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

'He did, come to think of it,' I answered with a frown, in fact I believe he wrote a short piece of macabre fiction around just such a creature as Urbicus mentions. Now what was the story called . . .?'
'Yegg-ha's Realm,' Peaslee promptly answered.
'Yegg-ha!' I snapped my fingers. 'Of course, I remember now. Titus once told me about a skeleton he'd dug up near Hadrian's Wall between Housesteads and Briddock - he was something of an archeologist on the quiet, you know - and he hinted that its owner must have been other than human. Yes, and I remember that he tied his discovery in with Lollius Urbicus, too.'
'Right,' Peaslee agreed, 'and he wrote his story pretty much as it must have happened, though of course he presented it as fiction. Even so it was pretty realistic. I've read it since and I can quite understand the stir it caused when it was first published in Grotesque. As for the bones he dug up, they were, as you say, other than human. Indeed, they were monstrous! Mind you, I never saw the actual remains, the great featureless skull or the archaeop-teryx-like wing fragments. For some reason Crow destroyed them not too long after he found them, but he showed me photographs. Those pictures were definitely of something from . . . outside.'
'From what I know of Titus Crow,' I put in as Peaslee paused, 'it rather surprises me that he didn't go looking for this gate himself.'
'Ah, but he was much less well informed in those days, Henri. We all were. No matter, he had the right idea in the end. As I've said, it was because of what Crow told me that we did finally track this gate down. We actually found it, a door to an imperfect, synthetic universe,

manufactured by the Elder Gods to imprison beings the Earth couldn't bear to harbor! We found it, and now we've locked it once and for all.
'Of course the thing was not physically a gate or a door; it was, rather, a place where our space-time continuum occasionally overlaps with another. The CCD knew this and telepathically fed the barbarians sufficient knowledge to allow them to open the way for the beings beyond. But the prisons of the Elder Gods are not so easily broken open. Only the minions, the underlings of those imprisoned powers of evil managed to break out, hideous but nevertheless flesh-and-blood creatures like Yegg-ha, while the actual inmates of the prison-dimension were obliged to remain in their timeless bondage. And that in turn leads us to the following questions: which of the Great Old Ones did Yegg-ha and his sort serve? And would it be possible for modern, rather more sophisticated dupes of the CCD to call them out?
'Of the latter question, there's little to fear of that now. We've put the most powerful locks we know of on that gate; we have literally welded it shut with our developing science, which was once the magic of the Elder Gods. If ever the gate is tampered with again, it will have to be by men who know as much as we do, and you may only find such men within the Foundation.'
'Don't forget, Wingate,' I reminded him, 'that there was once a so-called mad Arab, one Abdul Alhazred. He knew as much as we do, probably more.'
'Alhazred,' the professor answered, 'was the greatest dreamer, seer and mystic of all time. Aleister Crowley was a nobody by comparison, Dee a pewling babe, Eliphas Levi a mere dabbler and Merlin, if he ever existed, a first-year apprentice. Certainly there was an Alhazred; there was also a da Vinci, a Van Gogh and an Einstein. Such men occur once, and in the case of

Alhazred we may thank all that's merciful for that! And I think, too, that he really was more than a little mad. That way he would have been an ideal receiver for the telepathic sendings of the CCD. Did it ever occur to you to ask yourself just where Alhazred came by all of his occult knowledge in the first place?'
'No,' I answered truthfully, 'that's something I never thought about.'
'Hmm! Well, don't worry, there are thousands of questions that no man has yet thought to ask; questions are meaningless anyway until the answers are at least half known.'
'And have you decided: or discovered which of the Great Old Ones Yegg-ha served?' I asked.
'Not for certain, but we have our ideas.
'One proposal is that this outer dimension is compart-mented, that is, it is divided between various imprisoned beings. For example, we know that Yog-Sothoth is conterminous with all space and coexistent in all time, or at least we are told this in the old books and documents. But how can this be? And if it is so, why isn't he here now and ravaging? Well, we believe that he is only omnipresent insofar as his universe borders on both the time and space fabrics of our own continuum. The concept is that one edge of his place lies parallel with our time while another impinges upon our space. At that point near Hadrian's Wall the two universes overlap, and with a little help it is possible for certain of these lurkers at the threshold to step over to this side. You'll recall, of course, that Yog-Sothoth is actually known in the Cthulhu Cycle as the Lurker at the Threshold?'
'Yes, of course. Then it's Yog-Sothoth who bides his time behind the barriers of this synthetic universe?'
'Compartmented, I said, de Marigny. We believe that Yog-Sothoth is imprisoned in one compartment - but

