"Whitley - Strieber - The Wild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

body, his heart breaking with obscure passions of overwhelming power, odors of the night filling his
brain, intoxicating himтАФand then, for the first and only time, he was alive.

It was like leaping and crawling at the same time. The world was transformed by a great magic, the moon
spreading its glow everywhere, and he was happy, all the cares of a dull childhood gone, and he was
suddenly free in the night and he threw back his head and shook his body and he howled out the piercing
joy that filled him blood and bone and soul.

Then he was awake. True, his pajamas were covered with grass stains and there was a dried leaf in his
hair. True also, it was seven o'clock in the morning and he had a math quiz to look forward to.

He had gone off to school, smell of paste, math exercise book, the classroom shades drawn against the
glory of the morning sun. But forever after, he had wondered if perhaps, for a little while in the dead of
the night, he had been a wolf.

It was truly an intoxicating thought, a delicious thought. Man into wolf. Running. Howling. Leaping on the
quaking innocent.

But he had never really escaped that classroom he entered on the morning after his magic, and now the
caged wolf's eyes mocked him for it. And he thought, You, are you a man who became a wolf, locked in
there now?

It was hideous to think that he might be looking at someone who had a name and a past, who had tasted
the freedom of the wild only to be locked up like this, a sort of double prisoner.

"Let's get Kevin and go. It's lunchtime."

"We've only been here ten minutes."

The wolf's eyes bored into him. He imagined long, thin claws extending out from the center of those eyes
and into the center of his brain, and forming there a molten spot. "The animal's angry," he said.

"I don't blame him. He's in a zoo."

"I hate this place."

"It's only a perfectly ordinary zoo. Anyway, Kevin's in the middle of something exciting. Look at him."

Bob envied and loved his son's ability to draw and paint. But for a child of twelve, why such furies? He
made Francis Bacon look cheerful. His son would climb into his lap and they would read together, and
Bob would wonder what tormented the boy, who read Kafka's "Hunger Artist" in a solemn, priestly
voice, perhaps even in the voice Kafka had heard while he was writing it. Another jumbo jet would roar
over the house, and to the west the sky would mutter, another restless night.

Bob was trapped between the staring wolf and his son's obvious excitement. When he moved, he was
captured by his wife's cool hand, which squeezed his own. "Relax. It's a sunny day."

"The cages get to me."

"It's only a zoo!"