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

Cat Magic

Whitley Strieber

PROLOGUE
Stone 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, deferring 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 Maywell, 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 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 students 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 dogged obsession with his own bizarre theories made him tiresome to his peers at Yale.
Eventually, when he raved to the newspapers about bringing frogs back to life, he was hurled out. So
now he continues his career in this forgotten comer of the academy, teaching freshmen the intricacies of
the zygote and plotting the breakthroughs that will vindicate his genius.

Besides its beauty and isolation and its smattering of eccentrics, Maywell has something else odd about it.
This is a bit more serious. This is quite terrible and quite wonderfulтАФif such words have any clear
meaning. Terrible conjures images of huge, gaping beasts or sulking psychopaths; wonderful brings a
silken princess and a thomless rose.

Both words might conjure a cat.

Certainly either suggests the great King of the Cats, a creature known almost exclusively to students of
obscure Celtic mythology, and holding sway, according to Robert Graves, тАЬupon a chair of old silverтАЭ
whence he gave тАЬvituperative answers to inquirers who tried to deceive him.тАЭ No doubt he/she accounts
in part for the androgynous nature of Puss In Boots and was the progenitor of the first Cinderella story,
тАЬThe Cat-Cinderella,тАЭ which is itself a folk memory of the very ancient legend of the cat as friend of