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

more, so that I had pressed Crow until finally he had given in to me and
described, all too clearly, some of those pictures of his dreams.
In some of them, he had told me, there had been an almost symbolic reaching
towards the surface, a group-stretching of hideous tentacles; and in others,
plainly surface scenes as opposed to subterrene - in those there had been
sheer horror!
Vividly I remembered Crow's mode of expression, the cracked hollowness of his
voice as he had said: "There were four of them in one dream-fragment, de
Marigny, rearing like caterpillars on their haunches, mouths agape - and they
had a woman between them, pulling her to pieces and slobbering while the blood
gushed and slopped . . .'
'But how,' I had morbidly demanded, my voice a whisper, 'could creatures
without heads have . . . mouths?' Even asking my question I had known that I
would not like the answer.
'Try thinking in less routine terms, Henri,' Crow had quietly advised. 'But
whatever you do don't think on it too long, or with too great an attention to
detail. They're so very - alien - these things.'
The memory of Crow's words and the way he had said them saw me reaching from
my bed in one convulsive instant to switch on the light. I could not help it
but a line from Ibn Schacabao's ancient and cryptic Reflections had
sprung unbidden to my mind, a line I knew had been repeated by Alhazred in the
Necronomicon: 'Evil the mind that is held by no head!' Ye gods! Minds and
mouths without heads!
I am not normally a nervous man - God knows that if such were the case I
should long ago have given up certain of my more outre interests - but with
those eggs in their box beside my bed, and with the knowledge that somewhere,
far away or perhaps not so far, deep down in the earth, monstrous burrowers
even now burned and bubbled in the ground - well, who could say that merely
illuminating my bedroom was an act of cowardice?
But in any case, even with the light on, I found myself no less apprehensive.
There were shadows now where none had been before - thrown by my wardrobe, my
dressing gown hanging on the door - so that before I knew it I found myself
calculating how long it would take me to get out of bed and through the window
in the event of-
I reached out again to switch off the light, purposely turning my back on the
cardboard box in an attempt to put its contents from my mind . . .
Perhaps I did sleep then for a little while, for I remember a merging of my
own drowsing thoughts with Crow's descriptions of some of his dreams as I
recalled their telling; and when this brought me sweatingly back to
wakefulness I also remembered his explanation of how he had first been alerted
to the existence of the cthonian menace.
It had been those chants heard in his latter dreams of the burrowers; those
chants containing the tell-tale name of a legendary city - G'harne!
Remembering Wendy-Smith's expedition in search of that place, and something of
the disastrous results, and then tying in certain of the newer contents of his
voluminous cuttings-file and the
details of his underground nightmares themselves, Crow had been led on to the
Wendy-Smith document. That document, along with the letter of explanation
obtained from Raymond Bentham, had clinched the thing in his mind. The
remainder had been merely his normal follow-through of intelligently applied,