"Michael Moorcock - City of the Beast" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

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City of the Beast (Warriors of Mars)
Michael Kane Book 1
by Michale Moorcock
Version 1.0


Chapter One

MY DEBT
TO M. CLARCHET

THE Matter Transmitter is both villain and hero of
this story (began Kane), for it took me to a world
where I felt more at home than I shall ever feel
here. It brought me to a wonderful girl whom I
loved and who loved meтАФand then took it all away
again.
But I had better begin nearer the beginning.

I was born, as I told you, in OhioтАФin Wynns-
villeтАФa small, pleasant town that never changed
much. Its only unusual feature was in the person of
M. Clarchet, a Frenchman who had settled there
shortly after the First World War. He lived in a
large place on the outskirts of town. M. Clarchet
was a cosmopolitan, a Frenchman of the old
schoolтАФshort, very straight-backed, with a typically
French, waxed moustache and a rather military
way of walking.

To be honest, M. Clarchet was something of a
caricature to us and seemed to illustrate everything
we had learned about the French in our dime
novels and comic books. Yet I owe my life to M.
Clarchet, though I wasn't to realize it until many
years after the old gentleman had passed on, and
when I found myself suddenly transported to Mars
... But again I am getting ahead of myself.

Clarchet was an enigma even to me though, as

boy and youth, I probably knew him better than
anyone else. He had been, he said, a fencing mas-
ter at the Court of the Tsar of Russia before the
Revolution and had had to leave in a hurry when
the Bolsheviks took over.

He had settled in Wynnsville directly because of