"Dan Simmons - A Winter Haunting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

I know what you’re thinking. There’s the old journalism anecdote of William Randolph Hearst needing
someone to cover the Johnstown flood and sending a young cub reporter. It was the kid’s big break. The
next day the novice cabled back this lead to Hearst’s paper: “GOD SAT ON A LONELY HILL
ABOVE JOHNSTOWN TODAY, LOOKING DOWN IN SORROW AT NATURE’S FIERCE
DESTRUCTION.” Old-timers swear that Hearst did not hesitate ten seconds before cabling back this
response: “FORGET FLOOD STORY. INTERVIEW GOD.”

I say I died forty-one years ago and your response is,Forget the story about Dale. Who cares? Tell us
what it’s like to be dead—what is the afterlife like? What is it like to be a ghost? Is there a God?

At least, these would be my questions. Unfortunately, I am not a ghost. Nor do I know anything about
any afterlife. When I was alive, I did not believe in ghosts or heaven or God or spirits surviving the body
or resurrection or reincarnation, and I still do not. If I had to describe my current state of existence, I
would say that I am a cyst of memory. Dale’ssense of me is so strong, so cut off and cauterized from the
rest of his consciousness by trauma, that I seem to exist as something more than memory, something less
than life, almost literally a black hole of holistic recollection formed by the collapsing gravity of grief.
I know this does not explain it, but then I do not really understand it myself. I know only that Iam and
that there was a—“quickening” might be the best word—when Dale decided to return and spend the
winter at the farm where I once lived and where I died.

And, no, I have no memory of my death. I know no more of that event than does Dale. Evidently one’s
death, like one’s birth, is so important as to be beyond recall.

When I was alive I was only a boy, but I was fairly smart and totally dedicated to becoming a writer
someday. I spent years preparing for that—apprenticing myself to the word—knowing that it would be
many more years before I could write a real short story, much less a novel, but practicing with opening
paragraphs for stories and novels nonetheless.

If I were borrowing an opening for this tale, I would steal it from Thackeray’s boring 1861 novelLovel
the Widower:
Who shall be the hero of this tale? Not I who write it. I am but the Chorus of the Play. I make remarks
on the conduct of the characters: I narrate their simple story.
Thackeray’s ominiscient “I” was lying, of course. Any Creator stating that he is a simple Chorus and
impassive observer of his creatures’ actions is a hypocrite and a liar. Of course, I believed that to be true
of God, on the few occasions when I considered that He might exist at all. Once, when Dale and Mike
and I were having a chickenhouse discussion of God, my only contribution was a paraphrased quote
from Mark Twain: “When we look around at the pain and injustice of the world, we must come to the
ineluctable conclusion that God is a thug.” I’m not sure if I believed that then or now, but it certainly
shocked Mike and Dale into silence. Especially Mike. He was an altar boy then and most devout.

But I’m digressing even before I begin the story. I always hated writers who did that. I still have no
powerful opening line. I’ll just begin again.

Forty-one years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very
bad winter.

Dale Stewart drove from western Montana to central Illinois, more than 1,700 miles in 29 hours, the
mountains dwindling and then disappearing in his rearview mirror, endless stretches of autumn prairie
blending into a tan and russet blur, following I-90 east to I-29 southeast to I-80 east to I-74 south and
then east again, traveling through the better part of two time zones, returning to the checkerboard