there are many others! What of Yibb-Tstll and Bugg-Shash, for example? They, too, are supposed to inhabit prisons in other dimensions. And Azathoth, before we discovered him to be simply the definition of a nuclear explosion, was also supposed to be omnipresent. Nor can we say that he is not, for certain nuclear theorists have it that the fabric of space-time is momentarily ruptured at the center of an atomic explosion. Who can say what horrors and nightmares man himself has visited upon the dwellers in yet more distant dimensions with his use of that lunatic weapon? This is one of the reasons why the Foundation supports the ban on all nuclear tests.
'However, I seem to have sidetracked a bit. I was answering your questions about the remaining CCD-inspired problems in Great Britain, wasn't I? Yes, well, after Hadrian's Wall we moved on to Salisbury Plain. With the permission of the British Archeological Society we checked Stonehenge out, as Crow had hinted we should. Nothing was there now, but there certainly was at one time in the remote past. We found star-stones there, deep in the earth, as old as any we've ever seen; in fact Schneider of archeology at Miskatonic believes that the monument itself was once in the shape of a great five-pointed star. Moreover, the G'harne Fragments bear him out. The outer points are long gone, but the hub of the thing remains. God only knows what horror the Elder Gods incarcerated down there that they required such a monumental tombstone to keep it down! The G'harne Fragments have it that when the early Cimmerians invaded Gunderland, some twenty thousand years ago, they destroyed the Great Elder Sign's pointed outer ramparts and thus set free the Being of the Great Star, and of course Gunderland covered that southern part of England in which Salisbury Plain lies. As to what became of the monster after that. . .'He shrugged.

'It may seem fantastic, but as for Stonehenge itself . . . well, despite what all your so-called experts may say to the contrary, the pyramids are the veriest babes of buildings when compared with Stonehenge!'
'You mentioned the G'harne Fragments,' I said, choosing that focal point from the mass of information the professor had presented. 'Poor Wendy-Smith once worked on those shards, didn't he? And Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole', too. Do you mean to say that we finally have a translation? I thought the fragments were supposed to be unfathomable, that their ciphers and glyphs were quite beyond understanding?'
'Oh, yes!' he exclaimed. 'We have a translation, all right. In fact we know almost all there is to know about the fragments now, except perhaps how they survived the centuries. Mind you, the Foundation can't claim the first translation or even the second, not by any means. Wendy-Smith must have translated quite a bit - and all power to him for that - but we took our lead mainly from Walmsley. I don't know if you're familiar with his book, Notes on Deciphering Codes, Cryptograms and Ancient Inscriptions, but if you are you'll recognize Gordon Walmsley of Goole as the greatest ever in his field. Little good his knowledge did him in the end, though.'
'So Wendy-Smith and Titus Crow were wrong about Stonehenge, were they? The monument is safe then?'
'Yes, but we can't say the same for certain other parts of Great Britain, Silbury Hill, for example, and Avebury. These places harbor an ethereal taint going back untold centuries. You must understand, there is little physical about this rare brand of evil. It is as vague and ill-defined as a picture drawn on quicksilver, transient as the phases of the moon, but just as surely recurrent. There were days, weeks even, when our telepaths and mediums gave these places spotless certificates of safety, as it were. And

there were other times when the telepathic and parapsy-chological ethers were crammed with presences that simply brooked no interference. It's no mere coincidence, I may tell you, that the Society of Metaphysics now has its headquarters in Tidworth; we intend to keep a close watch on the whole Salisbury Plain area.
'Similarly, we have agents permanently stationed in such towns as Marshfield, Nailsworth and Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds; and we are particularly interested in certain backwaters and centers of malign influence such as the decaying hamlets of Temphill and Goatswood along the Severn Valley.'
'The Cotswolds,' I repeated him, 'and Marshfield!
Don't tell me that you've found something in Marshfield?
Why, Crow's old confidante, Mother Quarry, used to live
there. It was her letter which warned Crow of the danger
when he and I had fallen into that last trap of the CCD.
She had had one of her visions, I remember. The way
Crow used to talk of her, I always saw her as some old
charlatan.'
'Then you wronged her, Henri,' Peaslee said. 'Mother Eleanor Quarry is one of the best mediums we've yet discovered. We employ such people now as frequently as we used to employ our telepaths in your day. Often the two talents complement each other; they go hand in hand. Mother Quarry heads a very effective group in the Cotswolds, and she still lives in Marshfield at her old home, which is now the group headquarters.'
'You employ mediums,' I mused. 'Isn't that carrying things a bit far? I mean, the Foundation's operational center at Miskatonic is a world-renowned seat of learning and science. Surely metaphysics and the like has little in common with -'
'De Marigny, you've much to catch up with, I fear,' he said, cutting me off, 'and there seems to be a lot you've

forgotten, too. Metaphysics has everything to do with our work! Why, didn't the Elder Gods themselves use the occult arts, and weren't those same occult arts their sciences? We're looking at all such sciences today, Henri, in as enlightened a way as our bigoted human minds will allow. At Miskatonic right now there are groups of specially talented people seriously studying such subjects as telekinesis and levitation ... to say nothing of mere crystal-gazing, divination and necromancy. Why, certain of our seminars read like a shaman's thesaurus! Oh, yes, you've much to catch up on.'
'Well,' I answered, 'that's what you're here for, Win-gate. You may as well tell me as much as you can, for I've damn little to tell you.'
'You remember nothing at all of your lost ten years, then?'
'Nothing.' I shook my head. 'Except ..."
I made myself a little more comfortable on my pillows before continuing. 'Oh, it's nothing really, just that I have an idea.'