"Philip Jose Farmer - A Feast Unknown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

My uncle believed that his brother was responsible for the disappearance of two whores from villages
only a few miles from the estates. A severed breast was found on the shore of a tarn; this was all. The
locals presumed that somebody had done away with the two women and buried them somewhere. My
uncle connected his brother to the murders because of his ravings while in the cell about killing all
whores, including his mother. Especially his mother.
His mother, of course, was safe from him. She had killed herself when James, John, and Patrick, her
three sons, were quite young. Her husband had killed himself because he suspected that a Swedish
gentleman was the father of the boys and that she may have killed herself because her conscience made
life unbearable. Their aunt raised the three boys and was much loved by them. But John Cloamby never
forgave his mother, although he had never spoken of her until his madness took him.
Later, my uncle believed that John was Jack the Ripper. Before his breakdown, John had been a
medical doctor. His real motive in becoming a physician was not in curing the sick. He wanted to know
everything about the human body because he intended to find out the secret of immortality. To this end,
he had meant to learn much more of chemistry and botany than any medical doctor had ever known.
This obsession was supposed to be the cause of his sickness. Instead, it was the symptom.
It was ironic that he did not find that secret but that I, his son, did. I supposed this, only to have to
change my mind.
If my mother and uncle had not gone to Africa primarily to put my father behind them, I would not
have become immortal (have a very long prolonged youth, to be exact). Or so I thought.
I am immortal in the sense that I will be thirty-two years of age in body for a very very long time.
However, accident, murder, and suicide can reduce me to the rotting corpse which others usually become
before their hundredth birthday.
I omitted disease from the fatal list. The same elixir that gives me a potentiality of 30,000 years or
more also preserves me from disease. This does not, however, explain my seeming immunity from all the
diseases so common in tropical Africa before I became thirty-two.
My uncle’s diary recounts in an elegant style, reading like a prose Racine, a ride through the dark fog
of the night on March 21. He glimpsed his brother after hours of driving through the mists, and he leaped
out of his carriage and ran shouting after him. My mother sat shivering with cold and fear in the carriage
while she tried to peer through the wet grayness. A gas lamp nearby shot a ghastly half-light through the
swirls. She was alone. Her husband had not wanted a coachman because he might report the peculiar
occurrences of the evening to the police.
For a while, there was silence. Then she heard the clicking of hard heels on the stones. A man
appeared like a ship sailing through the fog. He stopped and turned, and by the dim light she saw her
husband’s mad brother.
When James Cloamby returned, he found his wife unconscious on the seat of the carriage. Her skirt
and petticoats were up over her face, and her undergarments had been cut off, probably with the scalpel
that later took apart the bodies of the Whitechapel whores in such grisly fashion.
My uncle was to reason that his brother had not killed her because she was not a whore. But John did
hate his older brother, and he may have raped Alexandra for revenge, or possibly because she was not a
whore and so was better than his mother, whom, in one part of him, he must still have loved. Also, since


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 A Feast Unknown

John loved Alexandra, or had said he loved her, it was possible that this was his act of love. Who knew
what the madman was thinking?
My uncle lit a match when she did not reply to his cry of alarm. He saw the white legs, stripped of
the black stockings, and the black, exceptionally hairy vagina out of which oozed my father’s spermatic
fluid and some of her blood.