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

perceived that these ancient rituals had last been practiced in 1775; then, to mark the occasion, Oagon and his Deep Ones had taken hold on the minds of certain Innsmouth seafarers, thus influencing their participation in dark Polynesian religions and the eventual reunion of an alliance lost before the first coelacanth swam in Earth's seas - the liaison between the tomb-guarding Deep Ones of the Pacific and their kin in Y'ha-nthlei, whose nether vaults held dreaming Cthylla!
The Deep Ones were dead and gone now, those semi-human hosts of Y'ha-nthlei, and all the shoggoths of that sunken city with them, wiped out to the last by the Wilmarth Foundation during a second purging of Innsmouth in 1974; but deeper still beneath the bed of the gulf, in vaults which man might never have hoped to guess at, there, tended by faithful Hydra and ministered by Dagon, there Cthylla slumbers yet, awaiting . . . what?
Yet again, relying upon their telepathic and psychic fraternities, the Foundation's researchers think they have discovered the answer.
It all has to do with Cthulhu's enigmatic symbol-statement: 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl,' which, translated from the Riyehan, reads: 'In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,' and in that conjectural couplet from Alhazred's Necronomicon:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
That Alhazred, that great dreamer and mystic, plucked the latter lines direct from the minds of the Cthulhi can no longer be doubted, for it is known now that there is a second couplet, used in conjunction with the first in

Cthylla's rites; and these further lines may be interpreted as follows:
The dreamer dying faces death with scorn, And in his seed will rise again reborn!
Cthulhu the phoenix, rising up from the ashes of his own destruction in the spawn of his daughter's darkling womb . . . reincarnation!
To bear out this chilling concept, by no means farfetched in the light of what is already known of the CCD and particularly of Cthulhu, the Foundation's researchers have returned again to Alhazred in yet another cryptic passage from the rarest Al Azif of all:
Tis a veritable & attestable Fact, that between certain related Persons there exists a Bond more powerful than the strongest Ties of Flesh & Family, whereby one such Person may be awdre of all the Trials & Pleasures of the other, yea, even to experiencing the Pains or Passions of one far distant; & further, there are those whose Skills in such Matters are aided by forbidden Knowledge or Intercourse through dark Magic with Spirits & Beings of outside Spheres. Of the latter, I have sought them out, both Men & Women, & upon Examination have in all Cases discovered them to be Users of Divination, Observers of Times, Enchanters, Witches, Charmers or Necromancers. All claimed to work their Wonders through Intercourse with dead & departed Spirits, but I fear that often such Spirits were evil Angels, the Messengers of the Dark One & yet more ancient Evils. Indeed, among them were some whose Powers were prodigious, who might at Will inhabit the Body of another, even at a great Distance & against the Will & often unbeknown to the Sufferer of such Outrage.
Moreover, I have dreamed it that of the aforementioned most ancient of Evils, there is One which slumbers in Deeps unsounded so nearly Immortal that Life & Death are one to Him. Being ultimately corrupt, He fears Death's Corruption not, but when true Death draws nigh will prepare Himself until, fleeing His ancient Flesh, His Spirit will plumb Times-to-come

& there cleave unto Flesh of His Flesh, & all the Sins of this Great Father shall be visited upon His Child's Child. I have dreamed it, & my Dreams have been His Dreams who is the greatest Dreamer of all...
Cthulhu, then would be reincarnated in the womb of his daughter, to be reborn as her child. To Dagon would go the honor of fathering this blasphemy, Hydra would be nurse and handmaiden, Cthylla herself would raise the hybrid horror with Cthulhu's monstrous mind and psyche. Then in the waxing strength of a young adult - pointless, horrible even to conjecture what characteristics this thing might have! - he could again commence the influencing of men's minds, and this time from a location very close indeed to vast centers of human life.
Cthulhu, alert again, powerful, would be sending out his hellish dreams from the deeps beneath Devil Reef, unsuspected - for of course officially he would be dead!
Having told me so much, even though I pressed him for further details, Peaslee would say no more on the subject of Cthulhu's reincarnation. It seemed to me that there was more he could have told me, certainly, but that it was of such importance and of so ultimately secret a nature that he simply dared not mention it, not even to me. Furthermore I could see that he was biting his tongue, presumably for having said too much already. In any case, the lateness of the hour saved him from any further embarrassment: he used it as an excuse to take his departure.

PART TWO 1
Of Visions and Visits
(From de Marigny's notebooks)
Less than a week later Peaslee visited me again, this time to wish me luck for the future and to say farewell for the time being. There was work waiting for him in America. Before he left we talked of Titus Crow once more and then, finally, the old man asked me if I had any plans with regard to the Wilmarth Foundation. Did I want to come back into the organization? If so, there would always be a place for me. I thanked him but turned his offer down. I had my own interests, my own discoveries to make in this 'new world'.
It was only after a further period of six weeks in the hospital, with at least half of that time taken up with physiotherapy, the retraining of my poor, unaccustomed muscles, that I was finally allowed to sign myself out and go my way as a free man. In fact the last few weeks had seemed like a sort of imprisonment, and I was very glad when I was at last able to get back into the world, albeit a world with which I was greatly out of touch.
During those frustrating weeks there had been one regular visitor at the hospital, however, a lady whose presence helped combat the tedium of waiting out my time until the doctors would give me a clean bill of health: my dear old part-time housekeeper, Mrs Adams, who could only ever speak of Titus Crow as 'that dreadful Crow person', for in her eyes Titus had always been to blame for dragging me into whatever adventures overtook us. My hospital, I had discovered, was on the outskirts of

