"Cat Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

newspapers about bringing frogs back to life, he was hurled
out. So now he continues his career in this forgotten comer
of the academy, teaching freshmen the intricacies of the
zygote and plotting the breakthroughs that will vindicate his
genius.

Besides its beauty and isolation and its smattering of ec-
centrics, Maywell has something else odd about it. This is a
bit more serious. This is quite terrible and quite wonderful—if
such words have any clear meaning. Terrible conjures images
of huge, gaping beasts or sulking psychopaths; wonderful
brings a silken princess and a thomless rose.

Both words might conjure a cat.

Certainly either suggests the great King of the Cats, a
creature known almost exclusively to students of obscure
Celtic mythology, and holding sway, according to Robert
Graves, "upon a chair of old silver" whence he gave "vitu-

CATMAGIC 3

perative answers to inquirers who tried to deceive him." No
doubt he/she accounts in part for the androgynous nature of Puss
In Boots and was the progenitor of the first Cinderella story,
"The Cat-Cinderella," which is itself a folk memory of the
very ancient legend of the cat as friend of Ishtar, the fierce
old mother goddess who once swayed over Sumeria.

Among the fragments of the old mystery religion of the
Greeks is the identification of the goddess Diana with a cat.
From deep time, the female witch has identified a male cat as
her familiar. And, of course, there were the Egyptian cats,
most of whom were mummified and persist to this day
stacked in the basements of museums.

The extraordinary creature that inhabited the ridges of
Stone Mountain, though, was no candidate for a museum.
Indeed, at the moment it was very intensely alive, and not
out on the windy ridges, but wandering far more delightful
realms.

All was not perfect: long ago it had been touched by one of
Constance Collier's spells, and something was tied to its ear.

This was an invisible thread, which led from the delightful
realms all the way into Maywell, where it joined the other
invisible threads being woven on the loom of the town's life.

The other threads turned and twisted constantly, crossing