"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 2 - The Transition of Titus Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

THE TRANSITION OF TITUS CROW BY TITUS CROW

LONDON OCCULTIST BACK FROM THE DEAD!
Mr Henri-Laurent de Marigny, son of the great New Orleans mystic
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, is literally 'back from the dead', having been
pronounced missing or dead in 1976 along with his friend and colleague Mr
Titus Crow, late of Leonard's-Walk Heath. Speculation is now rife as to
whether Titus Crow may also still be alive following Mr de Marigny's amazing
reappearance after an absence of almost ten years, since the freak lightning
storm of 4 October 1969 that utterly destroyed Blowne House, Mr Crow's
residence. Until now it was also believed that the storm had killed the two
friends. An element of doubt has always existed with regard to their 'deaths',
for no bodies were ever found in the ruins of the house following the storm,
despite the fact that the occultists were believed to be in residence.
De Marigny's return yesterday morning was as dramatic as his disappearance. He
was fished out of the Thames at Purfleet more dead than alive, saved from
almost certain death by drowning by Mr Harold Simmons of Tilbury, who dragged
him aboard his barge from the precarious refuge of a buoy. Mr Simmons reports
how, despite de Marigny's battered and bruised condition and the fact that all
his limbs were broken, the occultist clung to the buoy like a limpet, even
making an exhausted, delirious attempt to fight his rescuer off. 'He looked
like he'd been hit by an express train,' Mr Simmons reports, 'but he certainly
wasn't ready to give in!' Mr de Marigny, identified initially through certain
documents he carried, is now recovering in hospital . . .
The Daily London News 5 September 1979

Prologue
At Miskatonic University, the morning of 20 March 1980, just six days before
the Fury, Professor Wingate Peaslee, then head of the Wilmarth Foundation,
called me into his office for a final briefing on Foundation affairs before he
left for Innsmouth, where he intended to supervise personally what was then
Project X, since known as Project Cthylla.
As vice-president of the Foundation (and in my capacity as Peaslee's
right-hand man and understudy) I was of course already very well informed in
all aspects of Foundation work; therefore my briefing was not protracted.
Wingate was uneasy. Though at that time our organization had already enlisted
the aid of many 'sciences' of previously dubious authenticity, we were only
beginning to investigate precognition; in this lay the source of the
professor's disquiet. Within the space of the last week he had received no
less than three separate warnings from psychically endowed persons within the
Foundation, all of them forecasting doom - forecasting, in fact, the Fury!
Could he afford to ignore them?
The question with prognostication is of course this: Will the foreseen event
come about as a direct result of external and uncontrollable influences, or
will it be brought about by internal forces attempting its avoidance? Would
Project X bring about a disaster, or would the disaster be brought about by
the abandonment of the project? Another problem is this: How does one avoid
what will be, what has been foreseen? There again, and perhaps on the brighter
side, there was always the chance