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

After Peaslee had gone I slept again, this time peacefully enough, until about midafternoon. When I awakened it was to find a young doctor at work removing the splints and casts from my arms. Matron Emily, as she insisted I call her, was assisting him, and she seemed genuinely delighted when at last my arms lay bare over the sheets.

'You wouldn't believe it,' she told me, 'if you had seen how badly mangled your arms were. But now . . .'
Now there were one or two minor scars, nothing much to show that my arms had suffered anything but superficial cuts and abrasions. 'Your friend the professor,' she continued, 'brought in the world's finest surgeons and specialists.'
She allowed me to sit up then, making me comfortable with pillows for my back. I was given a mirror, too, and allowed to shave myself. I soon learned not to move my arms too quickly; the bones were still very sore. By the growth of hair on my face I judged that it must have been all of a week since last I had seen a razor. Matron Emily confirmed this, moreover informing me that she had shaved me twice herself at similar intervals. I had been in her nursing home for three weeks.
I asked for the day's newspapers then, but before I could settle to read them a second doctor came in to see me. He was a bespectacled, bald little man with a busy, bustling attitude. He gave me a thorough going over: chest, ears, eyes, nose - everything. He harrumphed and grunted once or twice during his examination, made copious notes in a little black book, had me clench my hands and bend my elbows repeatedly, painfully, then harrumphed some more before finally asking me my age.
'I'm forty-six,' I answered without thinking; then, remembering that ten years had inexplicably elapsed since the world had last seen me, I corrected myself. 'No, better make that fifty-six.'
'Harrumph! Hmm, well, I prefer to believe your first statement, Mr de Marigny. Despite your injuries you're in a remarkably good state of preservation. I would have said forty-two, perhaps forty-three at the outside. Certainly not fifty-six.'
'Doctor,' I eagerly cried, grasping at his arms (and at a

straw at the same time) as I sought his eyes with mine. 'Tell me - what year is this?'
'Hmm?' He peered at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. 'Eh? The year? Ah, yes, you're having some trouble with your memory; aren't you? Yes, Peaslee mentioned that. Hmm, well, the year is 1979. Does that help any?'
'No, that doesn't help,' I slowly answered, dismayed to discover Peasiee's statement with regard to my lost ten years corroborated, even though I had known it would be. I shook my head glumly. 'It's strange, I know, but somewhere I seem to have mislaid ten years. Only I'm pretty damned sure I haven't aged ten years!'
He looked at me steadily for a moment, seriously, then grinned. 'Oh? Then you must count yourself lucky, er, harrumph!' He started to pack his instruments away. 'Years seem to hang like lumps of lead on me. Each one weighs that much heavier and drags me down that much faster!'
I spent the rest of the afternoon vainly attempting to formulate some sort of answer to this problem of the time lapse, giving it up in the end when I remembered the daily newspapers. They lay on a low chair to the right of my bed, within reach but out of sight, which was why I had forgotten them. But no sooner had I picked up the first newspaper than the enigma presented itself yet again - in the date at the top of the first page. Ten years . . .
Deliberately then, and with a genuine effort at concentration - something which should have come far easier to me - I forced the recurring problem from my mind and began to read. What I expected to find, what modern wonders had been wrought in this 'future' world, I really do not know. And so it was with a definite sense of relief

that I discovered very little to have changed. The Big Names of the day were different, certainly, but they featured in the same old headlines.
Then I came upon an article about the Mars program in an illustrated scientific journal of recent date, noting that space probes had already been sent around Mars and recovered, and that they had been brought down under their own power on dry land. Progress! The title, by no means purely speculative, was 'The Exploration of Space - Men on Mars by '85.' But no sooner had I come across this article than I remembered what the Foundation had found on the moon: the secret that not even the American astronauts themselves had known. Nevertheless, certain of their instruments had transmitted back to Earth the fact that life did exist beneath that stark, cruel surface, a life even more cruel and stark. The octopoid spawn of Cthulhu was there, imprisoned on Earth by the Elder Gods before the moon had been hurled into orbit from the Azoic Pacific, molten again following that terrific battle which the forces of evil had lost. Little wonder that the full moon has driven men to madness and caused dogs to howl down the centuries . . . And then I wondered just what new horrors the first men might find on Mars . . .
Just how widespread throughout the universe were the prisons of the Elder Gods, wherein they had chained the malignant powers of the CCD? The great occult books had it that Hastur was imprisoned near Aldebaran in the Hyades, and that the Elder Gods themselves were palaced in Orion. So very far away! I was no mathematician, but I still knew the definition of a light-year, and while no man could ever hope to visualize such a distance, nevertheless I could at least conceive of thousands of such units. So very far ... What hope then for little Mars, mere millions of miles away, in the selfsame star system

