"Jack Womack - Audience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Womack Jack)

Audience
Jack Womack
Jack Womack (b. 1956) is probably better known as a writer of dark and baroque science
fiction such as Ambient (1987) and Heathern (1990), but once in a while he turns his hand to a
more subtle canvas. Long ago H. G. Wells wrote " The Magic Shop" (1903), about a place that
sells genuine magic tricks. Since then there has been a steady trickle of stories about such magical
places. Check out Avram Davidson's anthology Magic for Sale (1983) for plenty of examples.
Here's one of the latest and certainly more unusual.

SMALL MUSEUMS IN LARGE CITIES INEVITABLY ATTRACT me whenever I travel. Their
haphazard assemblages - randomly displayed in no evident pattern, fitfully identified by yellowing cards -
on occasion contain items so memorably unsettling as thereafter to blot from the mind the holdings of the
Smithsonian, or Hermitage, or Louvre. I happened upon such a place one afternoon while strolling in the
Low City, near the Margarethestrasse, down an alley branching off St Jermyn's Close. The surrounding
rows of soot-shrouded houses leaned into their dank passageway; their roofs caressed rather than
touched, and their shadows shut away their inhabitants from notions of time or season. Overlooking all
was the close's six-spired cathedral, which itself served, until the recent political upheavals, as the
Museum of Atheistic Belief. The cathedral's carillons proclaimed the fifteenth hour as I knocked at the
door of the Hall of Lost Sounds, and for a moment I feared that, in their din, my own would go unheard.
"Thank you for seeing me," the curator said as I entered. I would have guessed him to be no older
than seventy. His voice held the measured resonance of a cello, and he declaimed his notes almost in the
manner of a Sprechstimmer.
"How much?" I asked. He shook his head. "You don't charge admission?"
"Who would come?"
A wholly unrecognizable accent misted his words. Much about his place appeared medieval, but
then, so did its district - while wandering its byways, I'd thought I could as well have come armed with
halberd rather than backpack, ducking the splash of chamber pots and not the offers of touts. The
curator lingered in his museum's antechamber as if awaiting some necessary cue before our tour could
begin, and we listened to the cathedral bells clanging out their last.
"It must hearten," I offered, "hearing them again after so long."
"No other noise assaults my walls," he said. "Lost sounds are sometimes better left lost. I keep only
those which tickle your ear like a lover's tongue."
The curator gestured that we should begin, and we entered the museum proper. Wooden planks
attached at floor and ceiling, aligned along the left wall, partitioned half of the first room into alcoves.
"Each space possesses its own eigentone," he said.
"Pardon?" I said.
"Excuse me. The reflections within are accurate, and in accordance with acoustic principles. If the
audience can be satisfied, it will be."
An iron bouquet was affixed to the door frame. The curator tugged at one of its sprigs, and fire
leaped hissing from the cardinal blossom. The creamy light revealed a coiled, valveless horn resembling a
golden snake. Retrieving it from its cubicle, he cradled the instrument in his arms as if it were his sister's
baby.
"A posthorn," he said. "The mail came four times daily, the nature of each delivery denoted by
unvarying leitmotifs." Pressing its mouthpiece against his lips, the curator blew three clear, ascending
notes, each possessing an oddly pitched, yet not unattractive tone. "Such music, heard across miles,
foretold of letters from your lover." Lifting the horn again, he played another short series, in a sharper
key. "That prepared you to receive unforeseen gifts." He coughed until his lungs rattled; then replaced the
horn within its enclosure. "Every signal, continually heard from childhood into age, was as familiar as a
mother's voice. Once the deliveries ended, it was decreed that the posthorn should never again be played
by anyone."