"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 2 - The Walls Of Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

though the perils before them were many and terrible.
Yet somehow Gil and Rudy discovered that they no longer
had any desire to return across the Void to their own world.
 Chapter 1



The setting was the Shamrock Bar in San Bernardino on a
rainy Saturday night. Rain drummed softly on the plate glass
window, and the tawdry gleam of lights shone on the wet
pavement outside. Two bearded bikers and a sleazy blonde were
playing pool in the back. Rudy Solis swigged off his second
beer of the evening and watched the room. There was
something he had lost, something that had been taken from him,
but he no longer remembered what it had been. Only a numb
ache was left.
He was out of money and not nearly drunk enough yet.
Behind the bar, Billie May moved back and forth along the
shelf of empty glasses and bottles of beer, her reflection trailing
her in the flyspecked mirror, showing her black eye make-up
and the red lace of her bra at the low neck of her sweater. The
mirror revealed all the usual Saturday night crowd, people Rudy
had known since high school тАУ since childhood, some of them:
Peach McClain, the fattest HellтАЩs Angel in the world, with his
old lady; Crazy Red, the karate instructor; Big Bull; and the
gang from the steel mill. But it was as if they were strangers. He
made a gesture with one hand, and a beer bottle levitated from
the shelf before the mirror and drifted across the intervening
space to his hand. No one noticed. He poured the beer and
drank, hardly tasting it. From the jukebox, the tinny whine of
steel guitars backed a syrupy nasal voice hymning adultery. The
hurt of the loss within him was unbearable.
He let go of the bottle in midair a foot above the surface of
the bar and made it stay there. Still no one noticed, or no one
cared, anyway. Rudy stared past it at his own reflection in the
mirror - the sharp bone structure and backswept eyebrows in
their frame of long, reddish-black hair. His fingers were stained
with car paint and grease, and his name was tattooed across a
flaming torch on his wrist. Behind him, the plate glass window
had grown suddenly dark, as if all light had died outside.
He turned, chilled with a horror he could not define. No
streetlights were visible outside, no sheen of neon, only
darkness that seemed to press against the window, soft and
living - darkness that stirred with a restless movement, as if
creatures impossibly sinuous haunted its livid depths. He tried
to cry out, and his voice was only a kind of feeble rattle in his
throat. He tried to point, but the people in the bar ignored him,
as if he were not there. A bolt of energy or power from outside
struck the wall of the bar like a monster fist, caving it in amid
an explosion of shattering bricks. Through the torn wall,