"Ty Drago - Shadowself" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drago Ty)

He smiled again, that same, humorless smile. "My own shadow."

"Don't sound so crazy to me."

"You haven't heard it all yet," Liam said. "What if I told you that my shadow really is out to get
me?"
Brenda chewed on this for a few moments. "Okay," she admitted. "That does sound a little
nuts. What makes you think your shadow's out to get you?"

"Know anything about a shadow, Brenda?"

She chuckled, as though amused by the question. "A shadow? Hell...I'm an expert! It's what
shows up behind you if you stand in front of a light. Let's see..." The painted nail of her
forefinger touched her bottom lip. "...it moves when you move...gets shorter in the morning
and longer in the afternoon...oh!...and it doesn't come out at all on rainy days. That about
cover it?"
Liam smiled. "The Egyptians believed a shadow was the antithesis of a man; a demon that
took a man's image. Later on, the Germans gave the idea a name: Doppleganger...
meaning 'ghost double'". Brenda didn't respond, but only watched him with deep blue eyes
and a face set with the interest of a professional listener. She's patronizing me, Liam
thought, and found he didn't care. It was good to tell the story once in a while, just to release
a little tension. And...hell...he'd never see this girl again.

"If it sounds like I know what I'm talking about," he continued. "It's because I do. Five years
ago, I was Dr. Liam Reese, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University."
Brenda's eyebrows rose. "No kidding?"

He frowned and took another swallow of beer. "No kidding. Wrote a dozen books and about
a thousand papers on the nature and history of man. Even made the cover of The
Anthropology Review . Ever here of that?" When she shook her head, he waved the point
away. "It doesn't matter. Well, one day in my researches I came across a grimoire...a book
of magic. Beautiful old thing, discovered in the basement of a church in Belgium. It wasn't so
much a spell book as just sort of a text book...an instruction book for student wizards, I
suppose...and about sixteen hundred years old.
"In it was a discussion of shadows, a mixture of the African and Eastern European
concepts. 'Shadowselves', as the book called them, were said to contain the vaguest
images of our own darker halves; always behind us...always striving for control. The devil on
our shoulders, so to speak. The book outlined a complicated means for communicating with
one's Shadowself."

Liam paused and sipped his brew. Brenda was studying him with what now looked like
genuine attention. "So..." he said slowly. "I spent the next several weeks going over that
procedure, memorizing and re-memorizing it. God! the paper I was going to write!

"Well...I won't bore you with the actual spell. Suffice it to say that the timing and verbage,
burning of incense and the glyph and runes had to be perfect , and the first three times I tried
it...I failed. But on the fourth, I did not. That night, I watched as my shadow...cast against the
wall of my study by candles I'd lit inside a pentagram...moved of its own accord..."

Liam closed his eyes, his narrative trailing away. This was the first time he allowed himself