"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.3.-.Clock.Of.Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

I never once pondered my ability to chatter in their many tongues, for often things are far simpler in dream, nor did I wonder at the ease with which I fitted myself into the alien yet surprisingly friendly scene; once attired in robes of dream's styling, my looks were not unlike those of many of her peoples. I was a little taller than average, true, but in the main Dylath-Leen's diverse folk might well have passed for those of any town of the waking world, and vice versa.
Yet there were in the city others, strange traders from across the Southern Sea, whose appearance and odor

filled me with a dread loathing so that I could not abide to stay near where they were for long. Of these traders and their origin I questioned the tavern-keepers, to be told that I was not the first from the waking world whose instinct found in those traders traces of hinted evil and deeds not to be mentioned. Randolph Carter himself had once warned Dylath-Leen's peoples that the traders were fiends not to be trusted, whose only desire was to spread horror and evil throughout all the lands of
dream.
But when I heard Carter's name mentioned I was hushed, for an amateur at dreaming such as I was at that time could not dare aspire to walk even in the shadow of one such as he. Why, Carter was rumored to have been even to Kadath in the Cold Waste, to have confronted Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, and to have returned unscathed from that place! How many could boast of that?
Yet loath though I was to have anything to do with those
traders, I found myself one morning in the towering tavern
of Potan-Lith, in a high barroom the windows of which
looked out over the Bay of Wharves, waiting for the galley
I had heard was coming to the city with a cargo of rubies
from an unknown shore. I wanted to discover just what
it was of them that so repelled me, and the best way to
decide this, I thought, would be to observe them from
a safe distant and location at which I, myself, might go
unobserved. I did not wish to bring myself to the notice
of those queerly frightening people of unguessed origin.
Potan-Lith's tavern, with its ninety-nine steps, served my
purpose admirably.
I could see the whole of the wharfside spread beneath me in the morning light; the nets of the fishermen drying, with smells of rope and deep ocean floating up to my window; the smaller craft of private tradesmen rolling gently at anchor, sails lowered and hatches laid back to

let the sun dry out their musty holds; the thag-weed merchants unloading their strongly-scented, dream-within-dream-engendering opiates garnered in exotic Eastern parts; and, eventually appearing on the horizon, the sails of the black galley for which I so vigilantly waited. There were other traders of the same race already in the city, to be sure, but how could one get close to them without attracting unwanted attention? My plan of observation was best, I was certain, but I did not know just what it was I wished to observe - or why.
It was not long before the black galley loomed against the entrance of the bay. It slipped into the harbor past the great basalt lighthouse, and a strange stench driven by the South Wind came with it. As with the coming of all such craft and their weird masters, uneasiness rippled all along the waterfront as the silent ship closed with its chosen wharf, and its three banks of briskly moving oars stilled and slipped in through their oarlocks to the unseen and equally silent rowers within. I watched eagerly then, waiting for the galley's master and crew to come ashore, but only five persons - if persons they truly were - chose to leave that enigmatic craft. This was the best look at such traders I had so far managed, and what I saw did not please me at all.
I have intimated my doubts with regard to the humanity of those - men? Let me explain why.
Firstly, their mouths were far too wide. Indeed, I thought that one of them glanced up at my window as he left the ship, smiling a smile which only just fell within the boundaries of that word's limitations, and it was horrible to see just how wide his evil mouth was. Now what would any eater of normal foods want with a mouth of such abnormal proportions? And for that matter, why did the owners of such mouths wear such queerly moulded turbans? Or was it simply the way in which the turbans were worn? For they were humped up

in two points over the foreheads of the wearers in what seemed especially bad taste. And as for their shoes: well, they were certainly the most peculiar footwear I had ever seen, in or out of dreams. They were short, blunt-toed, and flat, as though the feet within were not feet at all! I thoughtfully finished off my mug of muth-dew and wedge of bread and cheese, turning from the window to leave the tavern of Potan-Lith.
My heart seemed to leap into my mouth. There in the low entrance stood that same merchant who had so evilly smiled up at my window! His turbaned head turned to follow my every move as I sidled out past him and flew down the ninety-nine steps to the wharf below. An awful fear pursued me as I ran through the alleys and streets, making my feet fly faster on the basalt flags of the wider pavements, until I reached the well known, green-cobbled courtyard wherein I had my room. But even there I could not get the face of that strangely turbaned, wide-mouthed trader from beyond the Southern Sea out of my mind, nor his smell from my nostrils. So I paid my landlord his due, moving out there and then to head for that side of Dylath-Leen which faces away from the sea and which is clean with the scents of window-box flowers and baking bread, where the men of the taverns rarely venture.
There, in the district called S'eemla, I found myself lodging with a family of basalt quarriers who were such good, cheerful, charming folk that later, when I became an inhabitant of dream proper, I too chose quarrying for my trade. The head of the house was named Bo-Kareth, and he provided me with my own wide-windowed garret room, with a bed and a mattress of fegg-down; so that soon it was as though I had been born into the family, or might have seemed had I been able to imagine myself a brother to comely Litha.
Within the month I was firmly settled in, and from then on I made it my business to carry on Randolph Carter's

