"Barker, Clive - Sacrament (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final
part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before; which is to say, our lives?
So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by
chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.




PART ONE

He Stands Before An
Unopened Door


CHAPTER I







To every hour, its mystery.

At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the
day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh then the enigma of time itself; of a
day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.

It had been Saturday when Will Rabjohns arrived at the weather-bullied wooden shack on the outskirts of
Balthazar. Now it was Sunday morning, two-seventeen by the scored face of Will's watch. He had emptied his
brandy flask an hour before, raising it to toast the Borealis, which shimmered and billowed far beyond Hudson
Bay, upon the shores of which Balthazar stood. He had knocked on the door of the shack countless times,
calling out for Guthrie to give him just a few minutes of his time. On two or three occasions it had seemed the
man was going to do so; Will had heard him grumbling something incoherent on the other side of the door, and
once the handle had been turned. But Guthrie had not appeared.

Will was neither deterred nor particularly surprised. The old man had been universally described as crazy: this
by men and women who had chosen as their place of residence one of the bleaker corners of the planet. If
anyone knew crazy, Will thought, they did. What besides a certain lunacy inspired people to build a community
- even one as small as Balthazar (population: thirty-one) - on a treeless wind-battered stretch of tidal flats which
was buried half the year beneath ice and snow, and was for two of the remaining months besieged by the polar
bears who came through the region in late autumn waiting for the Bay to freeze? That these people would
characterize Guthrie as insane was quite a testament to how crazy he really was.

But Will knew how to wait. He'd spent much of his professional life waiting, sitting in hides and dugouts and
wadis and trees, his cameras loaded, his ears pricked, watching for the object of his pursuit to appear. How
many of those animals had been, like Guthrie, crazed and despairing? Most, of course.Creatures who'd
attempted to outrun the weeping
tide of humankind, and failed; whose lives and habitats were in extremis. His patience was not always
rewarded. Sometimes, having sweated or shivered for hours and days he would have to give up and move on,