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

'Oh? Well, go on, Henri.'
'Yes, I have this . . . idea. You see, Wingate, I don't seem to have aged at all in ten years, not by a single day, and I can't help wondering if . . .'
'Yes?'
'Well, when Titus and I entered that great old clock, when we fled Blowne House before Ithaqua's air elemen-tals could get in at us, I remember Crow saying something about a trip into time, a journey into the future.' I paused.
'That is very interesting, Henri,' Peaslee said, his old eyes wide and staring at me intently. 'Go on.'
'I was wondering if ... if perhaps Crow had indeed managed to pilot his craft into time, into the future, and if I - '

'If you had fallen overboard, as it were, before he got his ship properly out of port?'
'Yes, something like that,' I answered.
'Of course it's possible,' the professor told me after a moment's silence, 'and it would certainly explain why you haven't aged, to say nothing of your amnesia. How might a man remember ten years that never happened?'
'And you don't find the concept of time-travel too fantastic?'
'Not at all, Henri. I've seen far too much of the so-called fantastic to be awed by mere concepts. And after all, we're all time-travelers when you think about it.'
'Eh? How do you mean?' ,
'Why, aren't we all traveling into the future right now? Of course we are, except that we're traveling at a speed of only one second per second. From what you've told me, I'm beginning to believe that Titus Crow found a way to travel faster, that's all.'
After a while I said, 'Matron Emily tells me that when I was taken off the buoy at Purfleet I didn't even need a shave. Titus and I, we must have journeyed those ten years overnight! And since then, since my return, it's been almost two months. How far into tomorrow, then, is Titus Crow right now?'
Peaslee turned his suddenly troubled face away. "That's something we may never know, Henri. There's still hope, of course. There will always be hope, but -'
'I know,' I said, and abruptly there passed before my mind's eye a scene remembered from a dream, of a coffin-shaped meteor plunging endlessly through nightmare vast-nesses of space and time. 'I know . . .'

Cthulhu's Cosmic Miscegenation
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
For a long while we were silent. Then, deliberately changing the subject and entering into a long, informative narrative, Peaslee rapidly brought me up to date on all of the more recent successes of the Wilmarth Foundation -its successes, and a few of its failures. It would take too long to detail the professor's complete discourse, and in any case I doubt if my memory is up to it, but I can at least outline a few of the things that he revealed to me.
For instance, he talked about the translation of the G'harne Fragments and the great boost that those ancient, decaying shards had provided to the impetus of the Wilmarth Foundation. He talked about the submarine destruction of Deep Gell-Ho and its shoggoth inhabitants, of the collapse of rotting Kingsport on the New England coast and the fact that the gray sea was now eating away at certain previously unsuspected caverns of maggoty loathsomeness and ages-old decay. He talked of Lh'yib, mentioning what men had done to Ib's sister city beneath the Yorkshire Moors in lowered tones; then he brightened as he related the advances made against blue-lighted K'n-Yan, red-lighted Yoth, and Black N'kai. I remember, too, that he mentioned a certain Moon Bog of Irish myth and legend, in dark connection with the so-called nameless city of olden Turkistan.
Much of what I heard was completely new to me, only recently fathomed or discovered by the Foundation, so that I thrilled to such outri names as Sunken Yatta-Uc, a city drowned in the forgotten inner cone of Titicaca's

volcano; Doomed Arkan Tengri, a derelict aerie of mist-obscured peaks and icy pinnacles in the white wastes south of the Kunlun Mountains; and the Jidhauas, savage nomads of Mongolia's Gobi Desert and worshipers of Shudde-M'ell.
All of these things were fascinating to me, but one subject in particular that Peaslee touched upon toward the end of his long narrative completely absorbed me. It was in connection with Shub-Niggurath, yet another weird name from the Cthulhu Cycle of myth. Yes, Shub-Niggurath, 'the black goat of the woods with a thousand young', occasionally called the Ram with a Thousand Ewes or, as Peaslee preferred to refer to the mythological figure, Cthulhu's Cosmic Miscegenation!
I knew that previously Shub-Niggurath had been looked upon as a symbol of fertility, a being locked away with the CCD by the Elder Gods, and that in the Necronomi-con it was recorded that 'he shall come forth in all his (her?) hideousness when again the Great Old Ones are freed to walk the world as once they walked long ago.' Recently, however, the Wilmarth Foundation had interpreted all of this somewhat differently. Students of the Cthulhu Cycle pantheon had finally explained away certain conflicting statements as to Shub-Niggurath's sexual characteristics. For an example of the latter ambiguities, the Ram with a Thousand Ewes was often mentioned as being the wife of Hastur; and, even more confusingly, in the Cthaat Aquadingen Shub-Niggurath is referred to as 'Father & Mother of all Abominations, & of Others worse yet which will not be until ye Latter Times.'
Father and mother . . .?
The answer, Peaslee told me, is simply that Shub-Niggurath is the greatest fertility symbol of all, and in fact much more than a mere symbol. He/she is nothing less

