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

For some time a roaring had been growing in my ears, and even as the frontal panel of the clock swung silently open I looked up to see an awesome wall of water bearing down on me like some monstrous express train! That wave was all of fifty feet high, white-crested, curling and roaring and hissing like all the demons of hell and quite as fearsome! I hurled myself in a headlong dive into the clock's eerily illuminated interior, and as the panel clicked shut behind me felt my vessel picked up like a toy and carried away on the crest of the wave.
The tylosaurus was gone at once in the mad torrent of water. An instant more and my mind had meshed with the clock's and I was climbing up, up to the clouds while below me, viewed in the scanners, the great wave crashed' inland, carrying all before it ...
Three days later I left the Cretaceous and set course for the future. During the intervening time I managed to collect a marvelously representative selection of shells to replace the collection lost at the onset of that first disastrous volcanic outbreak. I undertook the task this second time far more carefully, choosing a beach far from volcanic regions. I also gathered an ample supply of the great nuts, to sustain myself should my journey prove to be a long one.
Ah, if only I could have guessed just how long it would take to return to my own era. But there, I could never have guessed, could not possibly have had any idea.
On the third evening following the recovery of my vessel, as the hot disk of the sun sank down behind wild and primal mountains, then I said my silent farewells and took leave of the Cretaceous forever. I had seen as much as I wanted to see of the vast and teeming swamps and

forests, jungles, lakes and oceans; and certainly I had had my fill of that prehistoric world's denizens. All scientific interests aside, my own time called to me from across future ages.
So it was that lifting the time-clock up again to the skies, I meshed my mind and psyche with those of my vessel and turned the prow of that fantastic vehicle in the direction of tomorrow.

PART FOUR
Introductory Note
Since it has been part of my task in the preparation of this work to divide it into its various parts, chapters and sections, and to provide titles, and since the following part (despite its length) is composed mainly of fragments, I have chosen for it simply that title, 'Fragments'. I have however subtitled separate sections within the whole.
This has been necessary due to the fact that while my safe at Miskatonic University was more or less fireproof, it was not completely waterproof. The flames that devoured the old university during the Fury did little harm to the tapes, but the flood waters of the freak storm which later deluged the ruins most certainly did! Whole sections of the tapes, I fear, complete and complex statements of not inconsiderable length, have been lost.
I have used the usual system of ellipses, three or four periods to mark breaks in what I judge to be sentences and paragraphs; I have similarly prefaced new paragraphs apparently springing from the broken narrative. Excessively large or long breaks I have marked with a line of asterisks and/or comments.
With the opening section of the following part my task was not so difficult, as the tapes were more or less complete. In general, however, this part of my work toward preparing the manuscript for publication was by far the most trying, particularly for one whose interests prior to this task were anything but literary.
Arthur D. Meyer

Fragments
(From de Marigny's recordings)
1 The Thing in the Vat
. . . And that, de Marigny, was when I first met up with the Hounds of Tindalos. Yes, those same Tind'losi Hounds of the Cthulhu Cycle: vampires of time that haunt the darkest angles of the fourth dimension, foraging abroad from the temporal towers of wraithlike Tindalos to hunt down unwary travelers.
I knew them of course through my familiarity with the pantheon of the Cthulhu Cycle and its legends, remembering them from the references they are afforded in the old occult works. Nevertheless, and though I ought to have been at least partially prepared by such knowledge, when I sensed them about my time-ship, and particularly when I actually first saw them in my scanners, they were so patently evil that my very soul shuddered!
And yet they are so difficult to describe. They are what one might expect to find if all goodness were taken away: an uncleanliness without living form, and yet embodied in vaguely batlike shapes, flapping rags of evil, vampirish drinkers of life itself. Of course, if we are to take the olden records as gospel, then in certain circumstances the Hounds are capable of materializations in three-dimensional space. I can only say that I have known innumerable clashes with them since that first time, but not once have they followed me out of time into normal space. They exist, you see, in time itself, 'amid time's darkest

angles', as it were. Which means of course that they exist at a different temporal speed from life as we know it. Ah, but when one travels in time, then one moves in their element.
But that first meeting.
As I have said, I had set my course forward from the Cretaceous, toward the present era, intending to slow down and stop at intervals of time until I reached a period subsequent to that of our departure when we fled from Ithaqua's elementals of the air. In this way I hoped to avoid the obvious pitfalls of temporal paradox.
It was as I was about to make my first halt in time that I became aware of the Hounds.
They were like shadows in the scanners, distant tatters that flapped almost aimlessly in the voids of time; but as they in turn sensed me their movements became imbued with more purpose! As they drew closer, I saw that in fact they had shape and size and even something approaching solidarity, but that despite all of these attributes there was still nothing about them that even remotely resembled what we know of life. They were Death, the worms in a dead man's skull, the maggots fattening in a rotting corpse. They were the Hounds of Tindalos, and once recognized they can never be forgotten!
Now they swarmed toward the clock, ethereal wasps attracted by a juicy apple of time in which I was the succulent core, and as they fluttered darkly about my hurtling vessel I heard their hellish chittering. They were batlike, and they communicated with batlike voices. Or were their chitterings simply expressions of delight that here they had found some unsuspecting traveler in time? Knowing instinctively that they were evil - I knew it as surely as I knew that they were the Hounds of Tindalos -I nevertheless thought myself safe in the body of the

