"Jeff Long - Deeper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Jeff)

And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatтАЩning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a HeavтАЩn.
(Satan peering into the abyss)
тАФJOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST, BOOK IV



Prologue
Ike surrendered.
As he stole from bed, naked, the cave dust in his old wounds and tattoos flickered
like lightning. He paused at the door to listen. Ali was seven months pregnant and
seemed to have found all the sleep Ike was losing. But he could not hear her soft
breath, only the song.
For more than a month it had been waking him in the middle of the night, always the
same song sung by the same woman, or maybe it was a child. Ike couldnтАЩt decide
what to call the thing, a war hymn or a ballad. Or the death of him. Bottom line, he
knew, the abyss was fishing for its faithless son. His time had come.
His pack was ready inside the garage, behind the garbage can. Tomorrow was
pickup day. Ike dutifully lugged the can to the road, one final chore in this world.
Then he saddled on the pack and set off into the moonlit hills.
When the song first began, Ike had blamed his ramped-up senses. All those years in
the deep had retooled him, inside and out. Metamorphosis came with the territory, a
medical fact. Everyone changed down below, some more than others, he more than
most. The depths had spared him disfigurement, but left him half-animal. Tonight,
for instance, he could count the birds in a tree by the rustle of their wings. The moon
literally uplifted him: its gravity pulled the fluid in his spine. He could hear his childтАЩs
heartbeatтАжstill growing in the womb.
Thinking the song might be coming from a sleepless neighbor or someoneтАЩs radio,
Ike had spent a week of nights prowling through the yards in his bare feet. But the
source eluded him, even as it grew stronger. He wondered if something in nature
might be calling to him, some creature, say, or the sea. Maybe the muse was teaching
him a song. Maybe this agitation was how you came to create something.
But a few days ago, at last, he had tracked the song to the mouth of a cave. That
was his destination tonight. A short walk brought him to a gash in a limestone cliff.
He stood there, facing the source. It did not exactly invite him with its dung and rot.
But Ike was a veteran of such places. In a sense, he had been born in there.
The song guttered out from the cave. It lured him with his memories of the deep
earth. The words were indistinct at best. Maybe Ali, the linguist, could have made
better sense of them. What he perceived was what he imagined: come away, leave
the golden apples of the sun. Or whatever. With a last glance back at the world, Ike
nodded good-bye and began to descend.
Over the coming days, the abyss acquired him at an average rate of seventy-five
heartbeats per minute. That was how calmly Ike abandoned all that he loved in the
world. One step at a time, inching down his ropes, braving the tunnels and
subterranean seas, Ike cast himself into the stone.
A week passed. His food ran out. His batteries failed.
Most people would have turned back. Most people never would have come down.
Ike just kept on sinking deeper. From his days of captivity, he knew tricks for seeing