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

retrieving the four Harden eggs. Crow had written three letters to trusted
friends of his. One to an ancient and extremely eccentric recluse living in
Stornoway in the Hebrides; another to an old American correspondent with whom
over the years he had exchanged many letters on matters of folklore, myth, and
similarly obscure anthropological subjects, a man his senior by a number of
years, the extremely erudite Wingate Peaslee, until recently Professor of
Psychology at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts; and finally the third to
an old charlatan of a medium, known and endeared to him of old, one Mother
Quarry of Marshfield near Bristol.
The plot was this: without waiting for answers to the letters, we would send
the eggs first to Professor Peaslee in America. Peaslee would of course
receive his airmail
letter fractionally earlier than the air-parcel containing the eggs. Titus had
more than enough faith in his friend to be satisfied that his instructions
would be followed to the letter. Those instructions were simply to send the
eggs on within twenty-four hours to Rossiter McDonald in Stornoway. Similarly
McDonald was instructed to send them on without too great a delay to Mother
Quarry, and from that 'talented', lady they would eventually come back to me.
I say 'back to me', because I took the box with me, neatly parcelled and ready
to be posted, when I left Blowne House. I was to be instrumental in forging
the first link in the postal chain. I also posted the letters on my way home.
I had agreed completely with my knowledgeable friend that the eggs must be out
of Blowne House that night -indeed I had insisted upon it - for they had been
there long enough already, and Crow had obviously started to feel the strain
of their presence. He had admitted to nervously starting at every slightest
creak of the floorboards, and for the first time since moving into his
singular and oddly-atmosphered bungalow dwelling he had started to jump at the
groans of certain vociferous trees in his garden.
But knowing what he knew, and believing what he -no, what we - now believed,
his nervousness was nothing if not natural. In fact, the presence of those
eggs in his house above all else, quite apart from the fact that he had lately
been grossly overworking, was responsible for the rapid deterioration of his
general well-being since I last saw him. It would, I believed, not have taken
very much more to start him on that same degenerative path taken by Sir Amery
Wendy-Smith!
It may readily be understood why I hardly slept a wink that night, but lay in
bed in my grey-stone house tossing and turning and chewing over in my mind the
bulk of the
new concept I had been asked to accept. In fact I had accepted it, but its
details still needed thinking on, if only to clarify the overall picture and
remove any remaining fuzz from its edges. Truth to tell, though, my mind did
seem more than slightly foggy, as if I were suffering from some sort of
hangover. But of course there was another, more immediate reason for my
insomnia - the box with the lustrous spheres lay on a small table beside my
bed!
Restlessly pummelling my pillow (which I found myself doing every half hour or
so), I turned things over in my mind a dozen times, looking for loopholes and
finding none - neither in Crow's immediate plot to stop the burrowers beneath
from regaining possession of their eggs, nor in the premises of his incredible
fears themselves - and yet I knew that there was something basically wrong! I