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

it, Trisha stepped back, away from the drop. She reset her cap (turning it
around so the bill pointed backward without even thinking about it) and
looked out across the valley. She saw the sky, now sagging with rainclouds,
and she saw roughly six trillion trees, but she saw no sign of human
life-not even smoke from a single campfire.
"I'm all right, though - I'm okay." She took another step back from
the drop and uttered a little scream as something
(snakes snakes)
brushed the backs of her knees. just bushes, of course. More
checkerberry bushes, the woods were full of em, yuck-yuck. And the bugs had
found her again. They were reforming their cloud, hundreds of tiny black
spots dancing around her eyes, only this time the spots were bigger and
seemed to be bursting open like the blooms of black roses. Trisha had just
time enough to think, I'm fainting, this is fainting, and then she went
down on her back in the bushes, her eyes rolled up to whites, the bugs
hanging in a shimmering cloud above her small pallid face. After a moment
or two the first mosquitoes alit on her eyelids and began to feed.


Top of the Fourth

HER MOTHER was moving furniture-that was Trisha's first returning
thought, Her second was that Dad had taken her to Good Skates in Lynn and
what she heard was the sound of kids rollerblading past on the old canted
track. Then something cold splashed onto the bridge of her nose and she
opened her eyes. Another cold drop of water splashed down dead center on
her forehead. Bright light ran across the sky, making her wince and squint.
This was followed by a second crash of thunder that startled her into a
sideways roll. She pulled instinctively into a fetal position, uttering a
croaky little scream as she did so. Then the skies opened.
Trisha sat up, grabbing and replacing her baseball cap when it fell
off without even thinking about it, gasping like someone who has been
tossed rudely into a cold lake (and that was what it felt like). She
staggered to her feet. Thunder boomed again and lightning opened a purple
sewn in the air. As she stood with rain dripping from the tip of her nose
and her hair tying lank against her cheeks, she saw a tall, half-dead
spruce on the valley floor below her suddenly explode and fall in two
flaming pieces. A moment later the rain was sheeting down so thickly that
the valley was only a sketched ghost wrapped in gray gauze.
She backed up, getting into the cover of the woods again. She knelt,
opened her pack, and got out the blue poncho. She put it on (better late
than never, her father would have said) and sat on a fallen tree. Her head
was still woozy and her eyelids were all swollen and itchy. The surrounding
woods caught some of the rain but not all of it; the downpour was too
fierce. Trisha flipped up the poncho's hood and listened to the drops tap
on it, like rain on the roof of a car. She saw the ever-present cloud of
bugs dancing in front of her eyes and waved at them with a strengthless
hand. NothIing makes them go away and they're always hungry, they fed on my
eyelids when I was passed out and they'll feed on my dead body, she
thought, and began to cry again. This time it was low and dispirited. As