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

purpose of glass was to disappoint frogs.

The cat nudged the frog with its muzzle, then opened its mouth. The sharp frog eyes saw the tongue, the
white fangs, the gently pulsating throat. And it saw more.

Instead of terror, the frog felt eagerness. For down in the cat's throat it saw its lost beauty, her skin
touched by sunlight. She lay in a crystal pond, tadpoles swimming about her flanks.

Heaven was in the belly of the cat. The frog laid his head in the tom's mouth.

This was one death it did not have to suffer. The torn snapped its jaws down so fast the frog felt nothing.

But then it had already died once and that was quite enough. It saw a fierce flash of light and heard a
sound like tearing leaves, and was gone.

The cat tasted the cold, sour flesh of the frog, gobbled, drank down the cool blood, felt the eyes sticky
against its tongue, the skin slick and bland, the muscles salty. It swallowed the frog.

When it returned to the night, the moon had risen red in the east, its light diffused by haze from the
Pecomc Valley Power Company's plant twenty miles away in Willowbrook, Pennsylvania. The torn
proceeded along North Street toward Maywell's one and only housing development, тАЬThe Lanes,тАЭ built
by Willowbrook Resources in 1960. The development's sameness had over the years been camouflaged
by trees. Each of the streets had been named after a familiar variety. The birches planted on Birch were
tall and blue in the moonlight, the spruce on Spruce dark green. On Elm there were oak saplings and one
or two still-struggling Dutch elm victims.

The cat passed down Maple Lane until it reached the Walker house, a substantial raised ranch with pale
yellow aluminum siding and a '79 Volvo in the driveway. Beside it was Amanda's ancient VW Beetle.

The torn went between the two cars, through the closed garage door, and into the game room beyond. It
was indifferent to the fact that the lights were on; it knew that the room was empty. It slipped behind the
sofa just as Amanda, nervous and hollow-eyed, entered. It cocked its ears toward her, and heard much
more than her breathing, her movements. It heard the voice of her mind, the thready whisper of her soul.

She looked around, shaking her head. Here she was again, back in this awful house. She knew that this
was a triumphal return to Maywell, but having to stay in this place cast a brown shadow on her victory.
Too bad she couldn't afford the Maywell Motor Inn. But she was lucky to have managed to get enough
gas for the Volks, given the present state of her finances.

This house. . . this town. . . the only thing about any of it that brought even a flicker of a fond memory
was the thought of Constance Collier herself, with her wild colony of witches out on the estate, and her
flamboyant seasonal rituals, the fires burning on the hillsides and the wild rides through the town.

It all seemed so peaceful now. As she had gotten older, Constance must have mellowed.

Sneaking out to the Collier estate to see the witches dancing naked in their April fields had been
desperately exciting, one of the few thrills of being a child in this staid community.

Always, though, there had been this house waiting at me end of a happy day. She had come home to the
resentments and the sorrows: this was a place of unspoken anger, where people wept at night.