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

set the instrument in order. I stood then, for a moment, to ensure that
everything was working correctly and for a few seconds noticed nothing
abnormal. It was my ears which first warned of the change. There had been a
low, clockwork hum and a steady, sharp scraping noise before. The hum was
still attendant, but in place of the scraping sound was a jerky scratching
which drew my fascinated eyes to the stylus.
That small screw had evidently made all the difference in the world. No wonder
the shock we had felt in the afternoon, which had so disturbed my uncle, had
gone unrecorded. The instrument had not been working correctly then - but now
it was!
Now it could plainly be seen that every few minutes the ground was being
shaken by tremors which, though they were not so severe as to be felt, were
certainly strong enough to cause the stylus to wildly zigzag over the surface
of the revolving graph paper . . .
I felt in a far more shaken state than the ground when I finally retired that
night. Yet I could not readily decide
the cause of my nervousness. Just why should I feel so apprehensive about my
discovery? True, I knew that the effect of the now - correctly? - working
machine upon-my uncle would probably be unpleasant, might even cause another
of his 'outbursts'; but was that knowledge alone sufficient to unsettle me? On
reflection I could see no reason whatever why any particular area of the
country should receive more than its usual quota of earth tremors. Eventually
1 concluded that the machine was either totally at fault or simply far too
sensitive - perhaps the brass screw needed adjustment - and so finally I went
to sleep assuring myself that the strong shock we had felt had been merely
coincidental to my uncle's condition. Still, I noticed before I dozed off that
the very air itself seemed charged with a strange tension, and that the slight
breeze which had wafted the late leaves during the day had gone completely,
leaving in its passing an absolute quiet in which, during my slumbers, I
fancied all night that the ground trembled beneath my bed . . .
The next morning I was up early. I was short of writing materials and had
decided to catch the lone morning bus into Radcar. I left the cottage before
Sir Amery was awake, and during the journey I thought back on the events of
the previous day and decided to do a little research while I was in town. In
Radcar I had a bite to eat before calling at the offices of the Radcar Mirror
where a Mr McKinnen, a sub-editor, was particularly helpful. He spent some
time on the office telephones making extensive inquiries on my behalf.
Eventually I was told that for the better part of a year there had been
no tremors of any importance in England, a point I must obviously have
challenged had not further information been forthcoming. I learned that there
had been some minor shocks and that these had occurred at places as close as
Goole, a few miles away (that one within the last forty-eight hours), and as
far as Tenterden near Dover. There had also been a very minor tremor at Ramsey
in Huntingdonshire. I thanked Mr McKinnen profusely for his help and would
have left then but, as an afterthought, he asked me if I would be interested
in checking through the paper's international files. I gratefully accepted and
was left on my own to study a great pile of interesting translations. Of
course, as I expected, most of the information was useless to me, but it did
not take me long to sort out what I was after.
At first I had difficulty in believing the evidence of my own eyes. I read