"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

movement.

But as he stroked toward the quay, toward the low lip of polished blue-gray
stone that would allow him to climb up to the walkway fronting the Great Walls,
he saw one small figure, just one. No, there was a second person. Man or woman,
be could not be sure . . . either of them.

He breast-stroked through the lovely crimson water, softly lapping at the stones
of the quay, and paddled in to shelter. He pulled himself along till he reached
something like a hemp cargo net hanging into the water, anchored out of sight on
the walkway above. He pulled himself up, and stood, dripping heavy pink
moisture, dwarfed by the immensity of the cyclopean walls that slanted away
above him. He craned to see the sky, even to see a ceiling, but all was mist and
the reborn antiquity of structures ageless and ever new.

He marveled that, if he were indeed somewhere beneath the Bermuda Triangle, in
some impossible sub-oceanic world that could exist in defiance of the rigors of
physics and plate tectonics and magma certainties, then this subterranean
edifice was certainly the most colossal structure ever built on the planet. A
holy sunken cathedral built by gods.

He stood there dripping pink, thick water, sanctifying himself in the first
moment of true religion he had ever known.

And one of the two figures who had been walking beside the quay came toward him,
and it was a man in his very late thirties or early forties, wearing a gray
chambray shirt and casual chino slacks. He was a pleasant-looking man, and he
walked toward Dennis Lanfear and, as he drew near, he smiled and said, "Dennis?
Is that you, son?"

Dennis Lanfear came back from abstract visions of the City of God, the holy
sunken cathedral, and looked at the man. Then he stared at the man. Then he saw
the man.

Then he knew the man.

He had not seen his father since he had been ten months old. Now he was just
over forty. He was older than the man in front of him, but he knew the face from
his mother's photographs -- the picnic at Crystal Beach, the wedding the shot of
him leaning against the Packard, the snapshot on the dock when he came back from
the War. Dennis Lanfear stared into, and knew, the smile of his father dead four
decades; the loving face of George DeVote Lanfear, come to beam upon, and
pridefully acknowledge, the son he had never been allowed to see grow to
manhood.

Dennis stood silent, the pain swelling up from his stomach to his chest and into
his eyes. As his father embraced him, he began to cry. His father's arms went
around him, the tough, corded arms that had worked so diligently until death in
the auto assembly plant; and that strength bound Dennis as securely as had the
arms of the mermaid who had brought him here, beyond midnight, to the sunken