as the home planet of Man, a system which had actually formed part of the inconceivably ancient battleground?
Puzzling just such disturbing questions as these, with that scientific journal still in my hands, I eventually felt myself nodding. In fact it had been growing dark in my room for some time. Matron Emily had looked in once or twice but had steadfastly refused to put my light on, saying that it was best I should get some sleep. Perhaps it was simply the added psychological effect of her words, or it just could have been the result of too much eyestrain in the steadily darkening room, but whichever way it was I soon succumbed to sleep, and it seemed that I began to dream almost immediately.
Now I have never been what you might call a great dreamer. In fact those dreams from which Peaslee had so mercifully rescued me were as strong and stronger than any I had ever previously known. By this I mean to say that it was extremely rare for me to dream so vividly; and yet no sooner had I closed my eyes when, for the second time in one day, I found myself assailed by strange nightmares and fantasies.
I floated in a region of weird forces outside yet forming a part of space and time; and I saw the great, coffin-shaped clock hurtling toward me out of even weirder nether regions while Crow's voice called out to me. But this time it was no exhortation to follow him that I heard but more a cry for help - an urgent request for assistance which I could not quite make out in its entirety before the clock drove on along paths unknown in nature into the distance of lost temporal wildernesses. And though the clock - or space-time ship, or whatever the thing was -had gone, still there sounded in my ears the eerie echo of Crow's lost cry for help, the tormented SOS of a soul in distress. That, at least, is the way it seemed to me, and I

was later to learn that this interpretation of my friend's telepathic communication was not far short of correct.
Again and again, recurrently, this vision of the clock driving through hyperspace-time came to me; and over and over again I threw myself in its path only to be flung aside, left to swim frantically in its wake, vainly attempting to rescue my friend from whatever horrors threatened him. But who may swim against the tides of time?
Finally I woke up, and it was night; the room was still and quiet; my star-stone gleamed whitely against the flower vase in a stray beam of moonlight.
For a long time I simply lay there, feeling the cool of the sheet against my hot, naked arms, and the rapid beat of my heart within my chest. And in a short while my thoughts turned again to wondering about the plight of my poor friend, lost from men for ten long years. . . . And I admit that I despaired.

Of Peaslee and the Wilmarth Foundation
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
Two mornings later, bright and early and just as he had promised, Peaslee came to see me. It seemed that I was no sooner awake and shaved, just starting in on a very ample breakfast brought in by Matron Emily (my meals had been growing progressively larger and more regular over the past two days) when he opened the door to walk in unannounced.
'De Marigny, you look well!' He came and sat by my bed. 'God, man, do you intend to eat all of that? Still, I suppose it's more substantial than all that muck they've had to pump into you over these last weeks. How do you feel?'
'Fine,' I mumbled around a mouthful of bacon and egg, 'and I'll feel even better after they get my legs out of this concrete tomorrow. Listen, you talk and I'll eat, then I'll talk. Not that you'll get much out of me, I'm afraid, for I've nothing really to tell. But how about you? What of the Wilmarth Foundation?'
'The Foundation?' Peaslee smiled broadly, deep wrinkles forming in his aged face. 'All's well within the Foundation, Henri, in fact things could hardly be better. We haven't got them all yet, the minions of the CCD, not by any means - but their numbers decrease every year, and that's the important thing. Oh, there are still certain problems, many of them in the USSR, but even the Soviets are starting to come around to our way of thinking.'
'And the organization retains its cloak of secrecy?'

'Certainly. More people in high places know of the Foundation's work now, yes - that was necessary for our expansion and continuation - but mundane mankind strolls blindly by. It has to be that way. To let people know what has been going on, what still goes on, would be to invite disaster. There are still . . . beings . . . that could be called up. The last thing we want is an upsurge of interest in such matters. The fear of large-scale panic is not so great these days; there are too many wonders to see, too many marvels to behold. A handful of ghosts and nightmares from a time already lost when the Cambrian was the veriest baby of an age would no longer drive the world to madness, but to have people alerted to these things, to have them seeking out and reading the great old books again, and perhaps dabbling . . . Oh, no. We can't have that, de Marigny. And so the Foundation remains secret, and its work carries on as before.'
I nodded, then inclined my head toward the vase of flowers and the curiously shaped stone at its base. 'For all your reassuring words,' I said, 'I see you're not about to take any chances with my life!'
'Indeed we're not!' he declared. 'For we've already lost you once too often. And you're honoured, de Marigny, for that's a very special stone. It is one of the originals, excavated with a handful of others when the Foundation killed a Cthonian recently, one of the biggest and worst yet. That was during a supposed archeological expedition to the region of Sarnath the Doomed in what was once the Land of Mnar, Saudi Arabia to you. That stone was manufactured by the Elder Gods themselves, whoever or whatever they were.'
I leaned across to take the object of our conversation in my hand, peering at it intently. There appeared to be fine lines drawn on its surface, whorls and squiggles,

curious glyphs that seemed to defy my eye to follow their intricacies. 'There are ... markings!'
'Do you recognize them?' the professor asked at once, vastly interested.
'Yes, I think I do,' I answered. 'They're very similar to the hieroglyphs on Crow's clock, his space-time machine. Do you think there could be some connection?'
'It would certainly seem that there is,' he answered wryly. 'I've kicked myself a thousand times since I first saw that clock at Crow's place when I stayed there. I knew then that it was a very important thing, but who could have guessed just how important? I should have taken notes, photographs. Why, Crow even told me he believed the thing to be -'
'A toy of the Elder Gods themselves?' I finished it for him.
'Yes, exactly. Of course, all is not quite lost: we have the books at Miskatonic which supplied Crow with his first really important clue to, well, how to drive the damned thing! But I dearly wish now that I had photographed the clock itself. Every fragment of information is of value in the overall picture, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and this must surely be one of the basic puzzles of the universe itself.'