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

... my body down there, and if Felicius and his party had not come across it first then I might ... to set the clock down close by. All others fled, even Thorpos, save the Roman noble whose faith . . .
'. . . gave you back to me,' he said, 'that you are theirs to take away!' He turned to the clock and cried: 'Merciful and almighty shades, whose wisdom . . . eternal and dwell ... but only give him life again . . . this shrine!'
What better time then to attempt what must now be attempted? If I succeeded, Felicius would be at peace in the belief that the shrine had taken me off again to the land of shades, and that he had been instrumental in his prayers for my deliverance from Earthly death and decay. And if I failed? But in any case, I had no time left to ...
And so I once more left my body behind, although on this occasion it was a body fashioned of no woman's womb but the hands of alien gods of Eld. I projected my mind or psyche or what you will out through the portal of my vessel, which opened at my command, even though that was unnecessary, and into the still cold form of that flesh which had been Titus Crow.
Instantly I felt my body about me, like the shelter of a room entered out of a storm. Felicius immediately jerked his hands from me and I heard him gasp. I opened my

eyes and looked at him, at which his jaw fell while his white crown of hair seemed to stand straight on his head. He staggered back from me as I climbed easily, smilingly to my feet. I marveled at this body T3RE had given me that life should spring so readily in organs which, by human standards, should surely already be falling into corruption!
'. . . no fear, Father mine, who has brought me back again from death's dark door that I may now return to the land of shades, there to live in peace and glory. But promise me this: that never more will you try to call me back from them whose shrine this is.' I turned toward the clock. 'And I... that you, too, will live out your span of years in peace and tranquility of mind and spirit, until you are called in your turn to the great beyond.'
Now I could not honestly say where the inspiration sprang from to use those exact words, but wherever . . .
For Felicius threw himself down before the clock to bathe a moment in its eerie rays, and as the door swung silently shut on me I heard him say, 'This I promise!'
It was only later, as I sailed the time-stream for home, that I thought to ponder . . . and of course I had known all along that Urbicus had been one and the same man as that author of Frontier Garrison, in which he had told his story from the viewpoint of ... Only the fact that I had not wished to tamper with the past, and that . . .
... is it not written, among many other strange things, that there occurred in that year a mysterious volcanic eruption of soil and stones in the vicinity of a villa some five miles from Eboracum, which sent a cloud of dust and pebbles and soil almost half a mile into the air and shook the moors over an area of many miles?
It is written, de Marigny, and thus it was.

7 The Black Hole
So I had set course for the future, and this time I had dared hope that my journey might not be long. Indeed, it should not have been long, less than nineteen hundred years! Never since leaving Blowne House to fall in ruins, as Ithaqua's elementals of the air beat at the place with their hurricane wings, had I been so close to my own age. Nineteen hundred years? It was nothing! Had I not journeyed through hundreds of millions of years of time, traversing whole epochs as if they were mere minutes? And had I not crossed limitless light-years in my ventur-ings in the voids of space?
Ah, but Cthulhu and his hosts were also aware that I was moving quickly toward journey's end, and it was not part of their plan that I should succeed in returning to my own time. Since they were in constant telepathic contact with those vampires of time, the Tind'losi Hounds, and since time was the element I must cross in order to regain my own period, it would not be too difficult for them once more to thwart my efforts. It was not difficult.
Of the Hounds themselves, one might almost be willing to return to a belief in the so-called supernatural when confronted with them; but since we know that there is a supernatural, and that it is merely the phenomenon of an alien science wherein mundane concepts hold little water . . .
. . . were herding me, those nightmares, a great flock of them and I was the only sheep. No unlikely analogy, that, for it really was as though a multitude of wolves chased one lone sheep, myself, and that soon they must bring me down.

Forgotten now was any dream of returning to my own time; it would be sufficient to come out of this alive, my soul intact! It dawned on me that to escape them I might simply halt my clock's motion in time, but that might mean a crash such as I had known when pursued by the Hounds to the world of robots. They might be simply maneuvering me into just such a position again. Then I had not known that I might also fly my craft through solids, even through the hearts of suns, with impunity. Instead, knowing that I must crash I had crashed, for my mind was linked with the clock and I had instinctively ordered it to halt, literally to crash against the surface of the robot world. Now I knew differently, that I could have driven right through that planet if I had wanted to, but such belated knowledge had not helped me then.
And supposing that the Tind'Iosi Hounds had now arranged a similar surprise for me in the universe of three dimensions? No, not until it was absolutely necessary dared I ...
... me utterly! Why, this was Tindalos - Tind'Iosi -itself! There, sailing the time-winds, doomed to the temporal mists of the fourth dimension just as the Flying Dutchman was doomed to sail the foggy seas of Earth, there was the ghost city; the black-spiraled citadel and seat of these disembodied vampires! They had driven me to their place, shepherding this frightened sheep to the slaughter; and out the butchers came to meet me, pouring from the dark turrets and black corkscrew towers of a city wandering in time. I have described them before, de Marigny, and you assure me that you yourself have seen them in monstrous dreams. Still, the memory is awful, even now!
What to do? How to avoid them, escape from them, when even now their flapping, pulsing, poisoned feelers sought me out through the fabric of the clock? Immaterial

