"Aaron Wolfe - Invasion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Aaron)

Yet that didn't seem possible. Certainly, the snow was falling very hard
and fast. Equally as certain: the wind was ugly. But the creature could
have had no more than a two-minute head start on me. The storm
couldn't have erased every trace of it so quickly. UnlessтАж Unless it was not
moving away from me at the same ponderous pace at which 7 moved. If,
in the instant that it turned away from the stable window, it had run, and
if it could run incredibly fast in spite of the bad weather, it might have
gotten a five-minute head start and its tracks might easily have filled up
and it might be a mile away by now.

But what sort of animal could move so easily and surely in wind like
this, on a night when visibility was near zero?

Considering that, I had to consider one other thing which I had not
wanted to think about just yet. I had seen two amber lights at the window,
low lights very much like candle flames muffled by colored glass. What
kind of animal carried lamps with it.

A man.

A man could be a wild animal.

But why would he carry lamps or lanterns instead of a flashlight?

A madman?

And even if it were a man who was playing some grotesque hoax,
wearing shoes that made those strange prints, he would not have been
able to move so fast and put so much distance between us.

So where did that leave me?

Nowhere.

Standing at the end of the trail, staring out at the gray-white curtains
of billowing flakes, I began to feel that the animal had circled behind me
and now stood in my own footprints, watching me. The feeling grew so
strong, so undeniable, that I whirled and cried out and stabbed my
flashlight beam into the air behind me. But the night was all there was.
 "You're being ridiculous," I told myself.

Having turned my back on the direction in which the animal had fled,
uncomfortable because of that, I struggled through the ever-mounting
drifts toward the rear of the farmhouse. I shone my flashlight ahead of me,
even though I didn't need its light and would have been better off without
it. Several times I thought I heard something out of place, a metallic
snickering noise that I could not identify, nearby, above the ululation of
the storm. But each time I probed the surrounding darkness with the
flashlight, there was nothing to see but snow.