"Guy N. Smith - The Lurkers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

in a way having the Ruskins as neighbours was worse than having no neighbours
at all.

Janie's lips tightened. Peter was selfish as well as greedy. He had uprooted
both herself and Gavin, heedless of the fact that their nine-year-old son had
just settled into the big middle school. Now Gavin had to pick up the threads
all over again, and try and hold his own in an out-of-the-way village school
where in all probability they used outdated teaching methods.

Janie sighed her relief audibly and almost forgave her husband for everything
as she spied the blue Saab estate car winding its way down the narrow lane
between the low pleached hedges. Her fears seemed to lessen with the
realisation that Peter had returned from collecting Gavin from school in the
village. But it would be like this every day: a regular period of loneliness
and terror. She tried to tell herself that she would get used to it but she
knew she wouldn't.

The Saab's headlights were on. Dusk had deepened considerably during the last
ten minutes or so whilst she had been looking out of the window. Even with
Peter back, night still held a thousand terrors for Janie; things she couldn't
explain, couldn't talk to Peter about.

Away to the left, only three hundred yards from the cottage and just visible
from the small lead-framed windows, a rough circle of twisted and stunted
pines were silhouetted against the deep grey of a darkening western sky, set
on an elevated hillock so that they would be visible from almost any angle in
this barren rocky hill country. Janie shivered; that place was something else
that unnerved her, making her want to lock the doors and windows before it got
properly dark. An ancient druid stone circle lay beneath those warped pines.
So the locals said, anyway, and you could take most of what they said with a
pinch of salt, Janie sneered to herself. The villagers didn't like having
strangers in their midst, so the story could have been invented for the sole
purpose of discouraging outsiders. But there was no getting away from the fact
that there was a rough circle of large stones up there and the place was also
listed on the large scale ordnance survey map of the district.

Peter had shown a considerable interest in the circle and had even taken Gavin
up there (all part of the boy's education, he had said), and the boy had been
fascinated by a huge flat stone which Peter claimed had to be the sacrificial
stone. Ugh, it was horrible, best forgotten. There were enough killings in the
twentieth century without digging up gory reminders from a bygone age, Janie
had insisted. History always seemed to be about bloodshed and maybe that was
why life was so cheap nowadays. Nobody was safe anywhere. That feeling of
uneasiness came back. There was something dangerous about Hodre.

'Hi.' Peter was standing inside the small hallway, seemingly oblivious of the
draught from the door, which hadn't latched properly. Short and stocky, his
features had a squareness about them, a ruggedness that Janie had once
described as a bulldog-look. But now his appearance was spoiled by the long
sandy hair that curled around the collar of his open-necked shirt and the worn