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

--but
the Wisconsin vanity plate made its ownership clear. It had parked on the
shattered glasses. A woman's black glove lay beneath one of the tires. In the
early morning glow, Fitz's manse seemed ancient and old: the lawn filled with
bottles and cans from the night before; the shutters closed and unpainted; the
steps cracked and littered with ashes and gum. The door stood open and I
slipped
inside, careful to touch nothing.

A great gout of blood rose in an arch along one wall and dripped to the tile
below. Drops led me to the open French doors. Through them, I saw the pool.

Tiny waves still rippled the water. The laden air mattress moved irregularly
along the surface. The man's eyes were open and appeared to frown in
confusion,
his skin chalk-white, and his neck a gaping hole that had been licked clean of
blood.

Of Ari and Fitz we never found a trace. A man who had lived on the fringes as
long as he had knew how to disappear. I had half hoped for an acknowledgment
--
a postcard, a fax, a phone message -- something that recognized the dilemma he
had put me in. But, as he said, an author never realizes that the characters
live beyond the story, and I suspect he never gave me a second thought.

Although I thought of him as I read the articles, the biographies, the essays
and dissertations based on his life-- his true life. I saved his novels for
last
and his most famous for last of all. And in it, I heard my grandfather's
voice,
and understood why he never spoke of his life before he returned from the East
all those years ago. For that life had not been his but a fiction created by a
man my grandfather had never met. My grandfather's life began in 1925 and he
lived it fully until the day he died.

I sold the house at the bottom of the hill, and moved back to the Middle West.
I
found that I prefer the land harsh and the winds of reality cold against my
face. It reminds me that I am alive. And, although I bear my grandfather's
name
in a family where that name has a certain mystique, that mystique does not
belong to me. Nor must I hold it hallowed against my breast. The current my
grandfather saw drawing him into the past pushes me toward the future, and I
shall follow it with an understanding of what has come before.

For, although we are all created by someone, that someone does not own us. We
pick our own paths. To do anything else condemns us to a glittering world of
all
night parties hosted by Fitz and his friends, the beautiful and the damned.