"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Spirit Dump" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

"What is all that stuff, Paul?" Suze asked.
 "Well," he said, pointing, "That spiky reddish thing is that bout of bad temper I had last summer and
just couldn't get rid of. The dark oily thing there is from when my mother was thinking about suicide-- I
brought her out here. But most of them I don't know; they were here before I ever saw the place."
Angie was staring at him, he realized. She probably thought it was a joke, he told himself.
"I learned about it from my grandfather," Paul explained, "And he claimed to have heard about it from
an old Indian who said this was the place where men could come and leave whatever evil spirits were
troubling them. Granddad called it the spirit dump."
"I never believed in any of that stuff," Suze said, still staring down the slope.
Paul shrugged. "I don't know if it's evil spirits, or if it's something in the air here, or magnetic fields, or
maybe it's all hallucinations; I just knew that it worked for me, and that it seemed to work for my mother,
and Granddad said it worked for him. And I wanted to see if it would work for everybody, or if maybe it
was just my family-- or just my imagination. And when you'd been in a funk for the past week I figured it
was a chance to find out."
"What are you looking at, Suze?" Angie demanded. "Ain't nothin' down there!"
Suze shuddered. "All that stuff..." she murmured. She stepped back from the edge.
"Let's get back in the car," she said. "I'll tell you about it later."

Paul sat at his desk, tapping a pencil on the blotter as he watched Suze talking brightly to Roger and
Amy. He frowned.
He hadn't told her to keep the spirit dump secret; he hadn't thought it was necessary. He didn't
suppose it could really hurt if more people found out about it; after all, from the amount of stuff
accumulated there already, plenty of people had known about it over the years.
Still, it bothered him. Suze was practically advertising the place, like a missionary seeking converts.
Roger and Amy were just the latest in a long series.
But then, why shouldn't she proselytize? What could happen? Was he afraid that the magic would get
used up somehow?
Maybe that was it.
Or maybe he was just being selfish; he had this wonderful cure-all, and he was being asked to share it,
and he wanted it all for himself.
Maybe that was it. He tapped harder.
When the pencil broke he went back to his paperwork.
***


By the end of the second week his agitation had reached such a level that it was interfering with his
work, with his driving, with everything.
Obviously, the thing to do was to drive out to the spirit dump and chuck his worry over the cliff. That
would prove that the place still worked, for one thing.
So, Saturday morning, he headed out past the Bannersburg landfill.
There were fresh tire tracks at the turn-off, several of them. He realized he had a headache.
Along the narrow access road a tree-branch snapped off against his window, the broken end dragging
across the side of his car, and his head began pounding.
And when he reached the strip of meadow and found a Chrysler mini-van half-blocking his path, so
that he had to steer carefully between its rear bumper and the trees in order to get out into the clearing,
the headache was unbearable. Enraged, he climbed out and shouted.
Faces turned toward him, half a dozen faces-- people he didn't even know. He marched out toward
them.
"Hey, Paul," someone called.
Paul followed the voice and spotted Roger. "What are you doing here?" he demanded.