"Ron Goulart - The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

arranged in alcoves and upon low pedestals. He'd long since noticed that
the floor was made up of black and white mosaic tiles that formed giant
serpentine patterns. He reminded himself that Lorenzo's predictions quite
often didn't come true.
Nearest the doorway stood the dancing girl the sailors had been anxious
to see. She was a little over five feet high, dressed in a spangled Gypsy
costume. She was poised on one foot with a tambourine raised high above
her kerchiefed head. In the flickering light provided by the two gas lamps
that had been left on she looked almost real.
"Almost," said Harry as he began another slow circuit of the long room.
Next to the immobile dancer sat a tiny golden-haired boy clad in a red
velvet lace-trimmed suit. On his tiny lap rested a tablet, and he held a quill
pen in his pink, pudgy right hand.
There was a clockwork flutist and a fortune-telling old witch, a caged
mechanical canary and a juggler. At the far end of the room two life-size
young men in fencing costumes faced each other holding sabers.
While Harry was studying the two realistic figures, the dancing girl's
tambourine rattled.
He spun.
She didn't appear to have moved.
The only sound he heard was the night rain hitting on the dozens of
glass panels high above.
Then he noticed that the feather pen in the little boy's hand was
flickering.
Harry went sprinting over there.
The mechanical boy had stopped writing by the time Harry reached
him.
 Scrawled across the white sheet of paper was a message for him.
Leave Zevenburg. It is not safe for you.
Harry took a step back from the little automaton. Lifting off his hat, he
scratched at his dark, curly hair. "Well now, I'll tell you," he said aloud, his
voice echoing. "I was aiming on leaving the whole damn country bright
and early tomorrow. Now, though, I'm not so sure."
"Too bad, too bad." The old fortune-teller had spoken in a dry, rattling
voice. "Now you'll die, now you'll die."
Above the drumming of the rain Harry heard heavy footfalls. He turned
to see one of the fencers walking, quite gracefully, toward him. The blade
of his saber caught the light of one of the bracket gas lamps and sparkled
once.
"Clockwork or flesh and blood," Harry warned the approaching figure,
"you're not going to take a slice out of me." He reached inside his coat for
his revolver.
The gun was no longer there.
Somebody out in that crowd, the Egyptian beggar kid most likely, was a
damn good pickpocket.
Keeping his hand inside his coat, Harry started backing for the
doorway. "I'd sure hate to shoot up a valuable piece of machinery like
you," he told the swordsman, who was now less than twenty feet from
him.
All at once Harry tripped.