"Simon Hawke - Wizard 4 - The Wizard of Rue Morgue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

compete. His acrobatics, his fire-eating stunts, his feats of strength and miraculous


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escapes seemed trivial compared to the illusions that adepts could conjure up. No one
cared about the skill involved and no one was impressed that he could do those things
without the aid of magic. What could be done with the aid of magic was a great deal
more spectacular. Jacques Pascal's career was ruined.
Having no other skills, he was reduced to working menial jobs, performing
unskilled labor and competing in an already overburdened job market with much
younger men and women. He had never saved up any money, so he fell farther and
farther behind, eventually losing his apartment and most of his possessions. He wound
up on the street, one of the city's homeless, and with no regular address, he was unable
to find work. His pride had succumbed to mortal wounds and his spirit had been
bludgeoned to the ground. Somewhere deep inside, the essential part of Jacques Pascal
expired. He became one of the walking dead. He did not survive so much as he merely
managed to exist.
The sewers were his home now, his place of sanctuary. He had found little nooks
and crannies here and there where he could curl up and sleep and if occasionally he did
encounter another lost soul like himself down in the tunnels, they usually fled from
him, being just as frightened as he was. His reason had not fled entirely, it had simply
become thoroughly numbed. He was filthy, scrofulous, tubercular and the moisture of
the sewers had seeped into his arthritic, eighty-year-old bones. He was old and sick and
his mind had long since retreated from the horrible reality that his existence had
become. Life had been reduced to a hopeless and deadening routine, scraping through
the city's garbage by night, like an emaciated alley cat, and shambling through the
sewer tunnels by day, ceaselessly exploring his underground domain. And nothing ever
happened to change this soul-deadening routine until the day he discovered the new
tunnel.
It was not, actually, a new tunnel at all, but an extremely old one that had been
exposed when one of the old sewer walls collapsed. Taking one of the crude torches he
used to light his way along the dark tunnels, he climbed through into the passageway
that had been exposed. It was very narrow, with just enough room for him to pass if he
stooped slightly, which had long since become his normal posture. Like a hunchback,
he shuffled down the musty corridor until it opened out into a larger chamber, with
several other tunnels branching off from it. Strewn all around this chamber were
ancient bones, dark brown with age, some simply scattered, others stacked in piles,
some laid out in bizarre arrangements.
He had found an old tunnel that led into the ancient Catacombs, originally formed
out of Roman quarries dating back to ancient times. Over the years, the Catacombs had
been expanded; scooped out to provide building materials for the city and a place to
dump the bones of millions of dead bodies transported from overcrowded cemeteries
and graveyards such as Les Innocents, which had given way to urban development.
During the Reign of Terror, the bodies of those claimed by the guillotine were brought
down into the Catacombs by cartloads, which saved the time and expense of proper
burial. Like the sewers, the corridors of the Catacombs honeycombed the ground
beneath the city. No one alive had ever explored them fully. They were like a vast
underground maze, a dark and foreboding final resting place for millions of dead souls.
It would be easy to become lost in them forever.