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Автор Джеймс Герберт

NOBODY TRUE

James Herbert

…So that this I, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body, is even easier to know than the body, and furthermore would not stop being what it is, even if the body did not exist.

René Descartes

Cogito, ergo sum – I think, therefore I am.

René Descartes

I think therefore am I?

James True

“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens. ”

Woody Allen

1

I wasn’t there when I died.

Really. I wasn’t. And finding my body dead came as a shock. Hell, I was horrified, lost, couldn’t understand what the fuck had happened.

Because I’d been away, you see, away from my physical body. My mind—spirit, soul, psyche, consciousness, call it what you will—had been off on one of its occasional excursions, to find on its return that my body had become a corpse. A very bloody and mutilated corpse.

It took me a long time to absorb what lay spread before me on the hotel’s blood-drenched bed—much longer, as you’ll come to appreciate—to get used to the idea. I was adrift, floating in the ether like some poor desolate ghost. Only I wasn’t a ghost. Was I? If that were the case, shouldn’t I have been on my way down some long black tunnel towards the light at the end? Shouldn’t my life have flashed before me, sins and all? Where was my personal Judgement Day?

If I were dead why didn’t I feel dead?

I could only stand—hover—over the empty shell that once was me and moan aloud.

How did this come about? I’ll give no answers just yet, but instead will take you through a story of love, murder, betrayal and revelation, not quite all of it bad.

It began with a hot potato…

2

I was six or seven years old at the time (I died aged thirty-three) and on holiday with my mother, having dinner in a Bournemouth boarding house. It was just the two of us because my dad had run out on us before I made my third birthday; I was told he’d gone off with another lady—my mother made no bones about it, despite my tender years I was always the sounding board for her vexations and rages, especially when they concerned my errant father. The nights were many when my bedtime story was a denunciation of marriage and cheap “tarts”. The topic of breakfast conversation often had a lot to do with the failings of men in general and the iniquities of wayward husbands in particular. I must have been at least ten before I realized that the equation “men = bad, women (specifically wives) = good but put-upon”, was a mother-generated myth, and that was only because I had several friends whose fathers were terrific to their sons and their sons’ friends, as well as loving towards their own wives. I got to know about marriages built on firm foundations and I have to admit to an envy of the other boys and girls who had normal home lives. Why did my dad betray me, why did he abandon us for this “tart”? It bugged me then, but now I understand. The icon of worship that was Mother eventually lost some of its shine. Yes, in later years I still loved her, but no, I didn’t turn into Norman Bates and murder Mother, stow her bones away in the fruit cellar. Let’s say my view of men in general, and my father in particular, became more balanced. Lord, in my teens I even began to understand how some wives—the nagging, abusive kind—could drive their husbands off. No disrespect, Mother, but you certainly had a mouth on you.