"Thomas M. Disch - The Priest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

THE PRIEST
by Thomas M. Disch


FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.


Copyright 1994 by Thomas M. Disch

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New
York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great
Britain by Millennium, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd., London, in 1994.

ISBN 0-679-41880-6


For Phil Marsh Hoopster, hipster, excellent role model




Kill them all. God will look after His own.
--ARNALD-AMALRIC, Abbot of Citeaux,
at the massacre of Beziers, 1209



Kill 'em all! Let God sort 'em out.
--a popular U.S. T-shirt, 1986




1

The grass was unnaturally green. Jelly-bean green or the green of golf
games on television, though come to think of it that was grass too, televised
grass but grass nevertheless. Golf was the only game she enjoyed watching
because there were no rules to keep track of. You only had to sink the ball in
the hole and count the number of times you'd hit it. People could have played
golf here except for the headstones. So many names and for the life of her she
couldn't remember which one she was looking for. This one was nice, all
speckledy gray-pink, ALPHONSE BURDETr, but imagine being married to someone
called Alphonse, and in any case Alphonse Burdett had died in 1951 at the age
of--? She did the arithmetic from his birthdate, 1878. Seventy-three, when he