themselves, the substance of the clock's shell was no barrier to them. They came through it like, like ghosts through a solid wall. For of course they were ghosts, disembodied entities doomed to sail a city over the temporal tides!
They were the same black rags of yore: rags with glinting eyes, flapping threads of wings and groping, soul-sucking feelers. And now those feelers were upon me, in my mind, fastening on my soul, sapping my life as Arctic ice draws all feeling from flesh and leaving me quite as numb. And then Tiania's voice came to me as so often before. This time, however, she had no advice, could offer no succor but only add her own mental cries of horror to my own.
Weakening, feeling my life-strength sapped and dimming like the flame of a candle in a bell jar, suddenly I saw my chance. They had closed in on me, the Hounds, clustering to my coffin-ship like bats to the walls of a cave, but beyond them the void of time lay clear before me in one direction. In that direction rode dark Tind'Iosi itself, empty now of its hideous inhabitants, and so I used up what was left of my rapidly waning mental strength to ram my faltering craft in that direction, scattering the Hounds in a flurry of fluttering, chittering rags behind me. Straight for their damned city I drove, straight to its heart and out the other side like an arrow through misted cobwebs - and knew too late that yet again they had tricked me!
Driven to this point in time, trapped and on the point of being mentally devoured, I had seen one egress and had taken it, but the Hounds of Tindalos had left no egress! I knew it as soon as I felt that nameless power, that force that pulled the clock now faster and faster, against all my efforts to rein it back. But wait! This was a force that must exist over vast distances of time; surely it

was so, for even now I was hurtling over the aeons. Did it also exist in three-dimensioned space? Dare I now stop the time-clock's temporal rushing, reverting back to those three dimensions of my natural heritage?
Shrieking their mental fear, helpless as moths caught in the candle's flame, a dozen rag-things which had thought to follow too close behind me whirled past, tumbling head over heels, as it were, in the grip of the same tremendous force that held me. If these beings that dwelt in time could not fight this awful attraction, then what chance did I stand?
I slowed the aeon-devouring flight of my vessel until it emerged into the mundane three dimensions, but not in any mundane place! For still the clock hurtled, not through time now but space, and yet drawn on by that same dread attraction. Faster and faster yet it plummeted, falling through space.
Falling? Gravity!
I was caught in a gravitational field of incredible force, which of course had extended in time as well as space. But in all my traveling in space I had never experienced this before; no sun, no giant star I had ever passed by in the clock had affected the course of that vessel of mine in the slightest degree. What, then, was the source of this enormous power?
The Hounds of Tindalos were gone now, left behind in time, their enforced habitat, their prison forever, and yet I saw that I was in no less a ...
. . . Behind me the stars, shrinking in the awful voids of space; ahead of me an empty blackness, a midnight that grew as I plunged headlong down its throat of pitch. All my power over the time-clock seemed dead, departed, as if it had never been. I could move my vessel neither up nor down, left nor right, and all efforts to slow the clock in its rapidly accelerating rush were useless.

One by one the stars behind blinked out, until blackness stretched in all directions. I had passed into a region where it seemed as if light was bent back upon itself, a region of such ferocious gravitational attraction that nothing might escape its lunatic pull! As this thought passed in a twinkling through my mind I knew suddenly where I was, and I remembered that dream I had known so long ago. I remembered those words uttered by the Eminence as it sat upon its alcove throne behind curtains of crystal and pearl-mist:
'If you cannot help him - if you fail - then you go down to the Black Hole with him!'
The Black Hole! And now other memories flooded my mind: of scientific concepts and theories I had known in my own time, particularly the popular one of a black hole. The theory describes how a giant star, collapsing in upon itself to a tiny diameter, develops a density of billions of tons per cubic inch of matter; this incredible mass would exert a gravitational field from which not even light itself might escape!
That was a black hole, and here I plummeted headlong into one!
Already my velocity must be enormous! And now I began to feel the tremendous strain on the clock and my own mind and body. If I could only swing my vessel to one side of the center of this unthinkable attraction, use its speed, like the swing of a giant pendulum, to fling myself away into free space on the other side. The idea caught, was immediately rejected. I was grasping at straws and . . .
. . . ridiculous thought; why, plainly . . .
. . . twisting, distorting, the time-clock's very atomic pattern commenced an elongation, a liquid flowing apart, and I knew my being, my human body, must also be

subject to this horrid atomic viscosity. Was this the end, then? The clock's mental scanners were dimming - not that it mattered greatly for there was absolutely nothing to see outside the vessel's shell - but the symbiotic sensitivity of their feel was dying in my mind's eye. I was rapidly losing all control, all contact with my time-ship.
What use to fight any longer? Toward the end of this last trip together, the clock and I would simply spread out, become an almost two-dimensional rain of component chemicals falling still toward the gravitational center. We were doomed, the clock and I!
'No, my love, my Titus, there is a way.r
The voice of the goddess, and more than a mere voice this time: a presence, a spirit! 'A way?' I asked, hope springing eternal within me, even as time itself slowed down with my velocity. 'What way?'