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

... of oppression. How may I describe it? It was a feeling as vague really as the dim and nighted landscape, and yet ominous.
Suddenly it came to me that I must not simply sit there waiting for something to happen. I knew, you see, that sooner or later something would happen. It was the type of feeling you get standing too close to the lip of a vast cliff gazing out over far horizons. No, not vertigo but rather a presentiment, the sudden realization of infinity and one's own insignificance, an awareness of the presence of vast powers. And even with the shadows lengthening grayly, then shortening, constantly and weirdly dividing and uniting under the spell of oddly orbiting moons, still I did not know where I was. Not even as I lifted my clock up and forward, to drift lazily over that pallid, alien, fog-masked landscape . . .
. . . that the milky fog now rolled like the waves of an ocean, a sea of undulating fumes white as the snowy domes of Amanita phalloides, and just as deadly, rising from some mordant sea. No, not a sea, a lake.
I saw it as my vessel passed into a region where the cloud-waves rolled less densely: a lake of murky depths the very sight of which, so still, without a ripple to stir its surface, tugged at the roots of memories that slumbered uneasily but would not waken.
A numbness was on my mind, Henri, engendered of unplumbed mysteries, mysteries not alone of the lake. That was only a part of it. I felt perhaps as a dying man feels in that moment before death; or as a baby before it is born; or a soul before it is reborn. Yes, this world, or more accurately this lake, might easily be the rebirthing place of souls - or their graveyard).
Ah, now I knew this place - as Alhazred knew it in the

desert, and Castaigne in New York; as Schrach, Tierney and others have known it - as every dreamer knows it at least once in life. And once is as much as most can bear, too much for many. Rearing in horror then above those depths, mentally lifting my coffin-clock up through an agonizingly leaden atmosphere, a succession of names and associations of half-remembered elder myths and monstrous legends flooded my mind.
I thought of Demhe and Hali, and knew it was the latter lying beneath me even as I rose slowly to the sky. I seemed to hear the songs Cassilda's dead voice sings, but knew them to be only the eerie ululations of someone, something else! I sensed the dread approach of the King in Yellow, knowing that his scalloped tatters still shrouded Yhtill; and, seeing a sudden swirl of mottled yellow far down near the milky shore of the lake, I knew also that my torpor had dissipated only just in time. Then, lifting higher and more freely, I saw behind that flapping yellow mote down on the shore the shadows of a moon, and behind those bloating fungi shades the jagged towers of lost Carcosa!
Then came the real horror, that which I had most feared. For rising up now behind me in that mordant lake from which, in the words of the poet, '. . . dreamers flee in nameless dread,' a great tentacle stretched, dripping bubbling acids as it lashed viciously in the wake of my fleeing vessel. It was a Cthulhoid tentacle, I knew, belonging to that prime evil's half-brother, the whistler of Cassilda's songs. Hastur had reached up from the depths of the prison Lake of Hali, sending a pseudopod to trap me but mercifully sending it too late!
Faster I climbed, completely free now of the morbid mental sloth that shortly before had held me in its languid arms, until red rays reached out to me from over the rim

of the prison planet and massive Aldebaran bathed my time-clock in the warmth of her ruddy light.
And now with the horror of Hali behind me, as I sped out into the Hyades, it dawned on me that indeed I was not far from the planet of my birth. Not far? No, a mere sixty-four light-years, but a moment of concentration. Ah, but in which direction? I was sure that my very rudimentary . . .
NOTE: At this point another lengthy part of the narrative, consisting of a third of a spool of tape, is lost.
ADM
10 Atlantis
. . . Sidney-Fryer's translations from the Atlantean of Atlantarion? Man, I was there when they were written in the original! In that same period, something like fifteen thousand years ago, I saw the foundering of Atlantis. Saw it? I was very nearly part of it ...
. . . awesome cataclysm, de Marigny! It saw the end of a land, of a people, of an era - the end of a period of poets who knew the true meaning of beauty, whose like can never be known again. I may say that of all...
NOTE: Here the break in the narrative is not so extensive, and my opinion is that the lost matter is not of great importance. In any case the narrative from this point on is more or less complete.

11 Outside!
. . . that at last they had succeeded in hounding me into a place of utmost evil. I sensed it in the same instant that I passed between incomprehensibly layered zones of hyper-space-time into that other place. There had been a sudden, short-lived blast of mental exultation, of fiendish delight, from the pursuing Hounds; their echoes seemed to follow me as I slipped sideways away from those fluttering, chittering rag-things into that parallel dimension. And their unholy . . . anticipation, warned me that here . . . something which, while it must be allied to the Tind'losi Hounds in hideous purpose, in the overall alliance of evil forces, even they stood in awe ... A power so monstrous that . . .
. . . dread; I had heard again as so often before Tiania's voice crying in my mind. And oh, the hopelessness that rang in that beautiful telepathic voice before it, too, was cut off:
'Not there, my love. I cannot follow you or help you there. I cannot even penetrate the veil in Kthanid's crystal! Not even a Great Thought can follow you there, and there is no returning from -
'No, Titus! NO!' . . .
. . . could not stay here, and yet I could not leave!
It had been contrived that I might place myself in a region from which I could not escape; and once again, in fear and loathing of the Hounds of Tindalos, I had obligingly done just that. But what else could I have done?
Desperately now I sought to plumb those depths of my vessel's psyche wherein I knew lay the controls to open

