"Manly Wade Wellman - The Dead Man's Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wellman Manly Wade)

thoughtful, Berna was young. She did not want her soul to be borne away yet. And
she felt a close silence about her, as of many lurking watchers.
Of a sudden, there popped into her mind a tag of another bedtime prayer, heard in
the long ago from a plantation mammy. She repeated that, too:


Keep me from hoodoo and witch,
And lead my path from the poor house gateтАж


The tenseness seemed to evaporate around her. Berna got into bed, listened a
while to the sighing of a breeze-shaken tree outside her window, and finally slept
soundly until her father's fist on the door told her that it was dawn and time to be up.
They had fried eggs and bacon in the kitchen that remained cool despite the fire
that had smouldered in the range all night.
Wiping his mouth at the end of the meal, Ward Conley tramped to the back door
and tugged at the knob. It refused to budge, though he heaved and puffed.
"I wish that Shonokin man was back here to open this, too," he said at last.
"Well, let's use the front door."
Out they went together. The early morning was bright and dry, and Berna saw
flowers on the shrubs, blue, red and yellow, that were beyond her knowledge of
garden botany. They walked around the side of the house and saw a quiet barnyard,
with a great red barn and smaller sheds. Beyond these extended rich-seeming fields.
"Something's been planted there," said Conley, shading his eyes with his hand. "If
anybody thinks he can use my fieldsтАФ well, he'll lose the crop he put in. Berna, go
back to the house and make a list of the things we need. I'll drive into town later,
either Hanksville or that little superstition-ridden rookery we passed through
yesterday."
He strolled off, hands in pockets, toward the land beyond the barnyard. Berna
again walked around the house and in through the front door. For the first time she
was alone in her new home, and fancied that her footsteps echoed loudly, even on
the rug in the hall. Back in the kitchen she washed the dishesтАФthere was a sink, with
running water from somewhere or otherтАФthen sat at the kitchen table to list needed
articles as her father had directed.
There was a slight sound at the door, as if a bird had fluttered against it. Berna
glanced up, wide-eyed.
That was all. She sat where she was, pencil in fingers, eyes starting and
unwinking. She did not move. There was no feeling of stiffness or confinement or
weight. Trying, in the back of her amazed and terrified mind, to diagnose, she
decided it was like the familiar grammar-school experimentтАФyou clasp your hands
and say "I cannot, I cannot," until you find yourself unable to move your fingers
from each other. Berna may have breathed, her heart may have beaten. She could not
be sure, then or later.
 The door, that had not budged for her father's struggles, was gently swaying
open. In stepped Mr. Shonokin, smiling over the glow of his peculiar little sheaf of
tapers. He snuffed them, slid the sheaf into his pocket. And Berna could move again.
Only her eyes moved at first, quartering him over. He wore the white suit,
beautifully cut, and of a fabric Berna could not identifyтАФif it were fabric and not
some sort of skin, delicately thin and soft and perfectly bleached. His hands, which
hung gracefully at his sides, were long and a little strange; perhaps the ring fingers