"Philip Pullman - Dark Materials 02 - The Subtle Knife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pullman Philip)

such a longing for home that tears scalded his eyes.

Eventually the cat turned away. This was night, and there was a territory to patrol, there were mice to
hunt. She padded across the road and toward the bushes just beyond the hornbeam trees, and there she
stopped.

Will, still watching, saw the cat behave curiously.

She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will. Then
she leaped backward, back arched and fur on end, tail held out stiffly. Will knew cat behavior. He
watched more alertly as the cat approached the spot again, just an empty patch of grass between the
hornbeams and the bushes of a garden hedge, and patted the air once more.

Again she leaped back, but less far and with less alarm this time. After another few seconds of sniffing,
touching, and whisker twitching, curiosity overcame wariness.

The cat stepped forwardтАФand vanished.

Will blinked. Then he stood still, close to the trunk of the nearest tree, as a truck came around the circle
and swept its lights over him. When it had gone past, he crossed the road, keeping his eyes on the spot
where the cat had been investigating. It wasn't easy, because there was nothing to fix on, but when he
came to the place and cast about to look closely, he saw it.

At least, he saw it from some angles. It looked as if someone had cut a patch out of the air, about two
yards from the edge of the road, a patch roughly square in shape and less than a yard across. If you were
level with the patch so that it was edge-on, it was nearly invisible, and it was completely invisible from
behind. You could see it only from the side nearest the road, and you couldn't see it easily even from
there, because all you could see through it was exactly the same kind of thing that lay in front of it on this
side: a patch of grass lit by a streetlight.

But Will knew without the slightest doubt that that patch of grass on the other side was in a different
world.
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He couldn't possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and
kindness was good. He was looking at something profoundly alien.

And for that reason alone, it enticed him to stoop and look further. What he saw made his head swim
and his heart thump harder, but he didn't hesitate: he pushed his tote bag through, and then scrambled
through himself, through the hole in the fabric of this world and into another.

He found himself standing under a row of trees. But not hornbeam trees: these were tall palms, and they
were growing, like the trees in Oxford, in a row along the grass. But this was the center of a broad
boulevard, and at the side of the boulevard was a line of cafes and small shops, all brightly bt, all open,
and all utterly silent and empty beneath a sky thick with stars. The hot night was laden with the scent of
flowers and with the salt smell of the sea.