"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)
Rose wasn't using Librium now. The drug had let her think calmly about Colin's advice, and Diana's. She'd begun to feel that her clinging to rationality might itself be irrational. Wasn't it absurd to explain away all that had happened to her by one blow on the back of her neck?
On impulse she'd gone to the library. It would be fun to leaf through Astral Rape, to see if it was as diverting as its title. But the copy had been stolen, as had most of the copies in Liverpool libraries. Oh no, she didn't want to order it, she'd said hastily. All the books about astral projection were on loan - it was a popular subject - but one of the staff had been reading Out of the Body, and had yielded it to Rose.
Reading the book was a series of shocks, as though she were encountering in print a text she'd planned to write. Each account had something in common with hers. The voyagers, as the book called them, always felt awake; their senses were never blurred, as in dreams. The continuity of the experience was always linear, without the dislocations of dreams. Some people felt their bodies vibrating invisibly; some thought that the vibrations became the astral form. Outside their bodies they felt weightless, or light as mist. Some felt they had died or were going mad - but most found the memory reassuring afterwards, for it proved they could live outside the body; life after death was possible. Though in many cases it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, some voyagers learned to control their trips. It was mostly a question of growing used to the ease of it, they said. `To think of moving is to have moved,' one voyager reported.
`Did you leave the key next door?' Bill said.
`Oh no, not yet. I'll do it shortly.'
How much of the text was nonsense, delusion? Some of the accounts seemed preachy as descriptions she'd read of LSD trips, with which they had something in common: the heightened vividness of colours, for example. Though the sheer number of astral reports was impressive, surely there were dreams which most people experienced at some time - of flying, of falling, of running without being able to move. Too many of the accounts seemed credulous or willfully eccentric. She didn't want to be associated with cranks.
She leafed through a chapter of theories and cosmologies. Life after death was determined by one's expectations at the moment of death, some said. There were dozens of exclusive heavens, each populated by members of a different religion, who believed only they could be saved. That would make Bill laugh, but she decided to keep the book to herself. Here was another vision - it could hardly be more than that - which maintained that there were planes of astral evolution after death; the one nearest the living was crowded with the newly dead, enclosed by fragments 'of their past lives, obsessed with their lost sexuality and with achieving some kind of sexual release, until they forgot their mundane preoccupations and moved on - if they ever did. It couldn't be more than a theory, but she found it oppressive. She leafed onward, through references to an English group of the 1900s, founded by someone called Peter Grace, which had tried to push astral research too far. It had led to infanticide, madness and (the book said vaguely) worse, but at least it was comfortingly distant, although some of the Nazis, Himmler in particular, had apparently tried to rediscover its secrets.
`Would you like to go for a walk on the prom?' Bill said. `It's a pity to waste a day like this.'
`Yes, I'd like to, in a few minutes.' Was he trying to distract her from the book? He wasn't helping her resolve her feelings. She felt that she was making it too easy for herself to dismiss the book as trash, to avoid pondering her own experiences. At least she was in good company, supposing that she wished to join them. On Holy Thursday, 1226, St Anthony of Padua was said to have appeared in two places simultaneously. In 1774, Alphonse de Liguori appeared before witnesses at the death-bed of Pope Clement XIV, although he was imprisoned in a cell at Arezzo, where he had slept for five days after fasting. Goethe met a friend on the road in dressing-gown and slippers, while the friend was dreaming of meeting Goethe. As a child, Thor Heyerdahl had been terrified under anaesthetic that he couldn't return to his body. While ill in Paris, Strindberg imagined himself at home, so vividly that he felt he was there, standing
by the piano - and was seen there by his mother-in-law, who wrote to ask whether he was ill. At the end of a visit to his friend Theodore Dreiser, John Cowper Powys promised impulsively to reappear later; two hours later Powys appeared, shining, in the locked apartment, though he was thirty miles away. Towards the end of his life, Hitler was observed to enter brief trances from which he could not be roused - and at these times his aides, who were often miles distant, were convinced that he was close to them and watching them. At the moment of his death, D. H. Lawrence told Aldous Huxley that he could see himself outside his body. Here was one of his cries from his death-bed: `Hold me, hold me, I don't know where I am, I don't know where my hands are . . .'
`Don't you want to go out?' Bill said.
His impatience was clearly directed at the book. In fact she was glad to leave behind Lawrence's struggle to cling to his sense of himself. She thought Lawrence had been too passionate for his own good - in terror as in everything, presumably. Still, she was glad to emerge into the sunlight for a while.
The postbox was a tube of crimson neon. The sky was parched of clouds. The villas baked like pastry. Everything radiated heat; scents of gorse and roses drifted as though in search of shade. The intensified colours - the overwhelming blue of the sky, the outpouring of green -seemed to converge in the focus, unbearably white, of the sun.
The couple who lived opposite the Tierneys were tramping through the residents' garden in hiking boots. The man's moustache was a thin black line in a bluish shaved penumbra; fragile bluish curls decorated the woman's head, as though it was a cake. `Good afternoon,' she said coolly. `Was that your party some weeks ago?'
'No, it was next door to us.'
`Oh, I see. The psychiatrist's house. There was so much noise that we thought one of his patients must have got out of control. Does he intend to continue bringing his patients here?'
`I think he's found somewhere in Rodney Street now.' Rose had glimpsed nocturnal visitors, but hadn't seen their faces - friends of the Hays, presumably.
`I hope you aren't mistaken.' She sounded as though she would hold Rose personally responsible for errors. `Well, we mustn't keep you,' the woman said, and stalked onward.
At the end of the garden, a fallen square of concrete fence gave access to Otterspool promenade. The Tierneys climbed down to the road which led to the rubbish tip. Dust swarmed above the road in the wake of a lorry, like solidified heat-haze. Beside the road, the shell of a television set was tuned to a selection of grasses and wild flowers.
Rose halted, staring. `I haven't seen that before. At least -'
`It's been there for a while.'
They ducked through a gap in wire netting and followed the path on to the grassy plateau. From the top they could see the sweep of the Mersey as it rushed down from the distant Pennines and out to the Irish Sea. The glittering ripples made her think of code, too rapid to decipher.
Just now she had been ready to tell him everything, but the chance seemed to have passed. She had been leaving Out of the Body where he could see it in the hope that he would broach the subject. If only he would give her that much help -
His gaze jarred her out of her reverie. `What's the matter, Ro?' he said wistfully. `You were with Colin a long time that day - you must have told him something. Don't you want to tell me?'
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