"Paul McAuley - Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple
by Paul McAuley


I first met the young engineer, and became entangled in the machinations of Dr.
Pretorius and the affair of the lost temple, at a seance. For three weeks, fantastic
stories of the psychic powers of a young Romanian gypsy woman had been
circulating throughout London. It was said that she could relay messages from the
dead and speak directly to the hearts and minds of the living, that her revelations
and admonitions made women faint and strong men weep. Rank and fashion flocked
to witness this latest curiosity; there had been numerous articles and sketches
about her in newspapers and magazines, and skits parodying her seances put on in
music halls and theatres.

I was newly arrived from Edinburgh, and still wore a black band for my mother and
father, but I was also young and full of misplaced confidence. I believed that I knew
more about the matter of the dead than anyone living, and was both jealous of and
intrigued by this young gypsy's fame; I knew that I must find out if she was a fraud,
a rival, or a potential ally and friend.

Her family had rented out the ground floor of a house on the northern edge of the
Holborn Rookery, and a large crowd had gathered outside to watch the arrival of
visitors to the new phenomenon. The unending procession of wonders that passes
through the great metropolis never seems to exhaust the curiosity of its
inhabitants; if the city were a theatre, it would never want for an audience, and its
angels would see their investments multiply without any of the usual risk. Young
women carrying babies or with small children clutching their skirts were begging for
alms; unshaven ruffians in battered caps and canvas waistcoats were swigging from
bottles; an old woman with greasy unbound hair and a shrewd gaze stood in a
doorway, smoking a short clay pipe. There were pamphlet and ballad sheet sellers,
orange sellers (the road was littered with the bits of tissue paper in which the fruit
was wrapped), and sellers of ginger-beer and fried fish and pies. A crew of beggars
lacking an assortment of limbs were got up as sailors in front of a sheet crudely
painted with a ship foundering in a tempest. A street preacher stood on a box under
a banner held up by his supporters, sweating into the serge of his black coat, his
face shining and his fists shaking by his face as he tried in vain to make himself
heard above the din. In short, every beastly aspect of humanity was on display, and
most of them were in some way haunted, mostly by imps of delirium or the ghosts
of dead children with faces like shrivelled apples; one old woman, bent double over
a stick, carried a dozen half-formed ghost babies on her back, squirming over each
other like blind newborn kittens trying to get their turn at their mother's teats.
It was terribly hot, the close, heavy air laden with the miasma of every taper,
candle, whale-oil lantern, and gas mantle burning in London's teeming night.
Carriages were lined up along one side of the road, their horses waiting patiently in
their traces, grazing from the nose bags strapped over their muzzles; the oaty reek
of horse piss was the cleanest smell in the crowded thoroughfare. A pair of
constables in black top hats and blue swallow-tail coats stood near a coffee stall,
watching the burlesque with a kind of baffled approval, as if it had been
unexpectedly staged for their benefit. I joined the knot of well-dressed men and
women waiting to gain admittance, paid my florin to a whiskery old rogue who