"Jack Williamson - Afterlife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

else, with a chance to see worlds more exciting than our own.

In the empty house, I lit a candle, ate another corn pone and a piece of fried chicken my
mother had left for me, went to bed. Trying to forget the vulture circling over that skinned
skull in the ditch, I lay listening to the tick of the old clock in the hall till I heard the rattle of
my father's wagon.

My mother and my sister came in the house while he drove on to stable the team. News of
the dead stranger stopped their chatter about the meeting. My father lit a candle lantern
when he heard about it, and we all walked across the road to the church. My mother lifted
the sheet to look at the body.

She screamed and my father dropped the lantern.

"Alive! It's alive!"

The candle had gone out. I shivered when I heard some small creature scurry away in the
dark. My father's hands must have been shaking; it took him a long time to find a match to
light the candle again. The long naked body was a man's, black with dried blood and
horribly scarred, but somehow whole again.

The bald skull had hair again, a short pale fuzz. The eyes were open, staring blindly up into
the dark. The body seemed stiff and hard, but I saw the blood-caked chest rise and slowly
fall. My mother reached to touch it, and said she felt a heartbeat.

My father made me saddle my pony and go for the doctor. I had to hammer at the door a
long time before he came out in his underwear to call me crazy for waking him in the
middle of the night with such a cock-and-bull story. If we had a live man there at the
church, it had to be some drunk who had crept inside to sober up.

Still angry, he finally dressed and saddled a horse to come back with me. My mother had lit
candles at the altar. My father was on his knees before it, praying. The doctor threw the
sheet off the man, felt his wrist, and said he'd be damned.

"The hand of God!" my father whispered, backing away and dropping back to his knees.
"A holy miracle! We prayed at the meeting for a sign to help us persuade the unbelievers.
And the good Lord has answered!"

"Maybe." The doctor squinted at me. "Or is it some trick of Satan?"

My mother brought a basin of warm water and helped him wash off the clots of blood and
mud. His eyes closed, the man seemed to be sleeping. He woke when day came, and sat
up to stare blankly at the empty benches around him. His blond hair and beard had grown
longer. The scars had disappeared.
My mother asked how he felt.

He blinked at her and shivered, wrapping the sheet around himself.

"Are you the Son of God?" My father knelt before him. "Have you come to save the
world?"