"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

Hayley followed him before the gate swung closed again, but there
was no sign of Troy when she was in the orchard. Since there was a
clear path trodden through the long grass, Hayley followed it,
expecting all the time to see Troy ahead of her beyond the next
tree. Instead, she came to another fence with a gate in it, which led
out into a wide field. She could not see Troy anywhere in the field.
But in the distance there was a man driving a tractor—or maybe a
digger—up a steep slope. Hayley set out towards him to ask if he
had seen Troy go past.
There seemed to be something wrong with the digger— or
tractor. It would get some way up the hill and then its engine would
stop and the machine would go sliding backwards downhill. Hayley
could see the man bobbing about, trying to put on the brake and
start the engine again. Before long, she could hear him swearing.
But before she got near enough to hear actual swearwords, Tollie
came racing up and stopped in front of her.
“You’re going wrong !” he cried out. “You can’t go this way!”
He sounded as if he was desperate for her to believe him. But
Hayley, like Harmony, felt she had had enough of Tollie. “Oh, go
away !” she said. “Go and find your roc’s egg and stop trying to
cheat!” She pushed past Tollie and marched on across the field.
She could hear Tollie shouting behind her, but by then, in the
strange way of the mythosphere, the hill and the stalled digger
were not there any more. Hayley found herself instead stumbling
among loose rocks in some kind of mountain pass. The pass very
shortly opened out into a stony valley, bare and barren except for
small yellowing bushes that smelt like turkey stuffing. There were
steep mountains on either side and not a sign of Troy anywhere.
Hayley faltered. Tollie must have been right and she really had
gone the wrong way. But then she thought how Tollie was always
trying to put people off and marched on, sliding and stumbling
among the stones.
There was a particularly huge mountain over to her left, very
strangely shaped. The top of it was covered in grey, smoky, shifting
clouds, but the lower part—the part she could see—looked almost
like a pair of great stone feet, with a sort of hump beyond that. This
hump, for some reason, made Hayley very uneasy. She kept her
eyes on it as she hurried and stumbled through the valley. At first
it was simply an odd-shaped crag, with clouds streaming across it,
dimming it, veiling it, and then showing it again, but it changed
shape as Hayley moved on. By the time she came level with it, it
was looking remarkably like an enormous stone woman, crouching
on the mountainside and peering out at the valley. Hayley was just
below it when the clouds suddenly smoked away from the rocky
nose, for a moment unveiling piercing eyes and a stern mouth.
Hayley almost screamed. It looked exactly like Grandma’s face
made of stone.
“Oh, heavens!” Hayley said. “No, no, no!”
She put her hands to the sides of her face and ran. Her feet
clattered and slipped on stones and then slapped on water. She was