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

supposed to bide my time. 'What was going on in the real world throughout this
period of strange dreams?'
'Well,' he slowly answered, 'it culminated in certain monstrous occurrences on
New Year's Eve at Oakdeene Sanatorium near Glasgow. In fact, five of the
inmates died that night in their cells; and a male nurse, too, on a lonely
road quite near the sanatorium. The latter was apparently attacked by a beast
of some sort. . . torn and horribly chewed! Apart from these deaths, all of
them quite inexplicable, one other nurse went mad; and, perhaps most amazing
of all, yet five more inmates, previously "hopeless" cases, were later
released as perfectly responsible citizens! You can read up on the case from
my cuttings-file for that period if you wish . . .
'Now, I'll agree that from what I've told you these occurrences seem to have
damn all to do with my dreams; nevertheless, after New Year's Eve, I wasn't
bothered again by those dreams!
'And that's not all, for I've checked, and rumour has it that prior to the
hellish happenings that night the worst inmates of Oakdeene gave themselves
over to some form of mad chanting. And I think I can hazard a guess as to what
that chanting was, if not what it was for.
'Anyhow, let's get on.
'Over the next thirty years or so,' Crow continued after closing the first
book and taking up a more recent diary,
'I had my share of lesser nightmares - no more than two dozen in all, all of
them of course recorded - one of which especially stays in my mind; we'll get
on to it in detail in a minute. But in late 1963, commencing on the tenth of
November, my sleep was once more savagely invaded, this time by dreams of a
vast underwater fortress peopled by things the like of which I never want to
see again, in or out of dreams!
'Well, these creatures in their citadel at the bottom of the sea, they were -
I don't know - ropy horrors out of the most terrible myths of pre-antiquity,
beings without parallel except in the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth Cycle. Most of
them were preoccupied with some obscure magical - or rather scientific -
preparations, assisted in their submarine industry by indescribable
blasphemies more heaps of mobile sludge than organic creatures . . . hideously
reminiscent of the Shoggoths in the Necronomicon, again from the Cthulhu Cycle
of myth.
'These Shoggoth-things - I came to think of them as "Sea-Shoggoths" - were
obviously subservient to their ropy masters, and yet a number of them stood
guard over one certain member of the former beings. I had the mad impression
that this . . . this Odd-Thing-Out, as it were -which was, even in its
absolute alienage, obviously demented - consisted in fact of a human mind
trapped in the body of one of these sea-dwellers!
'Again, during the period through which I experienced these dreams, there were
occurrences of peculiarly hideous aspect in the real, waking world. There were
awful uprisings in lunatic asylums all over the country, cult gatherings in
the Midlands and Northeast, terrible suicides among many members of the "arty
set", all coming to a head in the end when Surtsey rose from the sea off the
Vestmann Islands on the Atlantic Ridge.
'You know, of course, de Marigny, the basic theme of
the Cthulhu Cycle of myth; that at a time yet to come Lord Cthulhu will rise
from his slimy seat at Deep R'lyeh in the sea to reclaim his dry-land