"Gardner Dozois - A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Sometimes the old man was visited by time-travelers. He would
be alone in the house, perhaps sitting at his massive old wooden
desk with a book or some of the notes he endlessly shuffled through,
the shadows of the room cavernous around him. It would be the
very bottom of the evening, that flat timeless moment between the
guttering of one day and the quickening of the next when the sky is
neither black nor gray, nothing moves, and the night beyond the
window glass is as cold and bitter and dead as the dregs of
yesterday's coffee. At such a time, if he would pause in his work to
listen, he would become intensely aware of the ancient brownstone
building around him, smelling of plaster and wood and wax and old
dust, imbued with the kind of dense humming silence that is made
of many small sounds not quite heard. He would listen to the silence

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 A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows
by Gardner Dozois

until his nerves were stretched through the building like miles of fine
silver wire, and then, as the shadows closed in like iron and the light
itself would seem to grow smoky and dim, the time-travelers would
arrive.
He couldn't see them or hear them, but in they would come, the
time travelers, filing into the house, filling up the shadows,
spreading through the room like smoke. He would feel them around
him as he worked, crowding close to the desk, looking over his
shoulder. He wasn't afraid of them. There was no menace in them,
no chill of evil or the uncanny—only the feeling that they were there
with him, watching him patiently, interestedly, without malice. He
fancied them as groups of ghostly tourists from the far future, here
we see a twenty-first century man in his natural habitat, notice the
details of gross corporeality, please do not interphase anything,
clicking some future equivalent of cameras at him, how quaint,
murmuring appreciatively to each other in almost audible mothwing
voices, discorporate Gray Line tours from a millennium hence
slumming in the darker centuries.


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 A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows
by Gardner Dozois

Sometimes he would nod affably to them as they came in,
neighbor to neighbor across the vast gulfs of time, and then he
would smile at himself, and mutter “Senile dementia!” They would
stay with him for the rest of the night, looking on while he worked,
following him into the bathroom—see, see!—and trailing around the
house after him wherever he went. They were as much company as