"Laymon, Richard - The Traveling Vampire Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

After that, none of us said anything. We weren't that far from Janks
Field, so I think we were starting to get more nervous.

Janks Field was the sort of place that made you nervous no matter
what.

First off, nothing grows there. It's a big patch of hard bare dirt
surrounded by thick, green woods. But it's not bare on purpose.
Nobody

clears the field. As far as anyone knows, Janks Fidd has always been
that way.

I've heard people say the dirt there is poison. I think they're wrong
about that, though. Janks Field has more than its share of wildlife
the sort that lives in holes in the ground--ants, spiders, snakes, and
so on.

Some people say aliens landed there, and that's why nothing will
grow.

Sure thing.

Others say the field is cursed. I might go along with that. You
might, too, after you know more about it.

The reason they call the place Janks Field isn't because it belongs to
anyone named Janks. It doesn't, and never did. It's called that
because of Tommy Janks and what he did there in 1954.

I was just a little kid at the time, so nobody told me much. But I do
remember people acting funny the summer it all happened. Dad, being
chief of police, wasn't home very often. Morn, usually cheerful,
seemed oddly nervous. And sometimes I overheard scattered talk about
missing girls. This went on for most of the summer. Then something
big happened and everyone went crazy. All the grown-ups were pale and
whispering and I caught bits and pieces like, "Some kind of
monster...." and "Dear God .... " and "their poor parents .... " and
"always knew there was something off about him."

As it turns out, some Boy Scouts had hiked into the field and found
Tommy Janks sitting by a campfire. He was a deaf mute, so he never
heard them coming. They caught him with a gob of meat on the end of a
stick. He was roasting it over the fire. It turned out to be the
heart of one of the missing girls.

Must've been awful, walking into a scene like that.

Those Boy Scouts became instant heroes. We envied them, hated