"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

- Chapter 1

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file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Nieuwe%20map/074348861X___1.htm (1 of 5)24-12-2006 1:50:06
 - Chapter 1




2003
Trembling-on-the-Verge
Heron Island, British Columbia
Canada
1.
I was fifty-four years old the first time a dead person spoke to me. Wouldn't you know it? It was the
wrong one.
To be fair, he did manage to save my life. Just for openers.
I don't actually believe in ghosts. I stopped believing in them even before I stopped believing in the
Catholic church, and that puts it pretty far back. Not that many years after I stopped believing in Santa.
It's just that a few decades later I stopped disbelieving in ghosts, too. My wife Susan told me that when
she was in her mid-twenties, at a time when she was awake and not under the influence of drugs, her
dead father appeared to her. She said he asked for her forgiveness, and she gave it.
I never knew Susan to tell a lie unless it was to spare someone's feelings, and she had fewer delusions
than just about anyone else I ever met. She had been dead herself for five years now, and I still hadn't
given up hoping to hear from her. She didn't need my forgiveness, and I'd had all I was ever going to
have of hers, and like I said I didn't believe in ghosts. But still I hoped. So I guess I still didn't entirely
disbelieve in them either.
It was about the time they are traditionally reputed to appear, too, somewhere between three and four in
the morning. Despite the hour, I was, as Susan had been for her own visitation, wide awake and not
under the influence of drugs unless you're enough of a purist to count coffee or marijuana.
This was normal for me. All my life I've been a night owl, and now I had a job that allowed me to get
away with it, and with Susan gone and our son Jesse on the other side of the planet there was absolutely
no reason not to do so. I write an opinion column called "The Fifth Horseman" that runs twice a week in
The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, so basically I think hard for a living. What better
time to do that than the middle of the night, when there's nothing on TV and nothing that isn't mellow on
the radio, nobody comes to the door, the phone doesn't ring, and nobody anywhere in earshot is using a
chainsaw, swinging a hammer, practicing an electric guitar or riding a motorcycle?
And what better place than my office? It's a small outbuilding that was originally a pottery studio, well-
heated, soundproof enough to permit me to scream obscenities in the small hours if that's what the job
calls for, though that's less important now that I live alone. The noisiest thing in it is my hard drive. It
sits a whole six steps away from the houseтАФovergrown cabin, reallyтАФwhich, now that's Susan's not
living in it anymore, is basically just the place my coffee and food come from and go back to, and where
I spend the daylight hours in a coffin of my native earth. The noisiest things in the house are the furnace,
fridge compressor and cat. House and office sit together on a secluded bluff at the end of a long tire-
killing pair of ruts that wind through thick woods, in an out of the way corner of an island that's forty