"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.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

that those warning visions of doom had been deliberately planted by the CCD in the minds of the three Foundation psychics in an attempt to hold up the Innsmouth operations. These were some of the problems that worried Wingate Peaslee; they were among the reasons for his deciding to supervise Project X personally.
That same morning he had received by airmail a parcel from London containing a number of notebooks, various documents and tape recordings. The parcel was from a personal friend of the professor's and a former member of the Foundation, Henri-Laurent de Marigny. Similarly that morning a communication had arrived from the British chapter of the Foundation consisting of a brief and cryptic note from the psychic Mother Eleanor Quarry. Peaslee showed me the note. It said simply this: 'Titus Crow has been back. He is no longer here. I believe that this time de Marigny has followed him. Wingate, I think we are in for terrible trouble.'
Typical of the brilliant British psychic and cryptic as it was, nevertheless the first three sentences of this note meant much to both Wingate Peaslee and to myself; the last sentence was more obscure, unless it was yet another warning of approaching doom.
Peaslee then told me how he would dearly love to explore the contents of the parcel from de Marigny himself but simply had no time at present to do so. I was given that task. Perhaps, in retrospect, it would have been better if Peaslee had not gone to Innsmouth but had attended to the parcel instead. Who can say?
First I read the notebooks, a task I completed on the morning of 24 March. I began to listen to the tapes late on the night of the 25th, pressure of work keeping me from them until then. I had barely started when, just after midnight, there came the first subterranean rumblings,

the first grim warning that this was to be the day of the Fury!
Fortunately, before the Fury struck with its full force, I was able to place manuscripts and tapes alike in my office safe. When I retrieved them from the debris of Miskatonic four days later, the notebooks and documents were still intact; the tapes had suffered somewhat.
So much for a prologue. As background material toward an understanding of the forces behind the Fury, and as a personal account of his own involvement with the CCD and with Titus Crow, Henri-Laurent de Marig-ny's work is required reading. In it, as in the transcriptions from the tape recordings of Titus Crow's narrative, which follow it - and as in de Marigny's recently reprinted earlier account of the Wilmarth Foundation's work, The Burrowers Beneath - no single word of the author's original text has been altered.
Arthur D. Meyer New Miskatonic, Rutland, Vermont

PART ONE 1
But What of Titus Crow?
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
My first thought on awakening, particularly on finding myself in a hospital bed, was that it had all been a nightmare, a horrific dream perhaps engendered of whichever drugs I had been given to assist in my recovery from-
My recovery from what?
Plainly I had suffered some terrible accident or attack of incredible ferocity. My arms and legs seemed to be in splints; I was bandaged top to bottom and barely able to move my head. There was a lot of pain, so much that I could specify no single area of my body for its origin, it was everywhere. I was patently lucky to be alive! Exactly what, then, had happened to me? I could remember nothing. Or was there . . . something?
Yes, there was something. I could remember water pulling me down, and strange hands tugging at me.
Then, turning my head as far as my various wrappings and bandages would allow, I saw the vase of flowers by my bed, close enough for me to read the message on the attached card:
To a dear and valued friend, long lost but found again -get well very soon,
W. Peaslee
Peaslee! Professor Wingate Peaslee, head of the Wil-marth Foundation! Fragmentary visions of past events tumbled chaotically in my painfully fuzzy mind as I read

the man's name. But at least I knew now that they had been no nightmares, those horrible scenes reviewed subconsciously by my mind's eye immediately prior to waking - no dreams but memories of my past experiences as a member of the Wilmarth Foundation. My eyes, peering through slits in swathing bandages, went again to the vase of flowers, finding propped against its base a curious star-shaped stone like some fossil starfish from Silurian coral beds, a stone that went far to calming my abruptly whirling mind and fluttering heart.
And suddenly I remembered. I remembered it all! And with the memory a name sprang spontaneously to my lips.
'Crow!' I cried, 'Titus Crow! Where are you?1
His name, and my question, seemed to echo hollowly in the white room about me, hanging in the air. Particularly the question.
Where indeed . . .?
I must have slept then, for when I opened my eyes next it was night, or rather late evening. The shadows were long in my room and beyond the windows the first tendrils of a gray mist were rising. There was the smell of the country in the less than antiseptic air flowing into the room from a ventilator fan in the opposite wall. The room was pleasantly cool. I guessed that I was not in London, but wherever I was I knew that Peaslee was not far away, and that therefore I was safe from . . . them!
Them - the burrowers beneath and all the other horrors of the Cthu'lhu Cycle - I shuddered at the thought of them, then made a conscious effort to thrust them out of my mind. First I must think about myself.
At least I was feeling much better. That is, my pains were noticeably less and the bandages had been removed from my head and neck, allowing me at least sufficient freedom of movement to peer about my room. Above my bed, on the wall, I saw a button with the - from my

position - inverted legend RING. HOW I was supposed to comply, even if I had wanted to, was quite beyond me. My arms were still in plaster. No matter, for the moment I desired no company.
At least this time I seemed wide awake, capable of thinking clearly and reasonably. And indeed I had a lot to think about. I cast a few cursory glances about the room, sufficient to assure myself that I was definitely in a hospital, probably a private institute, if the impeccably delicate decor and my clinically immaculate immediate surroundings were anything to go by. Then I settled down to the more serious business of getting my thoughts - my memories of what had gone before, leading up to this present as yet unexplained confinement - sorted out in my mind into some sort of recognizable order.
Those memories still had many nightmarish aspects. Indeed, they were unbelievable to a point which might only suggest - to anybody mercifully less well informed -an incredible degree of gullibility, even insanity in any believer. And yet I knew that I believed, and that I was certainly not mad . . .
No, I was alive, sane and safe - but what of Titus Crow?
The last time I'd seen him had been at Blowne House, his sprawling bungalow retreat on Leonard's-Walk Heath; that had been on the 4th Oct. 1969, when Ithaqua's elementals of the air had attacked us in all their massed might. We had been trapped there, and no way out; we faced certain death; Crow's home was being reduced to rubble around us! At the last we were left with no other alternative but to put our faith in the grandfather clock: that old (how old?) coffin-shaped device, yes, which had once belonged to my father, for which Crow had named it 'De Marigny's Clock'.