"Stephen King. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon." - читать интересную книгу автора

and strangely exhilarating. She pelted up a slope, now running full-out
with her hat on crooked and her hair flying behind her-the rubber-band
which had held it in a ponytail was long since lost-hurdling small trees
which had fallen in some long-ago storm, topping a ridge . . . and suddenly
there was a long blue-gray valley spread out before her with brazen granite
cliffs rising on the far side, miles from where she was. And directly in
front of her nothing but a gray shimmer of early summer air through which
she would fall to her death, turning over and over and screaming for her
mother.
Her mind was gone again, lost in that white no-brain roar of terror,
but her body recognized that stopping in time to avoid going over the
cliff-edge was an impossibility. All she could hope to do was redirect her
motion before it was too late. Trisha swerved to the left, and as she did
her right foot kicked out over the drop. She could hear the pebbles
dislodged by that foot rattling down the ancient rock wall in a little
stream.
Trisha bolted along the strip where the needle-coated floor of the
forest gave way to the bald rock marking the edge of the cliff She ran with
some confused and roaring knowledge of what had almost happened to her, and
also some vague memory of a science fiction movie in which the hero had
lured a rampaging dinosaur into running over a cliff to its death.
Ahead of her an ash tree had fallen with its final twenty feet jutting
over the drop like the prow of a ship, and Trisha grabbed it with both arms
and hugged it, her scraped and bloody cheek jammed against the smooth
trunk, each breath whistling into her with a shriek and emerging in a
terrified sob. She stood that way for a long time, shuddering all over and
embracing the tree. At last she opened her eyes. Her head was turned to the
right and she was looking down before she could stop herself.
At this point the cliff's drop was only fifty feet, ending in a pile
of glacial, splintery rubble that sprouted little clumps of bright green
bushes. There was a heap of rotting trees and branches, as well - deadwood
blown over the cliff's edge in some long-ago storm. An image came to Trisha
then, one that was terrible in its utter clarity. She saw herself falling
toward that jackstraw pile, screaming and waving her arms as she went down;
saw a dead branch punching through the undershelf of her jaw and up between
her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo,
then spearing into her brain and killing her.
"No!" she screamed, both revolted by the image and terrified by its
plausibility. She caught her breath.
"I'm all right," she said, speaking low and fast. The
bramble-scratches on her arms and the scrape on her cheek throbbed and
stung with sweat-she was just now becoming aware of these little hurts.
"I'm okay. I'm all right. Yeah, baby." She let go of the ash tree, swayed
on her feet, then clutched it again as panic lunged inside her head. An
irrational part of her actually expected the ground to tilt and split her
off the edge.
"I'm okay," she said, still low and fast. She licked her upper lip and
tasted damp salt. "I'm okay, I'm okay." She repeated it over and over, but
it was still three minutes before she could persuade her arms to loosen
their deathclutch on the ash tree a second time. When she finally managed