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Northern Lights. Tim O’Brien
Читать онлайн.Название Northern Lights
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008133146
Автор произведения Tim O’Brien
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство HarperCollins
TIM O'BRIEN
Northern Lights
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by Flamingo 1998
First published in Great Britain by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd 1976
Copyright © Tim O’Brien 1975
Tim O’Brien asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006551485
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2015 ISBN: 9780008133146
Version: 2015-09-10
With gratitude
to the Arrowhead people,
who will know perfectly well that
there is no such town as Sawmill Landing,
that Grand Marais doesn’t sponsor ski races,
that these characters are purely fictitious
and that this is just a story.
For Ann
… and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places … For the day of his wrath is come. And who shall be able to stand?
REVELATIONS
Contents
Wide awake and restless, Paul Milton Perry clawed away the sheets and swung out of bed, blood weak, his fists clenching and closing like a pulse. He hadn’t slept. He sat very still. He listened to the July heat, mosquitoes at the screen windows, inchworms eating in the back pines, the old house, a close-seeming flock of loons. What he did not hear, he imagined. Timber wolves and Indians, the chime of the old man’s spoon in the spit bucket, the glacial floes, Harvey hammering at the half-finished bomb shelter, ice cracking in great sheets, the deep pond and Grace’s whispering, and a sobbing sound. He sat still. He was naked and sweating and anaemic and flabby. Thinking first about Harvey, then about the heat, then the mosquitoes, he’d been sailing in a gaunt nightlong rush of images and half-dreams, turning, wallowing, listening like a stranger to the sounds of his father’s house.
He sat still.
Harvey was coming home.
There was that, and there was Grace, and there were the mosquitoes crazy for blood against the screen windows.
‘Lord, now,’ he moaned, and pushed out of bed, found his glasses, and groped towards the kitchen.
He returned with a black can of insecticide. Then he listened again. The bedroom was sullen and hot, and he was thinking murder. Carefully, he tied the lace curtains to one side. He ignored Grace’s first whisper. He pushed the nozzle flush against the screen window. Then, grinning and naked, he pressed the nozzle and began to spray, feeling better, and he flushed the night with poison from his black can.
He grinned and pressed the nozzle. His fingers turned wet and cool from condensed poison, and he listened: mosquitoes and Junebugs, dawn crickets, dawn