"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

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.

Chapter One...

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 inside once more.

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was
total. The world seemed dead, the night a blankness.