"The Sympathy Society" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

During the cheese course (when the table was messy with crumbs and stripped-off sticks of celery) Tybalt scraped back his chair and said, ‘Martin - you've realized by now what we're doing here, haven't you?’

‘I'm not sure,’ said Martin. ‘I think perhaps I'm missing some­thing.’

‘Understatement of the year,’ put in Terence.

Tybalt ignored him. ‘We're not here to cry for you, Martin; or mollycoddle you; or make you believe that life has to go on. What a fallacy that is! Life doesn't have to go on, if you don't want it to. Where were you, before you were born? You weren't anywhere. You didn't exist. In the same way, you won't exist after you're dead. There's no heaven, Martin. There isn't any hell. But there is one thing: in the instant when you die, there's rev­elation.’

‘Revelation?’ Martin was used to being the center of attention, and he didn't like the way that Tybalt dominated the whole room, and everybody in it.

‘Revelation like the Book of Revelations,’ said Terence. ‘Revela­tion like the scales falling from your eyes.’

Tybalt smiled. ‘When you're dead, you're dead. That's all there is to it. Blackness, nothingness, that's it. We all know it, even if we're scared to admit it. But I believe there's a split-second, when you die, that you see the world as it really is. We probably see it when we're born, too. Why do you think babies cry, when they first come out of the womb? But babies forget; and babies can't tell us what they've seen.’

‘Neither can dead people,’ said Martin.

‘Well, you're right there. Nobody comes back. But these days, there is a way to record what people are seeing, in their mind's eye. When people think, electrical impulses jump from one synapse to the other, inside of the brain. And we can catch those electrical impulses and record them, just like a DVD disk.’

‘What are you trying to tell me? That you can record what's happening inside of other people's brains?’

Tybalt nodded; and nodded. ‘You've got it, Martin. That's exactly what we can do. The technology is still in its infancy, but we've managed to recover five or six minutes of footage of living brain activity; and at least six seconds of post-mortem activity. We can see what people are thinking about, when they die.’

He stopped for a moment, to light up a cigarette. Then he waved away the smoke, and said, ‘We can record those last split-seconds of human life. We can record it in pictures and sound, DVD no problem. The entire technology has been in place since 1996. What it needed was the will to make it work.’

‘And you think that you have that will?’ asked Martin.

‘Not me, you. You're the only one who can show us what happens when you go to meet your Maker. You and Terence, and Sylvia, and Sticky, and Theresa. You're the only people who can make this work.’

Martin said nothing. He was beginning to grasp the enormity of what Tybalt was saying, but he needed to hear it spelled out. Tybalt said, ‘I have my suits tailored, but I'm a physical mess. When I was twenty-four, I borrowed my friend's motorcycle and took my girlfriend for a ride along the Kingston bypass. We went through the New Malden underpass at 125mph, and then I lost it. She came off the pillion and flew right over the central reservation, straight into the front of a Securicor van. I tumbled nearly half-a-mile down the road in front of me, and smashed up everything that was smashable. Ribs, pelvis, arms, legs, ankles. I was like a jelly filled with bits of bone. And I died. I lay there on the road, dead. And when I was dead, I saw something. Only for a few seconds. But I saw the world as it really was. Not the way we imagine it, when we're alive. I saw the world as it really was.’

‘But you survived,’ said Martin.

Tybalt shrugged, and tapped his stick. ‘Yes, I survived. By good or bad fortune, an ambulance was passing, and they took me straight to Kingston Hospital. They thought I was past saving. They gave me so many electric shocks that they burned my nipples off. But after the seventh shock, I started to breathe; and I have never stopped breathing since.

‘All the same, I know what I saw, after that accident, and I don't believe that it was shock that caused me to see it, or concussion, or psychological trauma. As I lay in the road, Martin, I saw things that would make your hair stand on end.’

‘So what are you saying to me?’ asked Martin.

‘I'm saying nothing. But you listened to all of your fellow society members this afternoon, didn't you? They're all bereaved, just as you are. None of them want to carry on without their family or their partners. They all want to die. But none of them want to kill themselves with tablets, or exhaust fumes, or by cutting their wrists. When they die, they want to feel what their loved ones felt. They want to suffer in the same way. Sylvia wants to burn; Sticky wants to be crushed; Theresa wants to be trapped below ground. This will be their redemption.

‘You know what I'm talking about, Martin. How many mornings have you lain awake and thought about Sarah, and what she felt like, when that steel wire cut off her head? You want to experience that too, don't you, Martin? - or else you wouldn't have answered my advertisement. The Sympathy Society isn't the Samaritans. The Sympathy Society really sympathizes. We'll give you what you're craving for. The same death that your loved one suffered.’

Martin's mouth was totally dry. ‘You'll do that - you'll burn Sylvia? You'll trap Theresa under the ground?’

Tybalt nodded. ‘Nobody else understands, Martin, but I do. You want to die. But trying to cut your throat with a steak knife ... that doesn't even compare, does it? What did Sarah feel? After her head was cut off, did she still think for a second or two? Did she see her body, still speeding along on that jet-ski, with blood pumping out of her neck? You want to know that, don't you, Martin?’

Martin cleared his throat, and nodded.

Tybalt leaned forward and touched his knee with chalky fingernails. ‘The Sympathy Society can arrange for you to be killed in any way you choose. There's only one thing we ask in return. We need to record your impressions with synaptic monitors ... we need to see what you see, think what you think, the instant you die. I saw something terrible when I lay on the road after my motorcycle accident, and I need to know whether I was hallucinating or not.’