"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.Transition.Of.Titus.Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Of the Return of Titus Crow
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
Some three hours later Mother Quarry told me that it was time she left; transport was already arranged. I took her to the door but she insisted on walking down the garden path on her own. As she reached the gate a car drove up and pulled to a halt. She waved as she climbed in beside the unseen driver and then the car whisked her away. I was left alone to consider the things she had said.
Earlier, over our coffee and cake - a delightful homemade confection left for me by Mrs Adams - our conversation had covered a number of facets of the Foundation's work, reiterating much of what Peaslee had told me. At the time the incongruity of the situation struck neither of us, but now I smiled grimly at the thought of it: the two of us sitting there in my living room, carrying on a conversation whose tone was in direct contrast to the 'Olde Worlde' atmosphere of the beautiful eighteenth-century table at which we sat, the Irish silver we used, the simple meal itself.
Of our entire conversation, however, the part which had proved of greatest interest to me was the lady's description of the manner in which Titus Crow had 'spoken' to her, how awareness of him had first come to her during a self-induced psychic trance. She had not been sure of his identity at first but had guessed that it might be Titus. He had said simply this, 'Find de Marigny .. . tell him I'm coming back ... I need his help . . . Can't manage on my own . . . Tell him I'm coming, and tell him - ' But that was all. Somehow Crow's psychic or telepathic sending had been cut off short.

A few days later she had received a second message, differing only very slightly from the first. It was then, in her own words, that she finally recognized Titus Crow's psychic aura and knew for certain that the two messages had been from him. However cryptic the substance of those messages, nevertheless they conveyed more than enough meaning to Eleanor Quarry. She had wasted no more time but determined to look me up immediately.
She was already aware of the circumstances of my own rather spectacular return - it had been amply chronicled in the newspapers, and further details had reached her through the machinery of the Wilmarth Foundation - and so, allowing no time for an answer, knowing in her way that I would be there to receive her, she simply dropped me that vague note of hers and then visited me in accordance with its perfunctory arrangements.
And now the rest was up to me.
I showered, put on my robe, returned to my study and got out certain documents, photographs and manuscripts of special relevance to any attempted - evocation? - of Titus Crow. Night had already settled when, comfortably in my chair and puffing at a fragrant cigar, I deliberately set upon a more than merely nostalgic trip along the often dim and elusive, occasionally exceedingly dark, byways of memory.
At first it was hard work. I was making a very physical business of what should have been a purely psychical task, and in less than an hour I had developed a splitting headache. Once, as a boy, greatly interested in certain of my father's parapsychological experiments, I had tried to move a tiny feather with my mind. Telekinesis, I believe he termed this purely hypothetical ability. In the end, having developed just such a headache as I now suffered, I had blown the feather away with the merest exhalation of breath. And here I was after all these years still doing

it the wrong way, attempting to fit a physical solution to a wholly psychic problem, forcing my mind where it simply would not go, not under stress, at any rate.
Pushing aside Crow's photograph, I stacked his letters and the remaining memorabilia neatly to one side of my desk. Then I took a deep breath, leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes . . .
. . . And my soul was immediately sucked into that whirlpool between the worlds for a single instant that yet seemed to last a thousand years. The howling, tearing winds of the void, winds no waking man should ever hear or feel, carried to me the dying screams of mortally wounded worlds and the waking cries of newborn nebulae. Stars rose like bubbles as I descended into the seas of space, time itself caressing me as I drifted with its tides. The alien energies of darkling dimensions washed my being with sensations experienced by no other man before me, except perhaps Titus Crow!
And I heard then that well-remembered voice, bringing with it a steadying, a slowing of pace, a return to slightly less ethereal awareness. That voice echoing desperately out of limitless, unthinkable vastnesses: 'De Marigny - where are you?' 'I'm here, Titus!' I cried in answer, and the sickening spinning of my psyche lessened further, as if my answer to Crow's mental cry for assistance had helped anchor me and orient my being amidst the hell of this extrasensory chaos. And my being, my Id, whichever part of myself it was undergoing this experience, now indeed seemed to rock briefly before jarring finally to a halt.
Spread all about me then, so intensely bright as to be painful, I perceived a panorama of hurtling stars, rocketing spheres as colorful as precious stones thrown on a vast satin cushion. At first they appeared almost as coruscating bubbles, then they rapidly expanded to flare past me,

