"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 2 - Traveling With the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

ran her fingers under the chair rail and around the heavy molding of the room’s
two doors. Near the base of the door into the wine cellar she felt a lever click
unwillingly under her fingers and saw, in the dirty brazen light, the wider gap
between two panels.
There was a latch on the inside of the movable panel so it could be opened from
below, and a worn ladder going down.
As Lydia had guessed, the low room beneath looked as if it had been the subcrypt
of a church, either the one that backed the house—in a square named, oddly
enough, Spaniard’s Court—or some forgotten predecessor. Barely visible in black
paint on the ceiling groins were the words Salvum me fac, Deus, quoniam
intraverunt aquae usque ad animam meam.
Lydia had not been raised a Catholic—her aunts considered even the inclusion of
candles on the parish altar grounds for complaint to the bishop—but recognized,
from her residency at St. Bartholomew’s, the words from the Mass for Deliverance
from Death.
A granite sarcophagus filled the far end of the chamber like a somber altar, all
but concealing a low, locked door. Lydia stood before it for some time, holding
the lamp high and gauging the probable weight of the stone lid. Then she knelt
and studied the floor.
Dustless.
A laborious investigation of the cracks in the gray stone floor showed her the
trapdoor, an eye-straining business by the amber glow of the lamp; she gave up
early trying to do the business tidily and without griming and wrinkling her
skirt, and it was equally impossible to keep her corset bones from jabbing her
ribs and the pump sprayer from knocking her repeatedly on the elbow. Another
squinting, painful half hour revealed the trigger to the trapdoor’s catch behind
the projecting stone frame of the chamber’s inner door.
As she had deduced, the sarcophagus had nothing to do with anything. It was
simply too obvious.
The steps leading downward were shallow, so deeply worn in the centers that she
had to press her shoulder to one wall and brace herself against the other to
maintain her footing. She guessed it was well past dark outside, and beneath her
growing fear—the panicky conviction that she was completely unqualified to deal
with the encounter that lay ahead—she wondered precisely how dark was dark
enough. She suppressed the urge to check her watch and make notes.

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The lamplight could not penetrate the night below her, and from that darkness
rose the smells of wet earth, cold stone, and rust. Interestingly, there was no
smell of rats.
The light slithered wetly over a grille of metal bars. Lydia pressed herself to
it, maneuvered the lamp through and held it up to illuminate what lay within.
The bars were old, the lock on them new and expensive and beyond the capacity of
either the skeleton key or the picklocks. The lamplight reached only partway
into the catacomb beyond the bars, but far enough to show her wall niches, empty
for the most part, or occupied with the suggestion of ghastly natures mortes:
skulls, dust, and shreds of fallen hair.
On the right-hand wall the shadows all but hid a niche whose interior no amount