the gates between dimensions, those same controls I had manipulated to break through into this place, as I had used them to escape the Black Hole and other horrors. But now they were . . . gone! There was only an emptiness where they had been.
And outside, exterior to the clock, there stretched an infinite darkness. No stars hung in that all-embracing wall of seemingly solid jet. It was comprised of a blackness without the tiniest glimmer of illumination, as if suddenly I had been plunged into the heart of some titanic block of black marble, and yet not like that. For black may be denned as a color and this was an absence of color, an absolute absence of light. No, it was more even than that: it was the absence of everything. It came to me that there was quite literally nothing beyond the walls of my vessel, neither time nor space. This time I had gone - away -from everything; the time-clock - and I had quite literally moved outside!
Why, I asked myself, should these restrictions suddenly have been placed on the clock's previously unlimited capabilities? My vessel was now like an ocean-going liner confined to port, and an alien port at that. Desperately I attempted to burrow even deeper into the time-clock's . . .
. . . perceived that there was something out there after all, a movement, a disturbance in the darkness far away. This impression came to me through the clock's fantastically sensitive scanners. There being nothing else in that whole immense blackness to detect, the scanners had finally sought out this most distant disturbance to bring to my attention. But in this I was made aware of several other things, namely: if the source of the disturbance was distant, then this place did not have an absence of space. Therefore, since it is an irrefutable law that space and time go hand in hand, time also existed here. And yet I

knew somehow that this was a very different space, a very different time, a space-time continuum like no other.
The realization was instantaneous and went no further than that, for now the disturbance was closer, growing, seething in the scanners, its outlines beginning to make themselves clearer. For another instant I gaped, then drove my vessel away from the thing as it grew with fantastic speed from a distant amoeba outlined in eerie blue radiance to a spreading blot that put out groping, bubbling pseudopods. And along these pseudopods the thing seemed to shoot itself toward me, reminding me of some hideous octopus with its quick, jerky movements. But by then I knew that it was no octopus. I knew exactly what it was and where I was.
A different space, a different time - different because of an alien juxtaposition to nature - a place utterly outside nature, synthetic, manufactured! A dimension parallel with all four mundane dimensions but impinging on none of them, 'coexistent with all time and conterminous in all space' but locked outside nevertheless, behind barriers only the Elder Gods might construct. But barriers constructed to enclose what?
What else but that soul-symbol of most abysmal evil, that father of darkness, that frothing, liquescent, blasphemous shapelessness that masks its true horror behind a congeries of iridescent globes and bubbles; that primal slime seething forever 'beyond the nethermost angles', the Lurker at the Threshold - the noxious Yog-Sothoth!
I knew then that I was dead, de Marigny, finished, that already my life was used up and that all I had aspired to must come to nothing. My soul was lead within me, plumbing the very depths of despair, for there I was face to face with a being whose only peer in monstrousness is dread Cthulhu himself.
Face to face? Yes, despite the fact that I had in the



previous instant driven my vessel away from the thing! Certainly, for how might one escape a being who is conterminous in all space? I had no sooner hurled my craft in a direction away from that frothing obscenity than I found myself rushing toward him as he placed himself in my path! Time was no refuge either, for flinging my clock madly into the future I found the horror already waiting for me - no, rushing with me along the time-stream - and always, inexorably, drawing closer to me!
To and fro in space, forward and back in time. And through all of that silent, nightmare rush my hurtling vessel's scanners sought to obtain for me a clearer picture of the thing lurking behind those protoplasmic bubbles and globes. I caught insane glimpses of a purplish blue mass: a titanic primal jelly of wriggling ropes, bulging eyes and tossing, convulsing pseudopods and mouths . .. a super-sentient but nevertheless ultra-evil anemone from the deepest seas of screaming nightmare!
Closer still the horror came, while my attempts to avoid it grew ever more frenzied, ever more useless. Forward and back in time I plunged, then further back yet; to and fro and around and about in space. Faster and ever faster the pace grew, and closer the looming horror of Yog-Sothoth. All of those lightning mental reflexes built into me by T3RE were being taxed to their very limits, strained to the breaking point as I flung the clock through space and time in ever more intricate four-dimensional patterns. And through all of this those myriad bulging eyes of the monster stared and lusted. Its convulsing mouths drooled and chomped vacuously, and the mass of its throbbing body loomed over the clock as if to enclose it within some unmentionable amoeba.
It was hideous, indescribably hideous! Then suddenly, driven almost to insanity, gibbering and clawing at my hair in an attempt to force my mind to react faster and

faster yet to the perils of that impossible chase, finally it happened. I drove my time-clock in two directions at one and the same time!