"Barker, Clive - The Great and Secret Show v1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

How the hell did you know that?
"Put it down to a lucky guess..."
Liar!
"OK, so I'm digging around in your thoughts a little. Forgive me the trespass. I need help, Buddy, or the Jaff has me beaten. You don't want that."
No, I don't.
"Imagine for me. Give me something more than regret to make an ally of. Who are your heroes?"
Heroes?
"Picture them for me."
Comedians! All of them.
"An army of comedians? Why not?"
The thought of it made Buddy smile. Why not indeed? Hadn't there been a time when he'd thought his art could cleanse the world of malice? Perhaps an army of holy fools could succeed with laughter where bombs had failed. A sweet, ridiculous vision. Comedians on the battlefields, baring their asses to the guns, and beating the generals over the head with rubber chickens; grinning cannon fodder, confounding the politicians with puns and signing the peace treaties in polka-dotted ink.
His smile became laughter.
"Hold that thought," Fletcher said, reaching into Buddy's mind.
The laughter hurt. Even Fletcher's touch could not mellow the fresh spasms it initiated in Buddy's system.
"Don't die!" he heard Fletcher say. "Not yet! For Quiddity's sake, not yet!"
But it was no use his hollering. The laughter and the pain had hold of Buddy head to toe. He looked at the hovering spirit with tears pouring down his face.
Sorry, he thought. Can't seem to hold on. Don't want to—
Laughter racked him.
—You shouldn't have asked to remember.
"A moment!" said Fletcher. "That's all I need."
Too late. The life went out of him, leaving Fletcher with vapors in his hands too frail to be set against the Jaff.
"Damn you!" Fletcher said, yelling at the corpse as he'd once (so long ago) stood and shouted at Jaffe as he lay on the floor of the Mision de Santa Catrina. This time there was no life to be bullied from the corpse. Buddy was gone. On his face sat an expression both tragic and comical, which was only right. He'd lived his life that way. And in dying he'd assured Palomo Grove of a future burgeoning with such contradictions.

IV
Time in the Grove would play countless tricks in the next few days, but none surely as frustrating to its victim as the stretch between Howie's parting from Jo-Beth and the time when he would see her again. The minutes lengthened to the scale of hours; the hours seemed long enough to produce a generation. He distracted himself as best he could by going to look for his mother's house. That had after all been his ambition here: to learn his nature better by grasping his family tree closer to the root. So far, of course, he'd merely succeeded in adding confusion to confusion. He'd not known himself capable of what he'd felt last night—and felt now even more strongly. This soaring, unreasoning belief that all was well with the world, and could never be made unwell again. The fact of time unravelling the way it was could not best his optimism; it was just a game reality was playing with him, to confirm the absolute authority of what he was feeling.
And to that trick was added another, more subtle still. When he came to the house where his mother had lived it was almost supernaturally unchanged, exactly as in the photographs he'd seen of the place. He stood in the middle of the street and stared at it. There was no traffic in either direction; nor any pedestrians. This corner of the Grove floated in mid-morning languor, and he felt almost as though his mother might appear at the window, a child again, and gaze out at him. That notion would not have occurred to him but for the events of the previous night. The miraculous recognition in that locking of eyes—the sense he'd had (still had) that his encounter with Jo-Beth had been a joy in waiting somewhere—led his mind to make patterns it had never dared before, and this possibility (a place from which a deeper self had drawn knowledge of Jo-Beth and known her imminence) would have been beyond him twenty-four hours before. Again, a loop. The mysteries of their meeting had taken him into realms of supposition which led from love to physics to philosophy and back to love again in such a way that art and science could no longer be distinguished.
Nor indeed, could the sense of mystery he felt, standing here in front of his mother's house, be separated from the mystery of the girl. House, mother, and meeting were one whole extraordinary story. He, the common factor.
He decided against knocking on the door (after all, how much more could he learn from the place?) and was about to retrace his steps when some instinct checked him and instead he continued up the gentle gradient of the street to its summit. There he was startled to find himself presented with a panoramic view of the Grove, looking east over the Mall to where the far fringes of the town gave way to solid foliage. Or nearly solid; here and there the canopy broke, and in one of the gaps quite a crowd appeared to have gathered. Arc-lamps had been erected in a ring, bearing down on some sight too far off for him to see. Were they making a movie down there? He'd spent so much of the morning in a daze he'd noticed almost nothing on his way up here; he could have passed all the stars who'd ever won an Oscar walking these streets and not registered the fact.
While he stood watching, he heard something whisper to him. He looked around. The street behind him was empty. There was no breeze, even here on the brow of his mother's hill, to carry the sound to him. Yet it came again; a sound so close to his ear it was almost inside his head. The voice was soft. It spoke two syllables only, joined into a necklace of sound.
—ardhowardhowardhow—
It didn't take a degree in logic to associate this mystery with whatever was going on in the woods below. He couldn't pretend to understand the processes at work upon and around him. The Grove was clearly a law unto itself, and he'd profited by its enigmas too much to turn his back on future adventures. If pursuit of a steak could bring him the love of his life what might following a whisper bring?
It wasn't difficult to find his way down to the trees. He had the oddest sense, making the descent, that the whole town led that way; that the hillside was a tipped plate, the contents of which might at any moment slide away into the maw of the earth. That image was reinforced when he finally reached the woods and asked what was going on. Nobody seemed much interested in telling him until a kid piped up:
"There's a hole in the ground, an' it swallowed him whole."
"Swallowed who?" Howie wanted to know. It wasn't the boy who replied but the woman with him.
"Buddy Vance," she said. Howie was none the wiser, and his ignorance must have registered, because the woman offered supplementary information. "He used to be a TV star," she said. "Funny guy. My husband loves him."
"Have they brought him up?" he asked.
"Not yet."
"Doesn't matter," the boy chipped in. "He's dead anyhow."
"Is that right?" Howie said.
"Sure," came the woman's reply.
The scene suddenly took on a fresh perspective. This crowd wasn't here to watch a man being snatched from death's door. They were here to claim a glimpse of the body as it was put in the back of an ambulance. All they wanted was to say: I was there, when they brought him up. I saw him, under a sheet. Their morbidity, especially on a day so full of possibilities, revolted him. Whoever had called his name was calling it no longer; or if he was the crowd's lowering presence blocked it. There was no purpose in his staying, when he had eyes to gaze into and lips to kiss. Turning his back on the trees, and his summoner, he headed back to the motel to wait for Jo-Beth's arrival.

IV
Only Abernethy ever called Grillo by his first name. To Saralyn, from the day they'd met to the night they'd parted, he was always Grillo; to every one of his colleagues and friends, the same. To his enemies (and what journalist, particularly a disgraced one, did not court enemies?) he was sometimes That Fuckhead Grillo, or Grillo the Righteous, but always Grillo.
Only Abernethy ever dared: "Nathan?"
"What do you want?"
Grillo had just stepped out of a shower, but the very sound of Abernethy's voice and he was ready to scrub himself down again.
"What are you doing at home?"
"I'm working," Grillo lied. It had been a late night. "The pollution piece, remember?"
"Forget it. Something's come up and I want you there. Buddy Vance—the comedian?—he turned up missing."