seconds. "What are you staring
at, boy?"
"Nothing." That smell. So funny. What was it?
Papa nodded. "Come over here beside me."
The boy took a single step forward and then stopped. He thought of horses and
coffins and sobbing mourners.
"Well? Come over here, I said."
Across the room the woman was standing with one hand still on the coat. There
was a crooked smile on her face, as if she'd been slapped by a hand that had
snaked from the shadows. "Is everything all right?" she asked. In her voice a
note quavered like a pipe organ in the Budapest cathedral.
"Yes," Papa said, reaching out for his son. "Everything is fine now because
I'm home with my loved ones, where I belong."
The boy saw a shadow touch his mother's face, saw it darken in an instant. Her
mouth was half-open, and her eyes were widening pools of bewilderment.
Papa took his son's hand. The man's flesh was hard and welted with rope burns.
And so terribly cold. The man drew his son nearer. The fire undulated like a
serpent uncoiling. "Yes," he whispered, "that's right." His gaze found the
woman. "You've let it get very cold in my house!"
"I'm . . . sorry," she whispered. She began to tremble now, and her eyes were
deep pits of terror.
"Very cold," Papa said. "I can feel ice in my bones. Can't you, Andre?" The
boy"
nodded, looking into his father's shadowy firelight-sculpted face and seeing
himself suspended within eyes that were darker than he remembered. Yes, much
darker, like mountain caverns, and rimmed with eruptions of silver. The boy
blinked, dragged his gaze away with an effort that made his neck muscles
throb.
He was trembling like Mama. He was beginning to be afraid but didn't know why.
All he knew was that Papa's skin and hair and clothes smelled like the room
where Grandmother Elsa had gone to sleep forever.
"We did a bad thing," Papa murmured. "Me, your uncle Josef, all the men from
Krajeck. We shouldn't have climbed into the mountains . . ."
Mama gasped, but the boy couldn't turn his head to look at her.
". . . because we were wrong. All of us, wrong. It's not what we thought it
was . . ."
Mama moaned like a trapped animal.
". . . you see?" And Papa smiled, his back to the flames now, his white face
piercing the shadows. His grip tightened on his son's shoulder, and he
suddenly shivered as if a north wind had roared through his soul. Mama was
sobbing, and the boy wanted to turn to her and find out what was wrong, but he
couldn't move, couldn't make his head turn or his eyes blink. Papa smiled and
said, "My good little boy. My good little Andre . . ." And he bent down toward