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

to follow him home through something like four thousand miles of subterrene
burrows! Think of it, de Marigny. What a task they set themselves - to regain
possession of the stolen
eggs - and by God, they almost carried it off, too! No, I daren't destroy
them. Sir Amery tried that, remember? And what happened to him?'
After a slight pause, Crow continued: 'But, having given Sir Amery's portion
of the Wendy-Smith papers a lot of thought, I've decided that he could only
have been partly right in his calculations. Look at it this way: certainly, if
as Wendy-Smith deduced the reproductive system of Shudde-M'ell and his kind is
so long and tedious, the creatures couldn't allow the loss of two future
members of their race. But I'm sure there was more than merely that in their
coming to England. Perhaps they'd had it planned for a long time - for
centuries maybe, even aeons! The way I see it, the larceny of the eggs from
G'harne finally prodded the burrowers into early activity. Now, we know they
came out of Africa - to recover their eggs, for revenge, whatever - but we
have no proof at all that they ever went back!'
'Of course,' I whispered, leaning forward to put my elbows on the desk, my
eyes widening in dawning understanding. 'In fact, at the moment, all the
evidence lies in favour of the very reverse!'
'Exactly,' Crow agreed. 'These things are on the move, Henri, and who knows
how many of their nests there may be, or where those nests are? We know
there's a burrow in the Midlands, at least I greatly suspect it, and another
at Harden in the Northeast - but there could be dozens of others! Don't forget
Sir Amery's words: ". . . he waits for the time when he can infest the entire
world with his loathsomeness ..." And for all we know this invasion of 1933
may not have been the first! What of Sir Amery's notes, those references to
Hadrian's Wall and Avebury? Yet more nests, Henri?'
He paused, momentarily lost for words, I suspected.
By then I was on my feet, pacing to and fro across that
part of the floor Crow had cleared. And yet ... Once more I found myself
puzzled. Something Crow had said ... My mind had not had time yet to adjust to
the afternoon's revelations.
'Titus,' I finally said, 'what do you mean by "a Midlands nest"? I mean, I can
see that there is some sort of horror at Harden, but what makes you think
there may be one in the Midlands?'
'Ah! I see that there's a point you've missed,' he told me. 'But that's
understandable for you haven't yet had all the facts. Now listen: Bentham took
the eggs on the seventeenth of May, Henri, and later that same day, Coalville,
two hundred miles away, suffered those linear shocks heading in a direction
from south to north. I see it like this: a number of members of the Midlands
nest had come up close to the surface - where the earth, not being so closely
packed, is naturally easier for them to navigate
- and had set off to investigate this disturbance of the nest at Harden. If
you line up Harden and Coalville on a map
- as I have done, again taking my lead from the Wendy-Smith document - you'll
find that they lie almost directly north and south! But all this in its turn
tells us something else' - he grew excited - 'something I myself had missed
until just now - there are no adults of the species "in residence", as it
were, at Harden! These four Harden eggs were to form the nucleus of a new
conclave!'