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

seen or heard. Only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle
left me, but more of that later . . .
Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities
already mentioned, and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders
with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start
him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as 'a buried land where
Shudde-M'ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race
and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu When he was asked
officially to account for his missing companions, he said that they had died
in an earthquake; and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer,
he would say no more.
Thus, being uncertain as to how he would react to questions about his
expedition, I was loath to ask him of it. However, on those rare occasions
when he saw fit to talk of it without prompting, I listened avidly; for I, as
much if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.
He had been back only a few months when he suddenly left London and invited me
up to his cottage, isolated here on the Yorkshire Moors, to keep him company.
This invitation was a thing strange in itself, as he was one who had spent
months in absolute solitude in various far-flung desolate places and liked to
think of himself as something of a hermit. I accepted, for I saw the perfect
chance to get a little of that peaceful quiet which I find particularly
beneficial to my writing.
One day, shortly after I had settled in, Sir Amery showed me a pair of
strangely beautiful pearly spheres. They measured about four inches in
diameter, and, though he had been unable to positively identify the material
from which they were made, he was able to say that it appeared to be some
unknown combination of calcium, chrysolite, and diamond-dust. How the things
had been made was, as he put it, 'anybody's guess'. The spheres, he told me,
had been found at the site of the dead G'harne - the first intimation he had
offered that he had actually found the place - buried beneath the earth in a
lidless stone box which had borne upon its queerly angled sides certain
utterly alien engravings. Sir Amery was anything but explicit with regard to
those designs, merely stating that they were so loathsome in what they
suggested that it would not do to describe them too closely. Finally, in
answer to my probing questions, he told me that they depicted monstrous
sacrifices to some unthinkable cthon-ian deity. More he refused to say but
directed me, since I seemed 'so damnably eager', to the works of Commodus and
the hag-ridden Caracalla.
He mentioned that also upon the box, along with the pictures, were many lines
of sharply cut characters much similar to the cuneiform and dot-group etchings
of the G'harne Fragments and, in certain aspects, having a disturbing likeness
to the almost unfathomable Pnakotic Manuscript. Quite possibly, he went on,
the container had been a toy-box of sorts and the spheres, in all probability,
were once the baubles of a child of the ancient city; certainly children, or
young ones, were mentioned in
what he had managed to decipher of the odd writing on the box.
It was during this stage of his narrative that I noticed Sir Amery's eyes were
beginning to glaze over and his speech was starting to falter, almost as
though some strange psychic block were affecting his memory. Without warning,
like a man suddenly gone into an hypnotic trance, he began muttering of