"Manly Wade Wellman - Sin's Doorway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

Brett's house on Dravot Ridge."
A hundred dollars in cash must have seemed a fortune to those simple hill folk. A
heavy-featured, wide-eyed young man started forward at mention of it. But when the
preacher spoke of the house on Dravot Ridge, the young man stepped back among
his companions. He shuddered, I think; or perhaps they all shuddered.
I moved toward them. The preacher looked at me. So did something else, that
now I saw for the first time.
It lay prone by the coffin, brown and motionless. At first I thought it was a
hound, then I thought it was not. It was hound-size, and lean like a hound; but its
feet were all wrong, big and furry, and its low, close-drawn way of lying on its belly
was more like a weasel. Its eyes did not falter as mine met them. I never saw a dog
with ears like those, and the face, what I could see between the wide forepaws, was
strange.
"Yes, brother?" the preacher said to me.
"Sir, you ask for a sin-eater," I ventured.
He held the wallet toward me. "A hundred dollars and a house," he repeated. "It is
a fine houseтАФso I hear tell."
"The dead man's a stranger?" I suggested.
"Not Levi Brett," mumbled a voice in the group. "Not enough of a stranger,
anyhow."
I paused and thought, and tried to decide what sort of thing it was that lay and
watched me, there beside the pine coffin. Then I looked back at the preacher. I
licked my lips, but my dry tongue would not moisten them.
"I'll do it, if I'm allowed," was what I managed to say. Since I cannot explain how
I began to be nervous and frightened so early in the matter, I shall not try. "I'll do it,"
I said again, more confidently.
"Praise the Lord," a deep-voiced man intoned, and "Amen!" said a shrill woman.
 As I walked toward the coffin, the preacher stepped toward me and took my
hand in his big, strong bony one. "Let me call a blessing on you now," he said.
"Later, you may be glad of a blessing, brother." His eyes searched my face. "You
are young, you have a look of light. I pray your soul won't suffer out of reason."
"But you're really concerned for the soul of the dead man," I reminded, and
someone said "Amen!" I held out my hand. "Give me the money."
"First repeat," commanded the preacher. "IтАФand speak your name."
Obediently I did so.
"Do freely," he prompted me, "and before all living things in this world and the
next, assume and take to myself the sins that trouble the soul of the departed Levi
Brett."
I said it all, and wound up swearing, as he urged, on a holy name. Then he handed
me the wallet. It was simply cut and sewn, of some wonderfully soft dark leather. I
opened it. Inside were ten ten-dollar bills, of the old large size.
"Levi Brett stands clear of evil," said the preacher to his little flock. "He may enter
holy ground. The Lord's name be praised."
They burst into song, another old hymn, and six men moved forward to pick up
the coffin by wooden cleats that served as handles.
The preacher led, and they carried it past the stake-and-rail fence into the
cemetery where, I now saw, was a ready-dug grave. The hymn finished, and all
watched.
From the wallet I took a bill. I spoke to the nearest onlooker, a tussock-bearded
old man who looked like photographs of Ambrose Powell Hill.