"Adams, Douglas - Dirk Gently 01 - Holistic Detective Agency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.
This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus
computer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing
software.
The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The
Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image
of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help
with this process.
Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for all her
help in nursing this book into existence.

Douglas Adams
London, 1987


[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

This time there would be no witnesses.
This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and
the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by
which so many of the world's most momentous events seem to be
accompanied.
The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the
floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged
with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom
was a dreary kind of prickle.
Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the
low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a
kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.
It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of
magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at
a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible
than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages
dead.
The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly
along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,
the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.
But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was
not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering
deep within it.
The light was only just visible -- except of course that there was
no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a
light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little
brighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same time
a low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind of
wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away.
Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile
light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit
of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the
shadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared