"Dean Wesley Smith - The Last Garden In Time's Window" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Dean Wesley)

The Last Garden in Time's Window
Dean Wesley Smith
Dean Wesley Smith has sold over twenty novels and around one hundred short stories to
various magazines and anthologies. He's been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has
won a World Fantasy Award and a Locus Award. He was the editor and publisher of Pulphouse
Publishing, and has just finished editing the Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds II.

THE sun beat through the window over the sink, making the small main room of the trailer feel
degrees too hot. In my memory, as far back as being a young boy, this trailer always felt hot and stuffy.
In the summer, Grandma and Grandpa never opened the doors. In the winter, the gas stove just put out
too much heat for the tiny eight-by-twenty trailer.
I turned and blocked the door open, then threaded my way past my grandfather's stuffed armchair
to the small kitchen and forced open the window there. A faint summer breeze took some of the heat, but
left the smell of my grandparents. The lingering odors of his cigars, her perfume, were embedded in every
pore of the space.
It was almost as if they were still there, Grandpa in his chair, Grandma in the small kitchen behind
his chair. She always did all the talking when I visited, asking me about work, about which woman I was
dating. Except for an occasional grunt or laugh, Grandpa had very seldom made a noise or spoken an
entire sentence to me.
I stood near the dark gas heater, trying not to touch anything. I didn't want to accidentally trigger a
memory spell. Dirk, my master, had told me a dozen times to be careful, repeating it over and over right
up until I got on the plane. He didn't think my magic was ready to be used or controlled without his
watchful eye. I was just an apprentice and I should damn well remember that.
I did think about his warning, but now standing in my grandparents' old trailer home that sat tucked
back in a shabby trailer park in Boise, Idaho, I was having trouble caring. This was a different world, far
more distant than the thousand miles that separated me now from the world where I learned to control
my magic with Dirk in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Boise was where I grew up and where I now had to try to understand what happened to my
grandparents. Why I had stared at two caskets side by side at the funeral today. Oh, I knew the "how" of
their death. The police said the gas stove had finally leaked, filling the trailer and killing them while they
slept. A neighbor had noticed the smell and called the fire department.
But I just couldn't bring myself to believe it had really happened. Not after all these years of the two
of them living in this trailer. An accident like that wasn't something they would ever allow to happen, no
matter how old they got. Or at least that was what I wanted to believe.
After the service at their graves, I had thought about calling Dirk, asking him to come and help me,
but I knew what his answer would be. He would smile and shake his head, his perfectly-combed hair not
mussing. I could almost hear his voice say the words, When you are ready, you can find the answer to
their deaths. But first you must learn the control and the discipline of your magic.
More than likely he would have been right. I had learned to trust the guy who looked like a golf pro
in his Izod shirts and golf slacks. Dirk seemed to know everything there was to know about magic. He
was rumored, among the other apprentices I was on-line with, to be one of the most powerful magicians
in the world. Considering there were thousands of full magicians around the world and thousands more
apprentices like me, that was saying something.
But sitting in my grandparents' old, tiny trailer, I didn't much care or want to listen. Something had
taken the two most important people in my life from me, and I was going to find out what.
I stood, and without touching anything, tried to really look at the trailer around me, to see if anything
was missing or out of place. One big armchair that had been my grandfather's sat in the center of the
room, another smaller one on the other side of the gas stove had been Grandma's place. A tiny,
blanket-covered couch under the room's one window had always been for guests. I remembered sitting
on that couch a thousand times. The space was so small that half the time I had to keep my legs tucked