"Goulart, Ron - Cure for Baldness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

warm and somewhat hazy.

On his left he passed an abandoned roadside produce stand, an empty field and
then a freshly painted cottage. Attached to a post in front of the house was a
rustic sign -- Samson Institute: We Can Grow Hair Anywhere.

Roger slowed, then braked. He swung the car across the lane and onto the white
gravel driveway. He parked in front of the cottage and sat for a moment in his
car, robbing at his nearly hairless head. "Guy's probably a quack," he murmured.
"But I am going to need hair in California."

Sighing, he eased out into the humid afternoon. While still three paces from the
bright red front door, he heard an enormous ramble of thunder. He was aware,
too, of the crackling sizzle of lightning. But it all seemed to come from inside
the Samson Institute.

Deciding this could be an emergency, he sprinted to the door. He ignored the
brass horseshoe knocker and tried the handle.

The door opened and he stepped into a cluttered parlor. The smell of smoke was
thick all around and there was also a sulfurous odor. Sprawled in the exact
center of a large shaky pentagram that had been sketched on the bare hardwood
floor in pale blue chalk was a suit of clothes. A brown tweedy suit of clothes,
with a frayed blue shirt inside the coat and a mended black sock dangling out of
one of the trouser legs.

A pair of rimless spectacles lay just outside the farthest point of the
pentagram. Near the sock was steepled a thick book bound in pinkish leather.

Squatting, Roger read the title, "The Compleat & Dreadful Magikal Writings of
the Notorious Count Monstrodamus. Not too catchy, even for a hardcover."
Standing up, he glanced around. "Mr. Samson -- are you about anywhere?"

"You know, he got the incantation just about right. But hey, in black magic --
as in most things, come to think of it -- almost doesn't win you the cigar."

Roger noticed now that someone was seated in a bentwood rocker in the far comer.
The chair was ticking slowly back and forth, its high back hitting against a
tall book case that was crammed not only with fat ancient books but with lolling
stuffed toys, rusty miniature cars, dusty glass animals, clouded crystals and
dirt-smeared chunks of rock.

"Mr. Samson?" Roger squinted, but still couldn't make out the figure in the
chair. That section of the parlor seemed unusually shadowy.

The person in the chair chuckled. "No, nope. Samson is . . . well, he's
elsewhere. He's, yeah, about as elsewhere as you can get. Sad in a way, you
know. Here he summoned me up, but in futzing up that ancient spell -- and
granted, reciting Latin backward can be tricky-- by futzing up that one word, he
blew the whole deal." He chuckled again. "Maybe I can help you?"