"Greg Egan - Scatter My Ashes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

stroked her shoulders and breasts with my fingertips. She rearranged herself,
pulled a face, but didn't wake. I was about to brush her forehead with one
hand, which I knew would make her open her eyes and give me a sleepy smile,
when it occurred to me that if she did, there might be small, fanged mouths
behind her eyelids. When I woke again it was half past seven, and she was
already up. I hate that, I hate waking in an empty bed. She was reading the
paper as I sat down to breakfast. тАЬSo, what's happening in the world?тАЭ тАЬA
fifth child's gone missing.тАЭ тАЬShit. Don't they have any suspects yet? Any
evidence, any clues?тАЭ тАЬA fisherman reported something floating on the lake.
The police went out in a boat to have a look.тАЭ тАЬAnd?тАЭ тАЬIt turned out to be a
calf foetus.тАЭ I gulped coffee. I hate the taste of coffee, and it sets my
stomach squirming, but I simply have to drink it. тАЬIt says police will be
diving all day today, searching the lake.тАЭ тАЬI might go out there, then. The
lake looks fantastic in this weather.тАЭ тАЬWhen I'm snug in my office with the
heater on full blast, I'll think of you.тАЭ тАЬThink of the divers. They'll have
the worst of it.тАЭ тАЬAt least they know they'll get paid. You could spend the
whole day there for nothing.тАЭ тАЬI'd rather take my kind of risk than
theirs.тАЭ Once she was gone, I cut out the article on the vanished child. The
walls of my study are papered with newsprint, ragged grey odd-shaped pieces
affixed only at their top corners, free to rustle when the door is opened or
closed. Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for a moment after I've
switched off the lamp, I get a strong impression of diseased skin. тАЬPut them
in a scrap book!тАЭ says Wendy, whenever she ventures in to grimace at the
state of the room. тАЬOr better still, put them in a filing cabinet and see if
you can lose the key!тАЭ But I need to keep them this way, I need to see them
all at once, spread out before me like a satellite photograph, an aerial view
of this age of violence. I'm looking for a pattern. My gaze darts from
headline to headline, from STRANGLER to STALKER to RIPPER to SLASHER, hunting
for a clue to the terrible unity, hunting for the nature of the single dark
force that I know lies behind all the different nightmare stories, all the
different fearful names. I have books too, of course, I have shelves stuffed
with volumes, some learned, some hysterical, from treatises on Vlad the
Impaler to discussions of the entrails of London prostitutes to heavy
psychoanalysis of the Manson gang. I have skimmed these works, read a page
here and a page there only, for to clutter my mind with details can only
distract me from the whole. I recall precisely when my obsession began. I was
ten. A convict, a murderer, had escaped from a nearby prison, and warnings
were broadcast urging us to barricade our homes. My parents, naturally, tried
not to alarm me, but we all slept together that night, in the room with the
smallest window, and when the poor cat mewed to be let in the back door, my
mother would let nobody, not even my father, budge. I dozed and woke, dozed
and woke, and each time dreamt that I was not sleeping but lying awake,
waiting for the utter certainty of the unstoppable, blood-thirsty creature
bursting through the door and slicing us all in two. They caught him the next
morning. They caught him too late. A service station attendant was dead, cut
up beyond belief by an implement that was never found. They showed the killer
on TV that night, and he looked nothing like the stuff of nightmares: thin,
awkward, squinting, dwarfed between two massive, smug policemen. Yet for all
his apparent weakness and shyness, he seemed to know something, he seemed to
be holding a secret, not so much about murder itself as about the cameras,