Aylesbury; Mrs Adams, when she finally knew my whereabouts, traveled up daily from London just to spend an hour or so with me. She had kept my place going all this time, visiting the house twice a week for ten long years in my absence. As she herself put it: 'I knowed you'd be back sooners-laters, Mr 'Enri, sir.' And now, though I was still using a walking stick, now I was back.
Fortunately I had all but dissolved my small but lucrative antique business some time after joining the Foundation, and so very little had wanted or wasted for my absence. I intended now to revive my lifetime interest in beautiful old books, pottery and furniture, but first I would spend a few days simply getting used to the feel and atmosphere of my old home again.
While the house itself was the same as ever, the district had seemed to change enormously. 'Progress', as they call it, waits for no man - not even a time-traveler. Indeed, especially not a time-traveler! Out walking in a neck of the city I'd once considered my own, it was as if I trod the streets of some strange, foreign place. New buildings, alleys, posters; a well-remembered old cinema had been replaced by a shopping arcade; even the faces were different, where shops I'd once used had now passed into new hands or disappeared completely, demolished. The underground was the same, and yet was not the same, but that didn't bother me much: its system had always been beyond my comprehension. And in all truth I had not used the tube since first learning of the existence of the burrowers beneath; and because of them, despite all Peaslee's assurances, I did not intend to use it again . ..
Not that I ventured far from my house during those first few weeks out of the hospital. I did not, except to make one very special trip to Leonard's-Walk Heath late in November. Blowne House, Crow's strange, foreboding bungalow retreat, had once sprawled on the heath. All I

could find now was a shattered ruin, a drab and desolate skeleton of a house. The bricks of the old chimney were crumbling onto rotten floorboards; the creepers of wild brambles made slow but steady incursions throughout the surrounding gardens; nettles grew in threatening clumps along the drive. In another five or six years it would almost seem as if the place had never been . . .
And it was there, standing in those ruins with my nostrils pricking in painful nostalgia, lost in memories of days spent with Crow in arcane study and esoteric discussion, it was there that I experienced for the first time during waking hours a dizzying assault on my senses which was to occur ever more frequently during the following weeks. As the world started to spin around me and the gray November sky turned black, I hastily sat down on the old, bare floorboards with my back to the base of the crumbling chimney. No sooner was I seated than I experienced a wild rushing sensation, a dizzy tumbling as if I had fallen from some primal cliff into the blackness of a pit that reached down to the Earth's very core. I seemed to fall for ages, until I began to think that the sickening descent would never end. It was altogether a nauseating, stomach-wrenching, mind-numbing experience; and yet, as I sensed the approaching end or climax of this nightmare fall, even as my senses began to right themselves, I knew that what was occurring was nothing new to me. I had known this before, but only in dreams.
Well, dream or developing psychosis or whatever it was, I finally recognized my surroundings. Whereas a moment before I had seemed to whirl and plummet in blackest depths, now in a mere instant my numbed senses had become super-sensitive. I smelled the strange winds that roar between the worlds, bearing the odors of darkling planets and the souls of sundered stars; I felt about me the emptiness of remote and infinite vacuums of space,

and their coldness; and I saw, blazing on a panoply of jet, unknown constellations and nameless nebulae stretching out and away through the light-years into unthinkable abysses of space. Finally, winging through the nearer voids, I spied that enigmatic coffin shape recognized of old, and again, as in delirious dreams, I heard my lost
friend's voice.
He made no new demands that I follow him, but as on a previous occasion simply called out to an empty void: 'Where are you, de Marigny? Where are you?'
'Here, Titus!' I yelled in spontaneous response, hearing nothing of my own voice above the roar of the wind blowing between the worlds. 'Here!' I screamed again, at which the great clock seemed to swing a little, hesitantly turning toward me in its hurtling flight across the heavens. And I heard Crow's answering cry ringing out in amazed exultation:
'De Marigny! Where? Where are you?'
I would have answered again at once; but then, swelling out of the blackness in the wake of Crow's weird craft -bloating up in a green and rotten glow of corruption, filling my entire view in an instant and reaching with slimy tentacles - there came a shape . . . the shape of utmost
lunacy!
Cthulhu! I knew him at once. Who could mistake him?
First the tentacles, seeming to reach back infinitely to the face from which they sprang; and that face itself, evil rampant, express and implied in a single glance; and to the rear, dwindling away in distant abysses of the void, the vast arched wings supporting an impossibly bloated body. Cthulhu, even now reaching to wrap fearsome face-tendrils about the toy coffin-ship!
'Look out!' I finally managed to scream, flinging my hands up before my eyes . . .
. . . And then I again felt the stomach-wrenching

sensation of falling as from a vast, immeasurable height, and all my senses fought for stability in the headlong rush of my psyche back to its home in material flesh.
Cold daylight rushed in upon my startled eyes. The dampness of rotting floorboards touched me through my clothes and my back felt the hard chimney bricks behind me.