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

Ishtar, the fierce old mother goddess who once swayed over Sumeria.
Among the fragments of the old mystery religion of the Greeks is the identification of the goddess Diana
with a cat. From deep time, the female witch has identified a male cat as her familiar. And, of course,
there were the Egyptian cats, most of whom were mummified and persist to this day stacked in the
basements of museums.

The extraordinary creature that inhabited the ridges of Stone Mountain, though, was no candidate for a
museum. Indeed, at the moment it was very intensely alive, and not out on the windy ridges, but
wandering far more delightful realms.

All was not perfect: long ago it had been touched by one of Constance Collier's spells, and something
was tied to its ear.

This was an invisible thread, which led from the delightful realms all the way into Maywell, where it joined
the other invisible threads being woven on the loom of the town's life.

The other threads turned and twisted constantly, crossing as the druggist married the grocer's daughter,
slipping apart when he died, becoming knotted when she also passed on, and so on, the cloth never
finished, its invisible patterns ceaselessly shimmering and changing.

Only one of the townspeople, Constance Collier, had both the wisdom and inclination to sit occasionally
at the sacred loom and maneuver the threads around a bit, perhaps granting some indigent follower of
hers a little good fortune or causing the business affairs of one of her adversaries to come unraveled.

She never touched the thread connected to the mythical cat's imaginary ear, and hadn't since she had first
tied it, a deed she had done on a soft spring day when she was still full of hope. Many long years had
passed since then, while Constance had plotted and spelled and hexed and waited. But she had never
needed to call the cat. She had gone from being a beautiful young woman to a wise old one, and had
become patient with her lifetime of waiting.

If the thread was pulled, it would bring the cat back to Stone Mountain, and down into innocent,
unsuspecting Maywell. There was, however, only one reason to do this appalling thing.

Of late Constance had known renewed hope. There was a chance, after all, that the final chapter in a
very old story would at last be written.

Constance, Dr. Walker, Brother PierceтАФthree of the main characters are in place. There remains only
one more, and she is already approaching the town, chugging along in her ancient Volkswagen Beetle.
Even more promising, it is jammed with luggage and easels.

An observer of the invisible could see that the particular thread that is tied to the cat's ear has wafted
down and fallen across Morris.Stage Road. The old Volks wheezes, its gears grind, and it moves closer.

Hidden breezes blow the thread about, entangling it in the lower limbs of an autumn-fired birch. Now the
thread is tight.

Closer and closer the car comes, its blond young driver peering out. There are no exit markers here. She
has been told to take the third right after the big crossroads. She is counting and staring as the car
sweeps into the thread. She experiences nothing more than a trickle and a sneeze, but off in the cat's
realm things are quite different. The cat is dragged, howling with pain and anger, all the way to the dreary,