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

alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, crumbling remnant of eons long lost,
and that he had

borne away certain things from that grim and leering necropolis.
For reasons unknown, the Yogi had made a gift of the clock to one
Etienne-Laurent de Marigny (perhaps the greatest ever American occultist and
the father of one of the heroes of the story to follow), who kept it at the
New Orleans retreat where his studies of the arcane sciences formed his
primary purpose in life. How much he discovered of its secrets remains
unknown, but after the elder de Marigny died the clock was sold, along with
many another antique curiosity, to a French collector.
Here there is a gap in the history, for while many years later Titus Crow
bought the clock at an auction of antique furniture in London, all of his
subsequent attempts to discover the whereabouts of its previous Parisian owner
were doomed to failure; it was as though the man had simply vanished off the
face of the Earth.
Now then, of Titus Crow himself- a man with a positive genius for the
discovery of dark lore, lost legends, and nighted myth-patterns, who will also
feature prominently in my tale - much is known; but for now suffice it to
mention that his protracted studies of the clock over many years of his life
were such that the device became something of an obsession with him. Often in
his earlier years Crow would sit in his study in the night, his chin in his
hands as he gravely pondered the enigma of the peculiar, coffin-shaped,
oddly-ticking monstrosity in the corner of the room; a 'clock,' of sorts,
whose four hands moved in patterns patently divorced from any chronological
system known or even guessed at by man, and his eyes would rove over the
strange hieroglyphs that swept in intricate designs around the great clock's
face.
When he was not at work on less baffling cases, always Titus Crow would return
his attentions to the clock, and though usually such studies were in vain,
they were not always complete failures. Often he believed himself on

the verge of a breakthrough - knowing that if he were right he would finally
understand the alien intricacies governing his 'doorway on all space and time'
- only to be frustrated in the final hour. And once he actually had the
doubtful privilege of seeing the clock opened by two men of equally doubtful
repute and intent, whose affairs in the world were fortunately soon terminated
... but then at long last there came a genuine clue.
It was while he was working for the Wilmarth Foundation - a far-flung body of
erudite men whose sole avowed intent and purpose was to rid the world, indeed
the entire universe, of all remaining traces of an aeon-old evil, the
surviving demonic forces and powers of the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth - that Titus
Crow visited Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. There, in one of
the carefully guarded, great old occult volumes in the university's
world-renowned library, he finally recognized a sequence of odd glyphs which
at first he was startled, then delighted to note bore a striking resemblance
to the figures on the dial of his huge clock. Moreover, the book bore
translations of its own hieroglyphed passages
in Latin!
Armed with this Rosetta-Stone knowledge, Crow had returned to London, where