work of warning, putting in my word against the turbaned traders at every opportunity. My task was made no easier by the fact that I had nothing concrete to hold against them. There was only the feeling, already shared by many of the folk of Dylath-Leen, that trade between the city and the black galleys could bring to fruition nothing of any good.
Eventually my knowledge of the traders grew to include such evidences as to make me more certain than ever of their evil nature. Why should those black galleys come into harbor, discharge their four or five traders, and then simply lie there at anchor, emitting their foul odor, showing never a sign of their silent crews? That there were crews seems needless to state; with three great banks of oars to each ship there must have been many rowers. But what man could say just who or what such rowers were?
Too, the grocers and butchers of the city grumbled over the apparent frugality of those singularly shy crews, for the only things the traders bought with their great and small rubies were gold and stout Pargian slaves. This traffic had gone on for years, I was told, and in that time many a fat black man had vanished, never to be seen again, up the gangplanks into those mysterious galleys to be transported to lands across uncharted seas - if, indeed, such lands were their destination!
And where did the queer traders get their rubies, the like of which were to be found in no known mines in all Earth's dreamland? Yet those rubies came cheaply enough, too cheaply in fact, so that every home in Dylath-Leen contained them, some large enough to be used as paperweights in the homes of the richer merchants. Myself, I found those gems strangely loathsome, seeing in them only the reflections of the traders who brought them from across nameless oceans.
So it was that in the district called S'eemla my interest in the ruby traders waxed to its full, paled, waned,

and finally withered - but never died completely. My new interest, however, in dark-eyed Litha, Bo-Kareth's daughter, grew with each passing day, and my nights were filled with dreams within dreams of Litha and her ways, so that only occasionally were my slumbers invaded by the unpleasantly-turbaned, wide-mouthed traders from unknown parts.
One evening, after a trip out to Ti-Penth, a village not far from Dylath-Leen where we enjoyed the annual Festival of Plenty, as Litha and I walked back hand in hand through the irrigated green valley called Tanta toward our black-towered city, she told me of her love and we sank together to the darkling sward. That night, when the city's myriad twinkling lights had all blinked out and the bats cluttered thick without my window, Litha crept into my garret room and only the narg-oil lamp on the wall could tell of the wonders we knew with each other.
In the morning, rising rapidly in joy from my dreams within dreams, I broke through too many layers of that flimsy stuff which constitutes the world of the subconscious, to waken with a cry of agony in the house of my parents at Norden on the northeast coast. Thereafter I cried myself to sleep for a year before finally I managed to convince myself that my dark-eyed Litha existed only in dreams.
Grant Enderby's Story, II: The Ruby Horror
I was thirty years old before I saw Dylath-Leen again. I arrived in the evening, when the city was all but in

darkness, but I recognized immediately the feel of those basalt flagstones beneath my feet, and, while the last of the myriad lights flickered out in the towers and the last tavern closed, my heart leaped as I turned my suddenly light feet toward the house of Bo-Kareth. But something did not seem right, and a horror grew rapidly upon me as I saw in the streets thickening groups of carousing, nastily chattering, strangely turbaned people not quite so much men as monsters. And many of them had had their turbans disarrayed in their sporting so that protuberances glimpsed previously only in books of witchcraft and the like and in certain biblical paintings showed clearly through! Once I was stopped and pawed vilely by a half-dozen of them. As they conferred over me in low, menacing tones, I tore myself free and fled. For they were indeed those same evil traders of yore, and I was horrified that they should be there in my City of Black Towers in such great numbers.
I must have seen hundreds of those vile creatures as I hurried through the city's thoroughfares; yet somehow I contrived to arrive at the house of Bo-Kareth without further pause or hindrance, and I hammered at his oaken door until a light flickered behind the round panes of blue glass in the upper sections of that entrance. It was Bo-Kareth himself who came to answer my banging, and he came wide-eyed with a fear I could well understand. Relief showed visibly in his whole aspect when he saw that only a man stood upon his step. Although he seemed amazingly aged - so aged, in fact, that I was taken aback (for I did not then know of the variations experienced by different dreamers, variations in the passage of time between the waking world and dreamland) - he recognized me at once, whispering my name:
'Grant! Grant Enderby! My friend - my old friend . . .! Come in, come in . . .'
'Bo-Kareth,' I burst out, 'Bo, I -'

'Shhh!' He pressed a finger to his lips, eyes widening even further than before, leaning out to glance up and down the street before pulling me in and quickly closing and bolting the door behind me. 'Quietly, Grant, quietly. This is a city of silence now, where they alone carouse and make their own hellish brand of merry - and they may soon be abroad and about their business.'
'They?' I questioned, instinctively knowing the answer.