"Lisa Goldstein - The Phantasma of Q---" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

that episode, in the next volume?"
"I don't know. I hadn't thought to."
"Good. Leave it alone, Arbuthnot. It won't do either of us any good."
"But perhaps I will now," I said, moved by an impulse I didn't entirely understand. "Perhaps I'll find
her, and ask her—"
"Leave it alone," Wallis said again, and put the phone down.

Over the next few days I couldn't settle down to continue my memoirs. Was I going to mention her?
I hadn't planned to, but now I found that I could think of nothing else.
There was no help for it. I would have to get that incident out of the way, get it clear in my mind,
before I could go on.
It started as so many of my journeys did, with the chance word spoken at the Royal Explorers
Club. The club itself unfortunately no longer exists, though the building still stands, a massive pillared
structure once filled with animals and plants, statuary and stelae, jewels and mummies, urns and
reliquaries, all our marvels collected from all over the world.
I went there in the autumn of 1885, to give a talk about my unsuccessful voyage to Crete to seek
out the Minotaur. Afterwards a few of the members, some known to me and some not, settled back in
the club's plush leather chairs to reminisce. "Do you know," one of the fellows said, "a friend of mine
claims to have sighted a phantasma in the north," and he named a forest near the village of
Q—————-.
I was interested, of course. More than a little interested, if the truth be known, because a friend of
mine, a man named Witherspoon, had told me a few months earlier that he had invented a device that
made it possible to identify a phantasma. (Witherspoon, you may remember from the first volume of my
memoirs, is the man who invented the oneiroscope, a device for capturing dreams.) They look like us,
like ordinary people, though the consensus among explorers is that there are more females than males
among them. The ancient Greeks called them Muses, and had distinguished nine of them, all women.
Sightings by members of the Explorers Club seem to suggest that there are more than nine, though
perhaps not many more; they are very elusive. A man who had captured one, or who was even in the
presence of one, would be filled with ideas that would seem to burst from him; he would never lack for
inspiration and creative force. I paid a visit to Witherspoon and arranged to borrow the device he had
invented, which he called a musopticon.

The musopticon proved to be a bulky, boxlike structure about two feet on each side. Witherspoon
had constructed it of mahogany, and the levers, dials and gears of brass; it was also bound with
decorations of brass along the sides, so that the whole thing was extraordinarily heavy. I brought it to a
craftsman who had done work for me before and had him make me a knapsack of canvas so that I could
carry it on my back; he also made pockets in the knapsack for my other instruments.
I took a train to Q—————-and a cab to my lodgings. I would be staying with Mrs Jones, a
woman who rented out rooms in her house. It was late afternoon by the time I finished unpacking, and I
went downstairs to see if Mrs Jones had made tea. I was very displeased to discover that she had other
guests, a young man and woman. More people than I had heard the rumours about the phantasma, and I
hoped that these other guests were not here for the purpose of finding her. Surely, I thought, an explorer
would not bring his wife along on an expedition. And yet what other reason was there to travel to this
remote village?
We made our introductions. The man was Samuel Wallis and his wife was Adele; from their accents
I judged they were Americans. Wallis was lean and fit, with long glossy hair parted in the middle. Mrs
Wallis was as young as he and rather beautiful, with hair the same mahogany as my musopticon and wide
slate-grey eyes. We settled down to our tea.
"Are you Arbuthnot the explorer?" Wallis asked me.
I admitted that I was.