"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

and are startled by their error, and take flight.
Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.
Perhaps.
The Canyon is familiar with perhaps; with what may or may not be. And never
more so than on such a night as this, when the winds come sighing off the desert,
heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the Canyon hosts express their longing
for something they dreamed they had, or dreamed that they dreamed, their voices so
tenuous tonight that they're inaudible to the human ear, even if there were someone
to hear them, which there never is.
That's not entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough to
find their way into this vale of luxury and tears; a tourist, perhaps even a family
of tourists, foolishly determined to discover what lies off the prescribed route;
looking for some famous heart-throb's love-nest, or a glimpse of the idol himself,
caught unawares as he walks with his dog. There are even a few trespassers over the
years who have found their way here intentionally, guided to this place by hints
dropped in obscure accounts of Old Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these few.
Indeed there is often something close to reverence in the way they enter Coldheart
Canyon. But however these visitors arrive, they always leave the same way:
hurriedly, with many a nervous backward glance. Even the crassest of themуeven the
ones who'd claim they don't have a psychic bone in their bodiesуare discomfited by
something they sniff here. Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far more
acute than they had thought. Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of
the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do
they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a
harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.
PART ONE
THE PRICE OF THE HUNT
ONE
"Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister
Zeffer?" Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with
the handsome, sad face had come alone.
"The lady is not my wife," Zeffer explained.
Page 3
Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
"Ah..." the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating
that he was far from indifferent to Katya's charms. "A pity for you, yes?"
"Yes," Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.
"She's a very beautiful woman."
The monk studied Zeffer's face as he spoke, but having said what he'd said,
Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.
"I'm her manager," he explained. "That's all there is between us."
Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet. мAfter
the two of you departed yesterday," he said, his English colored by his native
Romanian, "one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely women he had
ever seen..." he hesitated before committing to the rest of the sentence "...in the
flesh."
"Her name's Katya, by the way," Zeffer said.
"Yes, yes, I know," said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted
gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.
The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in his