"Brian Lumley - Fruiting Bodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

BODIES
FRUITING

Brian Lumley

My great-grandparents, and my grandparents after them, had been Easingham people; in all likelihood
my parents would have been, too, but the old village had been falling into the sea for three hundred years
and hadn't much looked like stopping, and so I was born inDurhamCityinstead. My grandparents, both
sets, had been among the last of the village people to move out, buying new homes out of a
government-funded disaster grant. Since when, as a kid, I had been back to Easingham only once.

My father had taken me there one spring when the tides were high. I remember how there was still some
black, crusty snow lying in odd corners of the fields, coloured by soot and smoke, as all things were in
those days in the Northeast. We'd gone to Easingham because the unusually high tides had been at it
again, chewing away at the shale cliffs, reducing shoreline and derelict village both as the North Sea's
breakers crashed again and again on the shuddering land.

And of course we had hoped (as had the two hundred or so other sightseers gathered there that day) to
see a house or two go down in smoking ruin, into the sea and the foaming spray. We witnessed no such
spectacle; after an hour, cold and wet from the salt moisture in the air, we piled back into the family car
and returned toDurham. Easingham's main street, or what had once been the main street, was teetering
on the brink as we left. But by nightfall that street was no more. We'd missed it: a further twenty feet of
coastline, a bite one street deep and a few yards more than one street long, had been undermined,
toppled, and gobbled up by the sea.

That had been that.

Bit by bit, in the quarter-century between then and now, the rest of Easingham had also succumbed.
Now only a house or two remainedтАФ no more than a handful in allтАФand all falling into decay, while the
closest lived-in buildings were those of a farm all of a mile inland from the cliffs. Oh, and of course there
was one other inhabitant: Old Garth Bentham, who'd been demolishing the old houses by hand and selling
bricks and timbers from the village for years. But I'll get to him shortly.

So there I was last summer, back in the Northeast again, and when my business was done of course I
dropped in and stayed overnight with the Old Folks at theirDurhamcottage. Once a year at least I made
a point of seeing them, but last year in particular I noticed how time was creeping up on them. The "Old
Folks"; well, now I saw that they really were old, and I determined that I must start to see a lot more of
them.

Later, starting in on my long drive back down toLondon, I remembered that time when the Old Man had
taken me to Easingham to see the houses tottering on the cliffs. And probably because the place was on
my mind, I inadvertently turned off my route and in a little while found myself heading for the coast. I
could have turned round right there and thenтАФindeed, I intended to do soтАФbut I'd got to wondering
about Easingham and how little would be left of it now, and before I knew itтАж

Once I'd made up my mind, Middlesborough was soon behind me, then Guisborough, and in no time at
all I was on the old road to the village. There had only ever been one way in and out, and this was it: a
narrow road, its surface starting to crack now, with tall hedgerows broken here and there, letting you
look through to where fields rolled down to the cliffs. A beautiful day, with seagulls wheeling overhead, a
salt tang coming in through the wound-down windows, and a blue sky coming down to merge withтАж