"Charles Stross - A Boy And His God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

was occupied by a circular black pool. Dark tunnel-mouths led off in all directions. The halogen glare of
the headlights cast great shadows which imparted an air of instant, brooding menace to the turbid waters
that lapped at the nearside tyres. Something about the pool spoke of ancient evil, of things left
undisturbed since before the dawn of time, of an aura of necrotic decay that accounted for the stillness of
the air in some bizarre, twisted manner.

"Kill the lights", said Moon. Sophie complied. The darkness was not complete; overhead a myriad of
toadstools cast their ghastly luminescence across the surface of the pond, reflecting like distant,
unnameably ancient stars in a cosmos no human eye was meant to see. Moon wound down the window.
"Cthulhu!" he roared. "Here Boy! Fish!"

Reaching into a pocket he pulled out something that glistened faintly in the ghost-light. He cast it far out
into the pool, where it sank with a sickly plop that spread no ripples on the surface. "Squid", he
whispered by way of explanation; "always brings him."

Fred clutched at Sophie's arm. "Is this wise?" he ventured. "I mean, if anything happened ..."

"No problem!" she answered determinedly. "They're chicken, are gods. Can't stand up to a determined
atheist, not a-one of them. You'll see!" Howie sat up attentively and looked out the window. A smile
began to tug at his lips; a smile of anticipation.

A ripple appeared on the surface of the lake, a ripple which rapidly grew wider and higher as if some
unspeakable bulk was rising up from a slumber of aeons, deep on the floor of some miles-deep rift in the
continental bedrock. There was an ominous breeze blowing, as if the very air was being displaced from
the cavern; then something, shapeless and huge, monstrous beyond belief and twice as ugly, began to
rear itself from the centre of the lake. Howie gaped at it in frank adoration.

Sophie took one look in her mirror and changed her mind. "Big sucker, isn't he?" she said; "bet there
isn't room for him in our fishpond!" She slipped the Buick into gear with a jolt, and they disappeared off
up the next side tunnel with Howie still struggling to control his disappointment.

Behind them, Cthulhu continued his monumental rise from his far-drowned bed. His spine was so tall
that it took whole minutes for a command to travel the length of all those synapses; he often took so long
to stop sitting up that he bumped his head on the ceiling. He saw twin red lights vanishing up a tunnel

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 A Boy and his God

that his memory said led to the abode of his cousin Shub-Niggurath. Ponderously he swung his
oversized, misshapen abomination of a head to look after them; tentacles drooped and squirmed from his
pulp y lower lip as he examined Moon's squid, clutched in one unspeakable appendage. He shook his
head. So long, he rumbled; cheapskates!

Eventually Sophie and Fred bargained their prodigal down to one -- just one -- child of the unspeakable
Shub-Niggurath, father of the woods and eternal spawner of obscene life forms in his root-roofed cavern
beneath the rolling green hillsides around Arkham City. It took dire threats and the promise of fish for
supper every night for a week to forestall the promised tantrum and flood of tears that greeted Sophie's
outright refusal to countenance a Cthulhu. Fred even threatened to buy Howie a beaming fat Buddha if
he didn't behave himself; this latter threat seemed to do the trick. "That's cute," he spat as if the very
suggestion brought images of saintly abstinence to mind.