"Christopher Stasheff - Wizard in Rhyme 03 - The Witch Doctor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

thought.
 So what do you do when a friend disappears?
You have to find out whether or not to worry.
The first day, I was only a little concerned, especially after I
went back to the coffee shop, and they said he hadn't been in looking
for his damn parchment. The second day, I started getting worried-it
was midnight and he hadn't shown up at the coffeehouse. Then I began
to think maybe he'd forgotten to eat again and blacked out-so I went
around to his apartment to tell him off.
He lived in one of those old one-family houses that had been
converted into five apartments, if you want to call them that-a
nine-bytwelve living room with a kitchenette wall, and a cubbyhole for
a bedroom. I knocked, but he didn't answer. I knocked again, Then I
waited a good long time before I knocked a third time. Still no
answer. At three A.M when the neighbor came out and yelled at me to
stop knocking so hard, I really got worried-and the next day, when

nobody answered, I figured, Okay, third time's the charm-so I went
outside, glanced around to make sure nobody was looking, and quietly
crawled in the back window. Matt really ought to lock up at night;
I've always told him so.
I had to crawl across the table-Matt liked to eat and write by
natural light-and stepped into a mess.
Look, I've got a pretty strong stomach, and Matt was never big on
housekeeping. A high stack of dishes with mold on them, I could have
understood-but wall-to-wall spiderwebs? No way. How could he live
like that? I mean, it wasn't just spiderwebs in the corners-it was
spiderwebs choking the furniture! I couldn't have sat down without
getting caught in dusty silk! And the proprietors were still there,
too-little brown ones, medium-sized gray ones, and a huge malecater
with a body the size of a quarter and red markings like a big wide grin
on the underside of its abdomen, sitting in the middle of a web six
feet wide that was stretched across the archway to the bed nook.
Then the sun came out from behind a , loud, its light struck
through the window for about half a minute-and I stood spellbound.
Lit from the back and side like that, the huge web seemed to glow,
every tendril bright. It was beautiful.
Then the sun went in, the light went away, and it was just a dusty
piece of vermin-laden debris.
Speaking of vermin, what had attracted all these eight-legged
wonders? It must have been a bumper year for flies. Or maybe, just
maybe, they'd decided to declare war on the army of cockroaches that
infested the place. If so, more power to them. I decided not to go
spider hunting, after all. Besides, I didn't have time-I had to find
Matt.
The strange thing was, I'd been in that apartment just three days
before, and there hadn't been a single strand of spider silk in sight.
Okay, so they're hard to see-but three days just isn't time enough
for that much decoration.
I stepped up to the archway, nerving myself to sweep that web