Читать книгу Galilee - Clive Barker, Clive Barker - Страница 28

So much for my promised brevity. I intended to write a short, snappy chapter giving you a quick glimpse of the Geary family tree, and I end up lost in its branches. It’s not that every twig is pertinent to the story at hand—if that were the case, I’d never have undertaken the task—but there are surprising connections between some of what I’ve told you and events to come. To give you an example: Rachel, when she smiles a certain way, has something of Louise Brooks’s wicked humor in her eyes; along with Louise’s dark, shiny hair, of course. It’s useful for you to know how devoted Cadmus was to Louise, if you’re to understand how the presence of Rachel will later affect him.

But even more important than such details, I suspect, is a general sense of the patterns these people made as they passed their behavior, good and bad, on to their children. How Laurence Grainger Geary (who died, by the way, in a prostitute’s bed in Havana) taught his son Cadmus by example to be both fearless and cruel. How Cadmus shaped a creature of pure self-destruction in Norah, and a man subtly committed to his own father’s undoing in George.

George: we may as well take a moment here to finish George’s story. It’s a sad end for such a good-natured man; a death over which countless questions still hang. On February 6th, 1981, instead of driving up to his beloved weekend house in Caleb’s Creek to join his family, he went out to Long Island. He drove himself, which was strange. He didn’t like to drive, especially when the weather was foul, as it was that night. He did call Deborah, to tell her that he’d be late home: he had an “annoying bit of business” he needed to attend to, he told her, but he promised to be back by the early hours of the morning. Deborah waited up for him. He didn’t come home. By three a.m. she had called the police; by dawn a full scale search was underway, a search which continued through a rainy Saturday and Sunday without a single lead being turned up. It wasn’t until seven-thirty or so on Monday morning that a man walking his dog along the shore at Smith Point Beach chanced to peer into a car that had been parked there he’d noticed, close to the sand, for three days. Inside was the body of a man. It was George. His neck had been broken. The murder had taken place on the shore itself—there was sand in George’s shoes, and in his hair and mouth—then the body had been carried back to the car and left there. His wallet was later found on the shore. The only item that had been taken from it was a picture of his wife.

The hunt for George’s killer went on for years (in a sense, I suppose, it still continues; the file was never closed) but despite a million-dollar reward offered by Cadmus for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, the felon was never found.