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

Shudde-M'ell and Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll - 'alien Gods defying
description' - and of mythological places with equally fantastic names:
Sarnath and Hyperborea, R'lyeh and Ephiroth, and many more.
Eager though I was to learn more of that tragic expedition, I fear it was I
who stopped Sir Amery from staying on. Try as I might, on hearing him babbling
so, I could not keep a look of pity and concern from showing on my face which,
when he saw it, caused him to hurriedly excuse himself and flee to the privacy
of his room. Later, when I looked in at his door, he was engrossed with his
seismograph and appeared to be relating the markings on its graph to an atlas
of the world which he had taken from his shelves. I was concerned to note that
he was quietly arguing with himself.
Naturally, being what he was and having such a great interest in peculiar
ethnic problems, my uncle had always possessed, along with his historical and
archaeological source books, a smattering of works concerning elder-lore and
primitive, doubtful religions. I mean such works as The Golden Bough and Miss
Murray's Witch Cult. But what was I to make of those other books which I found
in his library within a few days of my arrival? On his shelves were at least
nine works which I knew were so outrageous in what they suggest that they have
been mentioned by widely differing authorities over a period of many years
as being damnable, blasphemous, abhorrent, unspeakable, literary lunacy. These
included the Cthaat Aquadin-gen by an unknown author, Feery's Notes on the
Necronomicon, the Liber Miraculorem, Eliphas Levi's History of Magic, and a
faded, leather-bound copy of the hideous Cultes des Goules. Perhaps the worst
thing I saw was a slim volume by Commodus which that 'Blood Maniac' had
written in 183 a.d. and which was protected by lamination from further
fragmentation.
And moreover, as if these books were not puzzling and disturbing enough, there
was that other thing . . .
What of the indescribable droning chant which I often heard issuing from Sir
Amery's room in the dead of night? This first occurred on the sixth night I
spent with him, when I was roused from my own uneasy slumbers by the morbid
accents of a language it seemed impossible for the vocal cords of man to
emulate. Yet my uncle was weirdly fluent with it, and I scribbled down an
oft-repeated sentence-sequence in what I considered the nearest written
approximation of the spoken words I could find. These words - or at least
sounds - were:
Ce'haaie ep-ngh fl'hur G'harne fhtagn,
Ce'haaie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M'ell.
Hai G'harne orr'e ep fl'hur,
Shudde-M'ell ican-icanicas fl'hur orr'e G'harne.
Though at the time I found the thing impossible to pronounce as I heard it, I
have since found that with each passing day, oddly, the pronunciation of those
lines becomes easier - as if with the approach of some obscene horror I grow
more capable of expressing myself in that horror's terms. Perhaps it is just
that lately in my dreams, I have found occasion to mouth those very words,
and, as all things are far simpler in dreams, my fluency has passed over into
my waking hours.
But that does not explain the tremors - the same inexplicable tremors which so
terrorized my uncle. Are the shocks which cause the ever-present quiverings of
the seismograph stylus merely the traces of some vast, subter-rene cataclysm a