clock. Very soon, however, I discovered that this was not
the case.
If my time machine were a sphere, Henri, then I might have been safe, for the Hounds fear perfect curves. But of course the clock is of hard angles, and the Vampires of the Void are one with all the angles of time. There are ancient Greek documents which, along with certain esoteric translations, might explain all of this far better than I ever could. What I am saying essentially is this: the Hounds could reach me, even through the incredibly hard material of the clock's walls. The first I knew of it was when smoke seemed to pour from all the interior angles of my vessel, angles I sensed rather than saw, you understand. And then awesome feelers entered into my refuge to fondle me with their chill, a chill that threatened instantly to draw off all of my body's heat - all of my life-force - and leave me stiff, frozen and dead!
I instantly accelerated, only to discover that the Hounds were endowed with that same power. They, too, were capable of controlling their rate of passage through time. Similarly, when I hastily slowed down and turned to race into the past again, they were amply capable of pacing me, closing with the time-clock once more to recommence their foul gropings and draining of my life-force.
Desperately, while yet hurtling backward through time, I further maneuvered my vessel in space. That is, I consciously sought to avoid the Hounds of Tindalos, whose element is time, by throwing my vessel through space. In this my blunder was twofold. One, I lost myself hopelessly. Two, my ploy did not succeed. Certainly I had fled through space, but I had still been traveling in time as I did it!
One cannot avoid the Tind'losi Hounds in time. There is only one way to escape them: the time-traveler must revert back to the three mundane dimensions. I should

have known it at once, but it's useless to cry over spilled milk. When, at the very last moment, I did revert back into normal space, it was to find myself utterly and hopelessly lost! Gone the Hounds, and with them any chance of an early return to my own time, my own place.
I had no way of judging, you see, how far I had accelerated into the future, no way of knowing how many aeons I had traversed in my flight back into the past. And when you consider the fantastic leagues, the light-years of space that the clock can consume in mere instants, why, I could be out beyond the Milky Way, while back on Earth the ice sheets might even now be reaching out from polar regions to freeze the woolly mammoth on the plains of Siberia.
I repeat, I was utterly, hopelessly lost.
From then on, for what I judge now must have been a period of at least a year of normal time - I find difficulty now, you know, in thinking of time as in my old pre-transition period - I wandered the space-lanes, and occasionally the corridors of time, seeking some clue, some signpost to the planet of my origins. It was toward the end of this period that I again braved time in a direction I hoped would take me toward my own era. I was actually searching for a period in which I might recognize the constellations, which in turn might lead me home. Instead, I again chanced upon a foraging party of the Hounds.
1 say chanced upon them, and yet it is more than probable that in fact they were lying in ambush. Yes, it seemed they were waiting for me, and I became aware of them only in the last instant, as they were actually fastening on the clock! To be surprised like that is disconcerting to say the least, de Marigny. Picture yourself in a car, driving down an empty street, when suddenly

a child steps off the curb only a few feet in front. Your brakes are out of the question; you are too close to the child. You hold the steering wheel in your hands, however, and while your foot is reaching for the brake you are able to turn the wheels.
I was in a vaguely similar position, except of course that it was my own life I had to save. My immediate reaction, I suppose, should have been to switch out of time into the mundane three dimensions. To this day I do not know why I did not do so, unless the Hounds have that same ability of the greater powers of the CCD to get into men's minds and dull them or turn them to their own purposes. Anyway, I turned my 'steering wheel' instead, and sought a path through the massed ranks of the Tind'losi Hounds. And indeed there seemed to be a path, a clear route through time that they had not blocked.
Fleeing down this sole avenue of egress, I saw my mistake too late: there were more of them waiting for me behind dark angles. Yet again I was obliged to fly both in space and time simultaneously, and yet again I found that in the end all escape routes were blocked. Only then, it seemed, did I remember the three mundane dimensions and revert back to them, and only then did I discover how cruelly the Hounds of Tindalos had fooled me!
They had maneuvered me into a perfect trap, forcing me to revert to normal space - or at least reminding me that I could do so - at that exact second of time most propitious to their cause, which I knew then was to destroy me completely! Hurtling out of time but yet speeding through space, I emerged in three dimensions to discover myself already rushing down upon the surface of a gray world. The vast bulk of the planet was there directly before me. There was no time even to think- an automatic application of mental brakes had but minimal effect. The lower atmosphere rushing by in a stream of