finally disappearing in a distant haze of light. And I thought I had reached a halt! Why, if the universe itself were not mad, then in fact it was I who hurtled headlong down these alien starlanes, for surely these stars must in reality be hanging comparatively steady in the void?
Bodiless though I was, nevertheless the chill of outer space and the loneliness of infinity gripped me, but could I really be alone? 'Titus!' I shouted again, shrinking instinctively as certain stars swelled far too quickly and much too close, blooming fantastically to roar by with furnace breath. 'Where - ?'
'Here, de Marigny!' The answer came from close at hand, but where . . .?
There! Directly behind me, driving me before it along its path like an insect pinned to the windshield of a car, was the coffin-shaped clock, Crow's time machine!
In times of stress, in fearfully dangerous situations or when faced with wonders or evils of apparently insurmountable magnitude, moments of utter import, the human being is likely to say the most ludicrously inept things.
I felt in no way inept when I asked Titus Crow, 'Where . . . where are you taking me?'
'I'm not taking you anywhere, Henri,' came his answer. 'You're taking me! We're following a direct course between you and your body.'
How to answer that? In my bewilderment I felt a wave of returning dizziness; the rushing stars began to blur.
Crow sensed my difficulty immediately and cried; 'Just keep talking, Henri! You're doing fine!'
'I ... I didn't understand what you said,' I finally managed, steadying up, fighting a lunatic urge to duck as the solid-seeming whirls of a great spiral nebula loomed ahead. In another instant we were into the expanding mass of stars that comprised one of the nebula's arms -

and out the other side - and in the next instant the whole magnificent Catherine wheel had dwindled in our wake.
'You are returning to your body,' Crow answered, 'doing it at a speed I can match.'
'What?' Still he was not getting through to me.
'It's like this: by an effort of will, using the sympathetic psychic link between us, we got you out here; I pulled and you pushed. The rest is automatic. At the moment you're heading back to Earth, back to your own space and time, back to your body where you belong. But you are also maintaining your contact with me, something you've never managed to do before, and so I'm able to follow you.'
'You're not shoving me along?' Crow's concept still eluded me.
'No, you are pulling me! But don't stop talking to me. The moment your attention wavers you're liable to snap straight back to your body and I'll lose you. This must be the twentieth time I've picked you up, and it's by far the most successful connection yet. Just keep it up, Henri!'
'But those other times there was . . . Cthulhu!'
'A mental projection, that's all,' he answered, confirming Mother Quarry's excellent guess. 'The CCD are doing all they can to stop me from getting back.'
'And yet they haven't gone for me,' I told him. 'Not directly, at any rate.'
'There may well be good reasons,' he answered, 'I think you'll find that they've erected some sort of mental barrier about the Earth, an almost impenetrable barrier. Also, I know that they're keeping a pretty close watch on me. And of course they must still be under pressure from the Wilmarth Foundation. I don't suppose this leaves them with a great deal of power to play with. They haven't caught on that I've managed to contact Mother Quarry and yourself because I've kept my sendings brief. If they

try hard enough they can still get into my mind with their hellish dreams, but as for anything else - well, that's a different story. Briefly, they no longer dare interfere with me, not directly. I have a weapon, one that - '
'Yes?' I waited for him to continue.
'De Marigny, we're very close now! I think that perhaps this time . . .' I could feel his excitement, and was about to answer that I, too, sensed an early end to our fantastic flight, when I saw that one of the stars ahead was black . . . and that it was swelling and expanding as we closed with it in a manner altogether different from the others. In another instant the thing had assumed a shape, one which was not that of any star or planet.
'Titus!' I screamed. 'We have a visitor. And, my God! / know him!'
'I see it, de Marigny, but are we seeing the same thing?'
'How's that again?' I cried, astonished. 'What do you mean, are we seeing the same thing? It's Ithaqua, the Wind-Walker - and damn it, he's closed
'Don't leave me now, Henri!' I heard Crow's frantic cry. 'We're almost home. It might take a very long time to pick you up again.'
I heard Crow's desperate argument and determined to stick it out with him come what may; but the living shape before me finally bloated into monstrous, definite being. It was huge, anthropomorphic, with carmine-star eyes glowing in Hell's own face, a shape of stark terror, striding splay-footed up the star winds, reaching with great tal-oned hands that visibly twitched in their eagerness to -
Again the universe seemed to spin and blur about me, but just as quickly Crow cried, 'Remember, Henri, it's just a mental projection! It's not really there, a telepathic image sent by the CCD. Don't let go now, man, we're almost home and dry!' And then, even among all these fantastic events, came