"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 1 - The Burrowers Beneath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

the word. 'Are you alone, then, in this belief of yours?'
'Yes, at least I think I am. Those others I mentioned are ... no more! I'll
try to explain.'
My gaunt-looking friend sat back then and visibly relaxed. He closed his eyes
for a second and I knew that he pondered the best way to tell his story. After
a few moments, in a quiet and controlled tone of voice, he commenced:
'De Marigny, I'm glad we're two of a kind; I'm damned if I know whom I might
confide in if we weren't so close. There are others who share this love of
ours, this fascination for forbidden things, to be sure, but none I know so
well as you, and no one with whom I've shared experiences such as we have
known and trembled at together. There's been this thread between us ever since
you first arrived in London as a boy, straight off the boat from America. Why!
We're even tied by that clock there, once owned by your father!' He indicated
the weird, four-
handed, strangely ticking monstrosity in the corner. 'Yes, it's as well we're
two of a kind, for how could I explain to a stranger the fantastic things I
must somehow explain? And even if I could do so without finding myself put
away in a padded cell, who would give the thing credit? Even you, my friend,
may find it beyond belief.'
'Oh, come now, Titus,' I felt obliged to cut in. 'You couldn't wish for any
more inexplicable a thing than that case of the Viking's Stone you dragged me
in on! And how about the Mirror of Nitocris, which I've told you of before?
What a threat and a horror there! No, it's unfair to doubt a man's loyalty in
these things before you've tried it, my friend.'
'I don't doubt your loyalty, Henri - on the contrary -but even so, this thing
I've come up against is ... fantastic! There's more than simply the occult
involved -if the occult is involved at all - there's myth and legend, dream
and fancy, hideous fear and terrifying, well, survivals!'
'Survivals?'
'Yes, I think so; but you'll have to let me tell it in my own way. No more
interruptions, now. You can question me all you want when I'm done. Agreed?'
I grudgingly nodded my head.
'Survivals, I said, yes,' he then continued. 'Residua of dark and nameless
epochs and uncounted cycles of time and existence. Look here; you see this
fossil?' He reached into a drawer in his desk and held up an ammonite from the
beaches of the Northeast.
"The living creature that this once was dwelt in a warm sea side by side with
man's earliest forebears. It was here even before the most antediluvian Adam
walked, or crawled, on dry land! But millions of years before that, possibly a
forebear of this very fossil itself, Muenstero-ceras, an early ammonite,
existed in the seas of the lower
Carboniferous. Now to get back to survivals, Muenstero-ceras had a more mobile
and much more highly developed contemporary in those predawn oceans, a fish
called Coelacanthus - and yet a live coelacanth, its species thought to have
been extinct since early Triassic times, was netted off Madagascar in 1938!
Then again, though I don't refer specifically to these sorts of things, we
have the Loch Ness monster and the alleged giant saurians of Lake Tasek Bera
in Malaya - though why such creatures shouldn't exist in a world capable of
supporting the very real Komodo dragons is beyond me, even if they are thought
by many to be pure myth - and even the Yeti and the West German