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Автор Anthony Price

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Anthony Price

The Labyrinth

Makers

First published in Great Britain in 1970 by Victor Gollancz I

Every August 14 for twenty-three years Mrs Steerforth put the same In Memoriam notice in the Daily Telegraph: STEERFORTH, John Adair Steerforth, Flt Lieut, DFC, RAFVR.

Lost at sea, September 1945. On this, his birthday, not forgotten

–Mother.

It was not Mrs Steerforth's fault that the notice was inaccurate. She had spent a whole week composing it, adding words and then subtracting them, until in the end she decided that brevity was the soul of dignity.

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The words 'not forgotten' were her only concession to sentiment, and they were the direct result of the inaccuracy. It was the thought of the cold and restless sea that made her heart ache; she was resigned to her son's death, but not to his lack of a known grave.

So for Mrs Steerforth the draining of the lake brought a sort of happiness: she was able to bury her son at last.

By the time Audley became involved with them, the lake, the aircraft and the man had parted company.

The lake no longer existed and the aircraft was spread out over the floor of a hangar at Farnborough. The man had been collected and taken away in a large cardboard box and later reassembled with unnecessary care in a much larger wooden one.

Audley never actually saw any of them, except in photographs.

There would have been no point in his doing so, even had it been possible. The reports were clear and adequate; he wouldn't have found anything more of value, for there had been nothing of value to find.

Yet he saw that lost lake many times in his mind's eye. Not as it had become, a marshy puddle in a muddy wasteland.

And not, perhaps, as it had been on the day it had closed over Steerforth.

The overhanging trees grew taller in his vision, the enveloping weed was thicker and the water more rank. He saw it as the remote and secret place it was, a drowner of small adventurous boys which had lost its reason for existing when the mansion on the hillside dummy4

above it had burned a century earlier.

Then Steerforth had given it back a new reason for being there, a secret of its very own.

But it was not the moment of impact he saw. He could never even decide whether it was skill or chance that slipped the plane so exactly between the random beeches and set it down so precisely.

Chance more likely, for in that torrential downpour a frantic pilot could have seen little. And luck could be so cruel, certainly.

It was the long decay afterwards which he saw, and the slow journey to nowhere.

He saw Steerforth changing into a horror, and a gorgeous windfall for millions of tiny, hungry eaters; and then into a mere framework, Icarus turned Yorick. And in that framework generations of pond life in turn lived and died, untroubled except for the small upheavals of bones and buckles, buttons and fastenings, each settling into its natural resting place.

And he saw the night when that well-ordered world ended.

The lake did not die in one spectacular cataract, but slowly and without fuss. In the darkness no one saw the streams rise further down the valley; and no one heard the slither and splash as matted balls of weed slid down the fuselage and engine cowlings, scouring the mud to reveal the faded khaki drab beneath.