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

A few days after the collapse of the cottage on the moors, I settled here in
this house on the outskirts of Marske to be close at hand if - though I could
see little hope of it - my uncle should turn up again. But now some dread
power keeps me here. I cannot flee ... At first their power was not so strong,
but now ... I am no longer able even to leave this desk, and I know that the
end must be coming fast. I am rooted to this chair as if grown here and it is
as much as I can do to type!
But I must ... I must . . . And the ground movements are much stronger now.
That hellish, damnable, mocking stylus - leaping so crazily over the paper!
I had been here only two days when the police delivered to me a dirty,
soil-stained envelope. It had been found in the ruins of the cottage - near
the lip of that curious hole - and was addressed to me. It contained those
notes I have already copied and a letter from Sir Amery which, if its awful
ending is anything to go on, he must have just finished writing when the
horror came for him. When I
consider, it is not surprising that the envelope survived the collapse; they
would not have known what it was, and so would have had no interest in it.
Nothing in the cottage seems to have been deliberately damaged - nothing
inanimate, that is - and so far as I have been able to discover the only
missing items are those terrible spheres, or what remained of them!
But I must hurry. I cannot escape and all the time the tremors are increasing
in strength and frequency. No! I will not have time. No time to write all I
intended to say. The shocks are too heavy ... to o heav y. Int erfer in g with
my t ypi ng. I will finis h this i n th e only way rem ain ing to me and
staple S ir Amer y's lett er to th is man use rip t no w.
Dear Paul,
In the event of this letter ever getting to you, there are certain things I
must ask you to do for the safety and sanity of the world. It is absolutely
necessary that these things be explored and dealt with - though how that may
be done I am at a loss to say. It was my intention, for the sake of my own
sanity, to forget what happened at G'harne. I was wrong to try to hide it. At
this very moment there are men digging in strange, forbidden places, and who
knows what they may unearth? Certainly all these horrors must be tracked down
and rooted out - but not by bumbling amateurs. It must be done by men who are
ready for the ultimate in. hideous, cosmic horror. Men with weapons. Perhaps
flamethrowers would do the trick . . . Certainly a scientific knowledge of war
would be a necessity . . . Devices could be made to track the enemy ... I mean
specialized seismological instruments. If I had the time I would prepare a
dossier, detailed and explicit, but it appears that this letter will have to
suffice as a guide to tomorrow's horror-hunters.
You see, / now know for sure that they are after me - and there's nothing I
can do about it! It's too late! At first even I, just like so many others,
believed myself to be just a little bit mad. I refused to admit to myself that
what I had seen happen had ever happened at all! To admit that was to admit
complete lunacy - but it was real, all right, it did happen - and will again!
Heaven only knows what's been wrong with my seismograph, but the damn thing's
let me down in the worst possible way! Oh, they would have got me eventually,
but I might at least have had time to prepare a proper warning.
I ask you to think, Paul . . . Think of what has happened at the cottage ... I
can write of it as though it had already happened - because I know it must! It