than the power of miscegenation itself, amazingly inherent in the majority of the CCD. He/she is their ability to mate with the daughters of Adam and the sons of Eve, and with others of this wide universe somewhat less human.
Thus, along with Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, Peaslee had relegated Shub-Niggurath, too, to a symbol of power proper as opposed to a physical, alien being. And of that monstrous cosmic miscegenation of the CCD the professor had much to say. He talked of the unthinkable consequences and results of the matings of them with human beings, mentioning that such vague reports as are occasionally heard of blasphemous offspring are often known to have direct links with the CCD. The Foundation, he went on, had collected and collated many valuable and damning data, but he feared that only the surface had been scratched.
From a host of hideous cases he quoted a few facts. He mentioned the twins born to an unmarried illiterate albino woman at Dunwich in north-central Massachusetts; the loathsome serpentes children whose mother hacked her husband to death in a lunatic fit nine months before her family was - spawned? - in Caddo County, Oklahoma; the Irish half-wit woman who gave birth to a boy with stubby, vestigial wings after her medium mother had been plagued with nightmares of a flying demon, and so on. The cases were seemingly endless.
I remember having stopped Peaslee at about that point in his narrative to question him with regard to his term Cthulhu's Cosmic Miscegenation: wasn't 'cosmic' just a trifle ambiguous or superfluous? It was then that he told me what little he knew of a certain shadowy intelligence deep in the sub-oceanic vaults of Y'ha-nthlei beyond Devil Reef. Basically what he said was that man was not alone

in intelligence in the universe, and that the CCD had not confined their spawnings to human flesh and blood alone.
He had said more or less the same thing before, but now he was more explicit.
Before the Great Uprising, Peaslee told me, Cthulhu himself fathered three sons 'upon a female sentience from remote, ultra-telluric Xoth, the dim green double sun that glitters like a daemonic eye in the blacknesses beyond Abbith . . .' This quote is taken from the Ponape Scripture which, according to Peaslee, is a primal document brought back from the Isle of Ponape by an Arkham merchant-skipper, Captain Abner Ezekiel Hoag, in about 1734. Circulated privately, the manuscript finally ended up in the Kester Library in Salem, where the Wilmarth Foundation first became interested in it.
From that book and one or two others, particularly the Zanthu Tablets, the Foundation had culled most of its knowledge with regard to Cthulhu's progeny, before setting themselves to the task of verifying or condemning such accounts. Considering the history of the Zanthu Tablets, it is not really surprising that the Foundation had only looked at that source seriously in comparatively recent years'. Purported to be the work of a prehistoric Asian shaman or wizard, the tablets were allegedly discovered by Professor Harold Hadley Copeland in Zan-thu's stone tomb in 1913, and a translation was published by Copeland three years later in a quickly suppressed brochure of 'fragmentary and conjectural content, seem-ing deliberately contrived to undermine all recognized authorities, especially science and theology.'
Well, people had called Sir Amery Wendy-Smith a madman, and they had scorned Gordon Walmsley of Goole and many others whose work was later to prove invaluable to the Wilmarth Foundation, and the Foundation had learned a lesson from such examples. After a

number of years of hard work, Peaslee's researchers had been able to state quite conclusively that both the Ponape Scripture and the Zanthu Tablets were works which, along with those other monstrous books passed down the ages, had a firm foundation in fact and unthinkably distant prehistory.
This is what was finally brought to light: that until such evidence was discovered to suggest otherwise, it must be accepted that Qhulhu had fathered three miscegenetic sons upon an extraterrestrial being, and that these creatures were still mercifully imprisoned in black and shrieking abysses of earth.
The three sons were: Ghatanothoa, 'the monster on the mount', interred in crypts beneath a primal mountain, now lost in depths of ocean at the southern edge of the southeastern Pacific Plateau, about a thousand miles south of Easter Island; Ythogtha, 'the abomination in the abyss', lying chained by the Elder Sign in Yhe, which location the Foundation has not yet pinpointed; and Zoth-Ommog, 'the dweller in the deep', dreaming insanely in unfathomed gulfs off Ponape. There were three sons . . . and a daughter]
Cthylla was her name, the Secret Seed of Cthulhu. Her presence had been carefully edited from all the ancient texts except in the most oblique references; the minions of the CCD had even removed her likeness from the Columns of Geph in the coastal jungles of Liberia before attempting to destroy the columns themselves, to keep word of the Secret One safe. Cthylla, a name Von Junzt was heard to scream out in supplication just once, before dying in 1840 in a locked and bolted Dusseldorf chamber with the marks of taloned fingers upon his throat; a name Alexis Ladeau, Von Junzt's closest friend, wrote upon a stone floor in tottering letters of his own life's blood after

reading certain sections of his friend's insane Unaus-sprechlichen Kulten. He had burned the book to ashes before slicing his throat through with a razor. Cthylla, of whose existence no other trace, no single clue remains extant in any form recognizable to mundane mankind, Cthylla nevertheless exists and is worshiped in the world today!
Knowing in the end that he was beaten by the Elder Gods, and seeing that his lore would be handed down through the aeons by his worshipers and that eventually other rulers of Earth and the universe might try to seek him out and destroy him, Cthulhu was determined not to let his daughter, his secret spawn, fall into any such peril. Whatever Cthulhu's own future fate, his seed must be protected. The existence of his sons, too, he had tried to obscure; but his daughter, who would be the spawn-mother of distantly future generations, her concealment must be complete . . .
This was no mere fatherly concern for his child, as one might expect in a human being; Cthulhu was in no way human, knowing nothing of emotions as man might understand such. So where, then, did he get this desire to provide safety in obscurity for his daughter? Certain rites telepathically received and recorded by Foundation tele-paths in Innsmouth held the abominable answer.
In 1975, in fact during the last week of October of that year, particularly Halloween itself, a hideous mental babble, emanating from tremendous depths beneath the bed of the gulf beyond Devil Reef, was picked up by a special team 'vacationing' in Innsmouth. Unaware that they were listening in on rites lost in every other instance in unbelievable antiquity, the Foundation people recorded the oft-repeated liturgies, discovering them to be the bicentennial incantations of Mother Hydra and Father Dagon to Cthylla, daughter of Cthulhu. They