"Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lebbon Tim)

things. Usually he found nothing but mud, muck and crawling things, but on those rare occasions when he
went home happy instead of dejected, he would be carrying some-thing of interest. A small skeleton
once, easily identi-fiable were we to ask our parents, though we didn't because we preferred the
mystery. He also found a buried box, about the size of a house brick, and we undertook to smash the
lock with a rock. Those few seconds were a magical time—the impact of stone on metal reverberating
through the woods, the endless possibilities rich and colored by our childish imagi-nations—and even
when the lid flipped open to reveal nothing but rust, we weren't truly disappointed. It was empty of
treasure or maps or hidden truths, but the box itself was still there, and that was good enough for us.
Scott walked home that day happier than I had ever seen him, the box tucked beneath one arm, his small
trowel dirtying his trousers where it protruded from a pocket. He was beaming. "There's always
something there," he said. "Everyone reckons that what we see is it. They forget about all the buried
stuff."

His progression from school, to university, to a ca-reer in archaeology was no surprise to anyone. We
kept in touch, even though my work took me on a vastly different route. Scott would disappear from my
life for years on end, and then I would receive an e-mail or letter out of the blue, inviting me to join him in
Bolivia or Uzbekistan or Taiwan. More often than not I would have to decline, but several times a rush of
excitement grabbed me. It was often his young, en-thusiastic face I thought of as I sat there in my office
at home, dreaming, persuading myself that I should go. The wonder in his eyes. The knowledge that
when 1 saw him again that wonder would still be there.

I was a jealous friend. Jealous when we were nine, and jealous when we were thirty-nine. Scott had
al-ways known what he wanted from life, and he pursued it with vigor. I lived my life unfulfilled, and
worse, felt that I had no potential to fulfill.

So I would talk to my wife and children and, with their blessing, jet off to some far-flung corner of the
world to spend two weeks in a tent with my old friend. He never changed, only became fuller. Each time
I saw him he seemed more alive and I felt more dead, ground down by life and work, impulsiveness
slaugh-tered by necessity. And each time, Scott seemed to be digging much deeper than even he knew.
It was not only lost things he was looking for, but things un-known, and even things that had never been.
He was looking past history and into the abyss of unadulter-ated truth.

He sometimes told me what he had unearthed. I was no longer a child, so 1 often found it difficult to
believe, a leap of imagination that I was not able to make. He would smile and shake his head, and that
simple ges-ture hurt me to the core. He was so used to miracles.

His final calling came in a series of brief, enigmatic e-mails.

I've found a city that no one has dreamed of in cen-turies, the first said. I smiled at the words on the
screen, my heart quickening in unconscious sympathy with the excitement bleeding from them. I imagined
Scott's eyes wide and childlike in their amazement.

The following night: It must be a city of ghosts. A thrill went through me. Scott could imbue text on a
screen with so much emotion and feeling… but then 1 knew that my memories of him were providing that
effect. He gave me sterile, blank words, and I fleshed them out with his passion.

Matthew is here.

Matthew was Scott's son. Scott had had a brief, pas-sionate affair when he was twenty, and six years
later he learned from his ex-lover that he had a child. She only told him because the boy was dying of