"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 2 - Traveling With the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

herself in and observing the deleterious effects of massive amounts of
adrenaline on her ability to concentrateтАж
How would I go about charting degree of panic with inability to make a decision?
The workhouse wouldnтАЩt really let me put my subjects into life threatening
situations.
In the end she turned the key but left it in the lock, and stepped cautiously
through the door she had opened, into what had probably been a dining room but
was as large as the ballroom of her auntтАЩs house in Mayfair. It was lined floor
to ceiling with books: goods boxes had been stacked on top of the original
ten-foot bookshelves, and planks stretched over windows and doors so that not
one square foot of the original paneling showed and the tops of the highest
ranks brushed the coffered ceiling. Yellow backed adventure novels by Conan
Doyle and Clifford Ashdown shouldered worn calf saintsтАЩ lives, antiquated
chemistry texts, Carlyle, Gibbon, de Sade, Balzac, cheap modern reprints of
Aeschylus and Plato, Galsworthy, Wilde, Shaw. In front of the bone clean
fireplace, a massive oak chest, strapped with leather and the only furniture in
the room, held a cheap American oil lamp of clear glass and steel, the trimmed
wick in about half a reservoir of oil. Lydia produced a match from her pocket,
lit the lamp, and by its uncertain light read the titles of the several new
volumes, half unwrapped from their parcel paper, which lay beside it.
A French mathematics text. A German physics book by a man named Einstein. The
Wind in the Willows.
How much time left?
With a certain amount of difficulty Lydia produced from beneath her coat a
curious deviceтАФa simple brass bug sprayer of the pump variety, its nozzle
carefully capped with a pinch of sticking plasterтАФand a shoulder sling
manufactured from a couple of scarves in last yearтАЩs colors. She removed the
cap, reslung the sprayer on the outside of her coat and, picking up the lamp,
moved off through the house.
The first-floor room contained more books. The rear chamber, book lined also,
held furniture as well. A heavy table, strewn with mathematics texts, abaci,
astrolabes, armillary spheres, a German Brunsviga tabulation machine, and what
Lydia recognized dimly as an old set of ivory calculating bones. At the far end
of the room loomed a machine the size of an upright piano, sinister with glass,
metal, and ranks of what looked like clock faces, whose use Lydia could not
begin to guess. Near it stood a blackwood cabinet desk, German and ruinously
old, carved thick with gods and trees, among which peeped the tarnished brass
locks to concealed recesses and drawers.
A wing chair of purple velvet, very worn and rubbed, stood before a fireplace
whose blue and yellow tiles were smoked almost to obscurity, its arms covered
with cat hair, an American newspaper lying on its seat. Movement caught her eye

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and made her gasp, but it was only her own reflection in a yellowed mirror, the
glass nearly covered by a great shawl of eighteenth-century black point lace
that hung over its divided pane.
Lydia set the lamp down and lifted the shawl aside. Thin and rather fragile
looking, her reflection gazed back at her: flat-chested and schoolgirlish, she