"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Beautiful Damned" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

It transpired after a few minutes that the young man had heard Fitz's name
around the office in a connection he wouldn't or couldn't reveal and, it being
his day off, had hurried out to Connecticut "to see."

It was a random shot and yet the reporter's instinct had been right. Fitz's
reputation, as spread by the people who saw him, the people who came to his
gatherings, had that summer fallen just short of news. Stories of his
mysterious
past persisted, and yet none came close to the truth.

You see, he did not die of a heart attack in 1940. Instead he fell in, as he
later said, with the ghouls of the Hollywood crowd. Obsessed with immortality,
glamor and youth, they convinced him to meet a friend, a person whose name
remains forever elusive. He succumbed to the temptation, as he had so often
before, and discovered only after he had changed that in giving up life he had
given up living and that the needs which drove his fiction disappeared with
his
need for food and strong drink.

He watched his daughter from afar and occasionally brought others into the
fold,
as the loneliness ate at him. He began throwing large parties and in them
found
sustenance, and others like him who had managed to move from human fame into a
sort of shadowed, mythical existence. But the loneliness did not abate, and
over
time he learned that he had only one more chance, another opportunity to make
things right. And so he monitored the baby wards in the South, allowing his
own
brush with the supernatural to let him see when her soul returned. For his
love
affair with her was more haunting and tragic than those he wrote about, and he
hoped, with his new understanding, that he could make amends.

Some of this I learned, and some of this he told me. I put it down here as a
way
of noting that the rumors about him weren't even close to the truth, that the
truth is, in fact, as strange as fiction, and I would not believe it if I had
not seen it with my own eyes. What he did tell me he said at a time of great
confusion, and I might not have believed him, even then; if later that year, I
hadn't found the books, the novels, the biographies, that somehow even with my
literary education, I had managed to overlook.

That night, I did not sleep. The phone rang three times, and all three times,
the machine picked up. Tom's coarse accent echoed in the darkness of my
bedroom,
demanding to know why Ari had not returned home. Finally I slipped on a faded
pair of jeans and loafers, and padded up the hill to see if I could convince
her
to leave before Tom created trouble.