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

тАЬGood. My customers would kill me very, very slowly if I stole their money. And that's what it would
amount to. I've got about sixty dollars of my own.тАЭ

George put his hands on her trim hips. She did not move away and she did not respond. She simply
became very still. Such plans he had for this slip of a girl! If the rhesus phase succeeded, she was next.
Dear little Bonnie was going to be the first person to die and live to tell about it. Assuming he could
convince her. Assuming the mere suggestion didn't send her running for the nearest bus depot. But the
problem of convincing her didn't need to be faced just yet.

George wrote out a purchase order for the coils. When they were delivered, Tess, poor dear, would
have a most extraordinary experience. Oblivious to her future, she sat in her cage delousing her mate and
rolling her lips back. If George worked at it, he could probably get Techtronics to deliver before noon
today. They had trucks up to the college all the time.

Dear little Tess. Not a big rhesus, not a scared rhesus. Not yet.

Chapter 4
Mandy didn't need a map to find her way to the Collier estate.

It took up the whole southwestern comer of the Maywell township and went beyond. The lands of the
original grant included Stone and Storm mountains and the valley between them, an area of eighty
thousand acres in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mandy drove down Bridge Street toward the entrance
to the estate.

A stillness filled the morning air. Red and yellow and orange trees overhung the old brick street. Here and
there children dawdled past on their way to school. Beside Bridge Street and sometimes beneath it
Maywell Brook shimmered in the sunlight. Autumn was the slow season for water, and the brook sighed
along its gouged, muddy bed. It was all so familiar, so peaceful, as if she had left only a few hours ago.
But the years had changed the familiarity of Maywell. Once this place had been, simply, life. Now it hurt
to be here.

Mandy glanced at her watch. 9:20. She was due to meet the great lady in ten minutes. The great and
dangerous lady. As a child Mandy had been cautioned never to speak to Constance CollierтАФnot that
she ever had. Except for her occasional forbidden intrusions onto the estate with other kids to watch
witch rituals, she had only once or twice glimpsed the legendary figure sitting regally in the back of her
enormous old Cadillac limousine, driven to some local function by one of her earnest acolytes.

On one memorable occasion she and Constance had locked gazes, as the old lady was driven slowly
down Maple in her big black car. That was when life at the Walker house was entering the deepest level
of hell. A quart bottle of gin went into the garbage every two days, and the arguments made Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf sound like a Marx Brothers film.

High up in her maple, Mandy had observed the car. It was moving very slowly. As it drew near she
realized that the old woman was watching her carefully.

Sometimes she dreamed of that car, coming unlit down the night street, and sometimes of the old lady
drifting out of it like mist which would slip across the lawn, beneath the shadow of the maple tree. . . and
then she would see the tall, severe shadow in the hall, or feel a bony hand on her forehead. . .

Once she heard her father screaming in the basement, and there was a low, sharp voice between the