"Terry Dowling - The Lagan Fishers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

"What if people are hiding them?"
Howie shook his head. "Doesn't follow. Someone somewhere would go for the gold and the glory instead,
bypass the authorities and go to the media direct. You'd only need one."
Sam didn't press it too closely, didn't say: unless they were loved ones. Returnees. Things of the heart.
He kept it casual, made it seem that he was just-what was Howie's saying?-shooting the breeze.
"Ever meet anyone who claims to have seen someone?"
"Sure. Bancroft, but he's always claiming one thing or another about the lagan. Sally Joule's neighbor,
Corben, had a stroke, but she won't buy it. Reckons the lagan did it to him because he discovered
something."
"Would he mind if I visited?"
"Probably not. I know Corben. He's two counties over, an hour's drive or more. But I go sit with him
sometimes. Talk's ninety-eight per cent one-sided these days, but that's okay. And you've got things in
common. He wildcatted his field too, just as you've done. I can take you out."

Ben Corben seemed pleased to see them. At least he tracked their approach from his easy chair on the front
porch and gave a lopsided smile when Howie greeted him and introduced Sam. He couldn't speak well
anymore, and took ages to answer the same question Sam had put to Howie: had he ever heard of anything
found alive in the lagan.
"Sum-thin," Corben managed. "Stor-ees."
And that was it for a time. The live-in nurse served afternoon tea, helped Corben with his teacup and
scones.
Which was fine, Sam found. It gave him time to look out over Corben's lapsed domain, let him see what
his own bloom would one day become.
Finally Howard brought them back to the question as if it hadn't been asked.
"Ever find anything out there, Corb? Anything alive?" He gestured at what remained of Corben's hedges,
stripped and wasted now, the towers and barricades fallen, the basements collapsed in on themselves, just
so many spike-fields, kite-frames and screens of wind-torn filigree, rattling and creaking and slowly falling to
dust.
"No," Corben said, so so slowly, and his skewed face seemed curiously serene, alive with something
known.
"It's important, Ben," Sam said. "It's just-it's really important. I've got hedges now. Never expected it.
Never did. But I think something's out there. Calling at night." He didn't want to give too much away. And
Howie had gone with it, bless him, hadn't swung about and said: hey, what's this? Good friend.
Corben blinked, looked out across the ruin of his own lagan field, now two years gone, so Howie had said.

Again Sam noticed the peace in the man, what may have been a result of the stroke or even some
medication stupor, but seemed for all the world like uncaring serenity, as if he'd seen sufficient wonders and
was content, as if-well, as if-
And there it was. Of course. Like Kyrie. Corben was like Kyrie. Slow and careful. Minimalist. Just like
Kyrie. Of course.

It was all so obvious once Sam saw it like that. Back home, he removed the photos, sims and mirrors, left
Kyrie to be what she-what "it" had tried to be all along. He saw what he thought to be relief in the maquette's
suffering eyes as he removed the last of the distractions, then brought a chair and sat in front of it.
Finish your job, he thought, but didn't speak it. Finish being what you already are.
And Sam found it such a relief to sit there and let it happen. Kyrie had never tried to be Jeanie, had never
been a gift from the lagan to ease a broken heart.
Not Kyrie. Cadrey.
Sam saw how he'd been: thinking of Jeanie by day, not thinking of her-blessedly forgetting her-at night
when he slept. Escaping in dreams, his only true time of self. Swaying Kyrie this way and that in its