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

knew it. The fault was there, submerged at the back of my mind, but would not
rise to the surface.
If only this brain-fog would lift. My mood of crushing depression had
vanished, true, but now I had this godawful mental smog to wade through!
Of course, I did not know Crow's correspondents, his friends of old,
personally; but he had tremendous faith in them, and especially in Peaslee. In
his letter to the professor Crow had outlined his entire perception of the
fantastic threat against Earth - hypothetically and yet strongly enough to
hint of his personal involvement - and in my own opinion, putting myself in
the position of a vastly intelligent man on receipt of such a letter, Crow had
endangered his whole case. I had bluntly pointed out to him, after listening
to a reading of the hastily scrawled letter, that Peaslee might see it as the
ravings of a deranged mentality. As Crow himself had said: 'I'm damned if I
know whom I might confide in . . .' But he had only chuckled at the
suggestion, saying that he thought it unlikely, and that in any case, if only
for past
friendship's sake, Peaslee would comply with his requirements regarding the
box of eggs.
He had reckoned on a maximum period of three weeks for the round trip of the
eggs, but had taken the trouble to request in addition confirmatory letters
with regard to their safe dispatch. I thought on this, and -
There it was again!
Now what was this twinge I kept getting at the back of my mind whenever I
thought of the journey the eggs would commence in the morning?
But no, whenever I tried to nail the thing down it faded away, back into the
mists of my mind. I had known this frustrating sensation before, and
recognized the unsatisfactory solution: simply to ignore it and let the thing
resolve itself in its own time. It was, nevertheless, annoying - and more than
worrying in the circumstances.
Then, turning in my bed, my eyes would light on the box with its enigmatic
contents, and I could picture those contents in my mind's eye, faintly
luminous with that pearly sheen of theirs in the darkness of their cardboard
coffin. That would set me off tangentially on yet another mental tack.
I had asked Crow about that other box, the 'incubator', discovered by
Wendy-Smith at the site of dead G'harne. Why, I had wanted to know, had there
been no similar receptacle in the tunnel-cave at Harden? But the tired
occultist (should I call him 'occultist' or 'scientist'?) had been almost
equally at a loss. He had finally hazarded, after giving the matter some
thought, that possibly conditions in that deep dark place had been more nearly
perfect for the incubation of the eggs than in the shallow hatchery at
G'harne.
But what of the pictures on that box, I had further probed? - at which my
learned friend had simply shuddered, saying that he might only direct me, as
Sir Amery
had once directed his nephew, to the works of Commodus and the hag-ridden
Caracalla. The pictures in his dreams had been more than enough without
dwelling on the horrors others had known; for there had been more than simply
blind, cephalopod obscenity to those nightmares of his. Likewise he believed
that Bentham's cave-pictures had contained far more than the man had cared to
mention - and perhaps understandably! This had whetted my curiosity all the