"Cat Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

PROLOGUE

btone Mountain is the only truly rough peak in the Peconics.
Its gray, cracked ridges stretch for about three miles in that
otherwise benign chain. They are so loose and treacherous
that even the most obsessive rock climbers avoid them as
offering too unsubtle a doom. The Appalachian Trail, defer-
ring to the fact that old Stone has been known to slice a good
pair of Beans to shreds, skirts the mountain and passes
through the orchard-choked exurbia of the little town of May-
well, which huddles beneath the mountain like an Israelite at
the feet of Pharaoh

From the grand and crumbling Collier estate at one end of
town to the dark Victorian buildings of Maywell College at
the other, the ridges look down on the whole of Maywell.
This is not an area of superhighways and roaring commuter
buses; Maywell has been bypassed by the roads and the
developers. Once again, old Stone is to blame. No highway
construction company would bid on a road to cross that
miserable expanse of cracked granite, so Mayweli remains

2 Wbidfy Strieber

much as it was a century ago, a town as pretty as it can be,
alone, and largely content with its own gentle self.

Maywell prospers in a quiet way, on the orchards and the
farms whose produce is trucked off to Philadelphia and New
York, and on the maintenance of Maywell College, an
institution small in both size and reputation, but more than
adequate to provide the town its full share of raucous stu-
dents and middle culture.

Maywell does not really like the modern world. It has a
tendency to look to sorter eras with well-dressed, genteel
longing. It is peaceful, moral, and respectable.

It is, in short, just the sort of place where peculiar things
happen.

These things may be grim and awful, as was the raising by
Brother Simon Pierce of his Resurrection Tabernacle, or
pretty much the opposite of grim, such as the witchy goings-on
out at the Collier estate.

They may be odd, as in the case of poor Dr. Walker. He
was a brilliant biologist whose abrasive personality and dog-
ged obsession with his own bizarre theories made him tire-
some to his peers at Yale. Eventually, when he raved to the