"Charles de Lint - Forests Of The Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

“Qu te vaya bien,” she said. Take care.
She cradled the receiver and finally chose the small shape of a dog from the milagros scattered across the
tabletop. El lobo was a kind of a dog, she thought. Perhaps she was making this fetish for herself. She
should sew her own name inside, instead of Marty Gibson’s, the man who had asked her to make it for him.
Ah, but would it draw los lobos to her, or keep them away? And which did she truly want?
Getting up from the table, she crossed the kitchen and opened the door to look outside. Her breath frosted in
the air where the men had been barefoot. January was a week old and the ground was frozen. It had snowed
again this week, after a curious Christmas thaw that had left the ground almost bare in many places. The
wind had blown most of the snow off the lawn where the men had gathered, pushing it up in drifts against the
trees and the buildings scattered among them: cottages and a gazebo, each now boasting a white skirt. She
could sense a cold front moving in from the north, bringing with it the bitter temperatures that would leave
fingers and face numb after only a few minutes of exposure. Yet some of the men had been in short sleeves,
broadcloth suit jackets slung over their shoulders, all of them walking barefoot on the frozen lawn.
Poreso ....
She didn’t think they were men at all.
“Your friends are gone.”
“Ellos no son mis amigos,” she said, then realized that speaking for so long with Adelita on the phone had
left her still using Spanish. “They aren’t my friends,” she repeated. “I don’t know who, or even what they are.”
“Perhaps they are ghosts.”
“Perhaps,” Bettina agreed, though she didn’t think so. They were too complicated to be described by so
straightforward a term.
She gazed out into the night a moment longer, then finally closed the door on the deepening cold and turned
to face the woman who had joined her in the kitchen.
If los lobos were an elusive, abstracted mystery, then Nuala Fahey was one much closer to home, though no
more comprehensible. She was a riddling presence in the house, her mild manner at odds with the potent
brujería Bettina could sense in the woman’s blood. This was an old, deep spirit, not some simple ama del
laves, yet in the nine months that Bettina had been living in the house, Nuala appeared to busy herself with
no more than her housekeeping duties. Cleaning, cooking, the light gardening that Salvador left for her. The
rooms were always dusted and swept, the linens and bedding fresh and sweet-smelling. Meals appeared
when they should, with enough for all who cared to partake of them. The flower gardens and lawns were
well-tended, the vegetable patch producing long after the first frost.
She was somewhere in her mid-forties, a tall, handsome woman with striking green eyes and a flame of red
hair only vaguely tamed into a loose bun at the back of her head. While her wardrobe consisted entirely of
men’s clothes—pleated trousers and dress shirts, tweed vests and casual sports jackets—there was nothing
mannish about her figure or her demeanor. Yet neither was she as passive as she might seem. True, her step
was light, her voice soft and low. She might listen more than she spoke, and rarely initiate a conversation as
she had this evening, but there was still that undercurrent of brujería that lay like smoldering coals behind her
eyes. La brujería, and an impression that while the world might not always fully engage her, something in it
certainly amused her.
Bettina had been trying to make sense of the housekeeper ever since they’d met, but she was no more
successful now, nine months on, than she’d been the first day Nuala opened the front door and welcomed her
into Kellygnow, the old house at the top of the hill that was now her home. Kellygnow she learned after she
moved in, meant “the nut wood” in some Gaelic language—though no one seemed quite sure which one. But
there were certainly nut trees on the hill. Oak, hazel, chestnut.
There were many things Bettina hadn’t been expecting about this place Adelita had found for her to stay. The
mystery of Nuala was only one of them. Kellygnow was much bigger than she’d been prepared for, an
enormous rambling structure with dozens of bedrooms, studios, and odd little room-sized nooks, as well as a
half-dozen cottages in the woods out back. The property was larger, too—especially for this part of the
city—taking up almost forty acres of prime real estate. With the neighboring properties ranging in the mil
lion-dollar-and-up range, Bettina couldn’t imagine what the house and its grounds were worth. Its neighbors