"Chad Oliver - The Winds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

It was utterly silent except for the sound of breathing—his own and the man's.
The vault was not empty. That was the worst part. Wes knew that his normal reactions had been
somehow inhibited, but he felt a tendril of apprehension at what he saw in the far wall.
 There were niches cut into the rock.
Five of them.
The light was not good in the chamber, coming as it did from tubes like flashlights, but he could see
that there were bodies in four of the slots. The fifth one was empty, but it was no great feat of mental
gymnastics to figure out who had been there before.
Forget about an airplane crash, then.
Forget about hermits.
Forget about fishermen.
The man looked at him, his white face expressionless. He glanced at the figures in the niches, as
though checking.
Then the man moved toward Wes, his eyes very bright, and stretched out his hands.


THREE
Wes Chase could not move.
The moment was intolerable, and it would not end. The cave, the niches, the hands—all were
razor-sharp in his mind. He had seen many men die, and had often wondered, rather casually, how death
would come to him. His life did not flash through his brain. Instead, a moment out of time was
pin-pointed and a line he had read in college shouted at him, insanely, over and over:
This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way—
But it wasn't.
Incredibly, the man's hands touchefl him and were gentle; there was no malice in them. Wes looked
into the man's eyes. They were a clear gray, and he could read nothing in them. The face was a human
face—there was a human skull un-der that flesh. Wes ticked them off: mandible, maxilla, zygomatic arch,
nasal cavity, orbits, frontal bone …
And yet the face was a face unlike any other he had ever seen. It was pasty in its skin texture, but that
wasn't the important thing. The proportions were odd in a way he could not define. And the expression.
Eyes bright, skin taut, thin lips open, breathing fast—
Hate?
Hunger?
Hope?
The hands went over him lightly. His pockets were emptied. His watch was taken from his wrist. The
gold wedding ring on his finger was examined, then left where it was. The man was looking for
something, Wes was certain of that. But what?
The loot was something less than sensational. A brown billfold Jo had given him for Christmas a year
ago. Some loose change—a quarter, two nickels, four pennies. A black comb, not too clean and with
one tooth missing; Wes had been meaning to get a new one at the drugstore. A key ring with three keys
on it. One was for his car, one for his home on Beverly Glen off Sunset, and one for his Westwood
office. Two packs of cigarettes, one of them crumpled and almost empty. A folder of paper matches,
also pretty well shot. Two chocolate bars wrapped in shiny paper. A couple of trout flies and a stray,
faded salmon egg. No handkerchief—Wes remembered that he had used that for a pillow; it was
probably still over there on the rocks.
The man sat down on the cave floor and examined the things intently. Intently? It was more than that.
He studied them with an eagerness that bordered on desperation.
 The watch seemed to interest him the most. He held it to his ear and listened to it tick. He fiddled with
it uncertainly, then wound it a little and moved the hands. He shook his head as though he were
disappointed.