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

The Beginning


Chapter One
The three-hundred-acre Timberlake Farm, which we were renting that
year, was as isolated a refuge as you could possibly find in New England.
Elsewhere highways had cut open regions once closed to man by dense
pine forests and rocky landscapes; and the small towns, previously content
with their unsophisticated ways, had begun to build industrial "parks" to
lure manufacturers from the choked cities; and the suburbs continued to
sprawl, gobbling up the open countryside, macadamizing and concretizing
and tract-housing the woodlands. Contemptuous of the noise and the
grime of civilization, northern Maine shunned highways that went
nowhere; and it did not welcome commuters who wanted to move into the
snow country with their big cars and snowmobiles and
aluminum-redwood houses. Some day, of course, when the population
pressure reached an unbearable peak, even Timber-lake Farm would be
filled with lookalike, two-bedroom ranch houses and condominium
apartment buildings; however, the year that we lived there the farmhouse
was two miles from the nearest neighbor and eleven miles from the
nearest town, Barley, Maine.

Isolated.

Perhaps too isolated.

But that realization was not to come to us until December, after we had
lived on the farm for more than six months. And then it was definitely too
late for second thoughts.
 The farmhouse was a two-story flagstone manor with four large
bedrooms, three baths, a drawing room, study, pine-panelled library,
formal dining room, and modern kitchen. The luxury was greater than one
might expect to find in a farmhouse in MaineтАФbut Timberlake had been
conceived as a gentleman's retreat and not as an enterprise that must
support itself. The land had never been cultivated, and the barn had never
contained any animals but riding horses.

Isolation:

The house had one telephone, the lines for which had been run in at no
little expense by Creighton Development, the company that owned and
rented the property through Blackstone Realty in Barley. It was completely
furnished except for a television setтАФand we had early decided to do
without that questionable luxury in favor of books and conversation.

Isolation:

Every two weeks the three of us drove in to Barley in our Volkswagen
microbus. We might take in a movie at the Victory Theater, and we always
had dinner at the Square Restaurant. We picked up new magazines and