"Paul McAuley - Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

reeked of cheap gin (the grey hair tangled around his face swarmed with flea-sized
imps), and followed the others through a dark corridor, hung with cobwebby threads
and damp rags that brushed unpleasantly against my face, into a hot airless room
not much illuminated by the half dozen candles spiked to the walls. There was a
filthy piece of red velvet stretched across the rear wall, a sagging armchair set in
front of it, nothing else.

The audience was much as I had expected: a party of young swells in bright
waistcoats given to laughter and loud remarks that were far less amusing and
original than they supposed; several dignified old women in widow's weeds; a
variety of the pale, anxious, recently bereaved. The only person of immediate
interest was a white-haired man in an antique jacket and high-collared shirt, with a
faint ineradicable sneer on his face and a bright, bird-like gaze that roved around
the room. It settled on me for a moment, took note, and moved on. I was pinched
toward the back, between a slight young man with the black hair and olive
complexion of a native of Southern France or Spain, and a married couple, the
woman in black with a veil across her face, her straight-backed husband attempting
to seem dignified, but trembling with barely suppressed emotion; it was to his leg
that the dead child clung, a stout but wan little thing no more than six years old.

There were other presences in the room—blurred partial shells of the kind cast off in
moments of intense emotion, and a foggy, bloated imp that peered out of the black
shawl of a sharp-nosed old woman whom I took for one too fond of laudanum—but
the little girl was the only true ghost. She looked at me with a kind of wonder, her
eyes dark smudges, and asked in a tiny voice only I could hear if I would help her
sleep.

I smiled down at her. Like her father, I was also possessed by emotion; a sick
anticipation revolved like a ball of hot tar in my stomach.

"I'm so tired," the poor creature said. "I want to sleep and I can't. I'm so tired."
She was too young to know what had happened to her. Like most ghosts, she was
frightened and pathetic.

I had an idea that she might prove useful, and said quietly, "Be patient, my dear,
and I'll help you sleep for as long as you like. But first, will you help me?"

She gave me a wan smile, and nodded warily. The young man beside me must have
heard me talking to her, for he frowned and seemed to be about to ask me a
question, but at that moment the grey-haired, imp-infested old man who had taken
the admission money limped around the edge of the room, leaning on a stout stick
and pinching out all but one of the candles. He took up station in front of the chair,
stamped his stick on the floor for silence, and made a long meretricious speech I
won't trouble to repeat in any detail, explaining at the end that all questions must
be directed through him, and that if anyone would like to contact 'the other side' for
the modest fee of just a half guinea, then they should now step forward, and tell
him the name of their dear departed.

Since most in the room had come there for that purpose, this took some time. The
old man wrote down their requests on a scrap of paper, licking the point of his