"Barker, Clive - Sacrament (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

the species he was seeking, for all its hopelessness, preserving its despair from his lens.

But Guthrie was a human animal. Though he had holed himself up behind his walls of weather-beaten boards,
and had made it his business to see his neighbours (if such they could be called; the nearest house was half a
mile away) as seldom as possible, he was surely curious about the man on his doorstep, who had waited for five
hours in the bitter cold. This was Will's hope, at least; that the longer he could stay awake and upright the
likelier it became that the lunatic would surrender to curiosity and open the door.

He glanced at his watch again. It was almost three. Though he had told his assistant Adrianna not to stay up for
him, he knew her too well to think she would not by now be a little concerned. There were bears out there in the
dark: eight hundred, nine hundred pounds some of them, with indiscriminate appetites and unpredictable
behaviour patterns. In a fortnight, they'd be out on the ice floes hunting seal and whale. But right now they were
in scavenging mode; come to befoul themselves in the stinking rubbish heaps of Churchill and Balthazar, and -
as had occasionally happened - to take a human life. There was every likelihood that they were wandering
within sniffing distance of him right now, beyond the throw of Guthrie's jaundiced porch-light, studying Will,
perhaps, as he waited on the doorstep. The notion didn't alarm him. Quite the reverse, in fact. It faintly excited
him that some visitor from the wilderness might at this very moment be assessing his palatability. For most of
his adult life he'd made photographs of the untamed world, reporting to the human tribe the tragedies that
occurred in contested territories. They were seldom human tragedies. It was the populace of the other world that
withered and perished daily. And as he witnessed the steady erosion of the wilderness, the hunger in him grew
to leap the fences and be part of it, before it was gone.

He tugged off one of his fur-lined gloves and plucked his cigarettes out of his anorak pocket. There was only
one left. He put it to his numbed lips, and lit up, the emptiness of the pack a greater goad than either the
temperature or the bears.

'Hey, Guthrie,' he said, rapping on the blizzard-heater door, 'how about letting me in, huh? I only want a couple
of minutes with you. Give me a break.'

He waited, drawing deep on the cigarette, and glancing back out into the darkness. There was a group of rocks
twenty or thirty yards beyond his jeep; an ideal place, he knew, for bears to be lurking. Did something move
amongst them? He suspected so. Canny bastards, he thought. They were biding their time; waiting for him to
head back to the vehicle.

'Fuck this!' he growled to himself. He'd waited long enough. He was going to give up on Guthrie, at least for
tonight; head back to the warmth of the rented house on Balthazar's Main (and only) Street; brew himself some
coffee, cook himself an early breakfast, then catch a few hours' sleep. Resisting the temptation to knock on the
door one final time, he left the doorstep, digging for the keys as he strode back over the squeaking snow to the
jeep.

At the very back of his mind, he'd wondered if Guthrie was the kind of perverse old bastard who'd wait for his
visitor to give up before opening the door. He was. Will had no sooner vacated the comfort of the lamplight
when he heard the door grinding across the frosted steps behind him. He slowed his departure but didn't turn,
suspecting that if he did so Guthrie would simply slam the door again. There was a long silence. Time enough
for Will to wonder what the bears might be making of this peculiar ritual. Then, in a worn voice, Guthrie said: 'I
know who you are and I know what you want.'

'Do you?' Will said, chancing a backward glance.

'I don't let anybody take pictures of me or my place,' Guthrie said, as though there was an unceasing parade of