"Diane Duane - Feline Wizards 1 - The Book Of Night With Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

You would walk on, pause in the center of the room, and look upward, as many tunes before, at the starry,
painted vault of the heavensтАФits dusk-blue rather faded, and half the bulbs in the Zodiac's constellations
burnt out. The Zodiac is backward. They'll be renovating the ceiling this spring, but you doubt they'll fix
that problem. It doesn't matter, anyway: after all, "backward" depends on which direction you're looking
from....
You would walk on again then, guided by senses other than the purely physical ones, and stroll silently
over to the right of the motionless up-escalators, toward the gate to Track 25. Once through its archway,
everything changes. The ambiance of the terminalтАФlight, air, opennessтАФ abruptly shifts: the ceiling
lowers, the darkness closes in. Lighting comes in the form of long lines of fluorescent fixtures, only one
out of every three of them lit, this time of day. They shine down in bright dashed lines on the seven
platforms to your right, the nine to your left, and straight ahead, on the gray concrete of the platform that
serves Tracks 25 and 26. Behind you, a pool of warm light lies under the windows of the glass-walled
room that is the Trainmaster's Office. Little light, though, makes it past the platform's edge to the tracks
themselves. They are long trenches of shadow between pale gray plateaus of concrete that stretch,
tapering, into the middle distance, vanishing into more darkness. The rails themselves gleam faintly only
close to where you stand: they too reach off into the dark, converging, and swiftly disappear. Red and
green track guidelights shine dully there. A few shine brighter: the track crew members are down there,
walking the rails to check for obstructions and wiping the lights off as they come.
You walk quietly down the center platform, letting your eyes get used to the reduced light, until you come
to where the platform ends, almost a quarter-mile from the arches of the gates.
You jump down from the tapered end of the platform, into shadow, and walk out of reach of the last
fluorescent lights. The red and green lights marking the track switches are your only illumination now, and
all you need. Seventy-five feet ahead of you, Tracks 25 and 26 converge. Just off to your right is the
walkway to a low concrete building, Tower A, the master signaling center for the terminal. You are
careful not to look directly at it: the bright lights inside it, the blinking of switch indicators and computer
telltales, would ruin your night-sight. You pad softly on past, under its windows, past the little phone-
exchange box at the tower's end, on into the darkness. The still, close air smells of iron, rust, garbage,


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kru...7%20-%20The%20Book%20Of%20Night%20With%20Moon.htm (3 of 271)23-2-2006 17:12:44
 THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON

mildew, cinders, electricityтАФand something else.
Here you pause, warned by the senses that drew you here, and you wait. Trembling on your skin, and
against your eyes, is a feeling like the tremor of air in the subway when, well down (he tunnel, a train is
coming. But what's coming isn't a train. Everything around is silent, even the subway tunnel three levels
below you. Two levels above you now is the block between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets: from there, no
sound conies, either. Watching, you wait.
No eyes but yours, acclimated and looking in the right place, would see what slowly becomes visible. The
air itself, somehow more dark than the air in front of it, is bending, showing contour, like a plate-glass
window bowing outward in a hurricane windтАФor inward, toward you. Yet the contour that you half-see,
half-sense, is wrong. It bulges like a blown bubbleтАФbut a bubble blown backward, drawn in rather than
pushed out. You half-expect to hear breath sucked inward to match what you almost-see.
The bubble gets bigger and bigger, spanning the tracks. The darkness in the air streaks, pulled past its
tolerances. Not-light shows through the thin places; wincing, you glance away. The faintest possible
shrilling sound fills your twitching ears, the sound of spacetime yielding to intolerable pressure, under
protest: it scales up and up, piercing you like pinsтАФ
тАФand stops, as the bubble breaks, letting through whatever has been leaning on it from the other side. You
look at it, blinking. Silence again: darkness. A false alarmтАФ
Until, as you shake your head again at the shrilling, you realize that you shouldn't still be hearing it. And