"Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 3 - The Clock of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

THE CLOCK OF DREAMS

Introduction
Myself, I've never been much of a dreamer, never traveled far past Ulthar; but
I have watched caravans fording the Skai, and I have sat in the smokeroom of
the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats and listened to the tales of my betters. I
suppose most dreamers have. It's true, though, that there seem to be fewer of
us around these days. Time was when a man of the waking world could guarantee
that if he boarded at an inn in the land of Earth's dreams, sure enough he
would find a fellow dreamer or two from the world of waking mortals; and
wouldn't the tales fly thick and fast then? Yes, they surely would.
You would hear magical names of men and places -names to set your pulses
pounding and your imagination tingling - and thrill to the telling of tales of
heroic and fantastic deeds. And someone would be bound to mention Kuranes or
Randolph Carter ... or Richard Upton Pickman. And while you might shudder at
the hinted fate of the latter, certainly you would also gasp in awe at the
adventures of the others. Ah, those were the dreams . . .
Still, I suppose I shouldn't complain too bitterly, for when I come to think
of it I heard two of my favorite tales quite recently, and as coincidence
would have it I heard them at the Inn of a Thousand Sleeping Cats . . . in
Ulthar.
The first was a strange tale and complicated, a tale of all the worlds of
space and time, of strange dimensions and planes of existence beyond the ken
of most men. A tale of motes in the multiverse swirling beyond barriers
neither

spacial nor temporal, nor of any intermediate dimension recognized by mortal
man except in the wildest theories of science and metaphysics. A tale of paths
between the spheres, dim corridors leading to equally dim and conjectural
lands of elder myth . . . And yet all of these seemingly inaccessible places
were just around the corner to the time-clock.
Indeed 'time-clock,' as Titus Crow had long since recognized the fact, was a
completely inadequate misnomer for that - machine? A plaything of the elder
Gods come down the ages from lands beyond legend, from a time beyond time as
men reckon it, the clock was a gateway on - on everything! It was a door to
worlds of wonder, joy and beauty - but it was also a dark pothole entrance to
caves of innermost, alien evil and shrieking, unnameable horror.
The first tale I heard was the story of how the clock came into Henri-Laurent
de Marigny's hands in the first place, and it is a tale already told. But for
the sake of the unacquainted I will briefly reiterate it before taking up the
second of the two stories proper. Before even that, however, I had better tell
what little is known of the time-clock itself.
Certainly the clock's history is strange and obscure enough to whet the mental
appetite of any lover of mysteries or would-be sounder of unfathomable wonders
(which you must be, else you would not be reading this). First, tracing the
existence of the weird - conveyance? -back as far as possible in the light of
incomplete knowledge, it seems to have belonged to one Yogi Hiamaldi, an
Indian friend of the ill-fated Carolina mystic Harley Warren. Hiamaldi had
been a member, along with Warren, of a psychic-phenomenist group in Boston
about 1916-18; and he had sworn before all other members of that group that he