"Дуглас Адамс. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" - читать интересную книгу автора

This time there would be no witnesses.
This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and the
onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by which so
many of the world's most momentous events seem to be accompanied.
The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the
floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged with
rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom was a
dreary kind of prickle.
Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the low
hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a kind
of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.
It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of
magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at a
peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible than
its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages dead.
The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly
along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,
the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.
But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was not
entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering deep
within it.
The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no
one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.
Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little brighter and then
faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same time a low keening noise
drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind of wailing climax, and then it
too faded, abjectly, away.
Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile light.
It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit of the
tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the shadowy
figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared inside once
more.

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total.
The world seemed dead, the night a blankness.
And then the glow appeared again near the tower's peak, this time
growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of
brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,
increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and
stridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on and on
till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness.
And then, abruptly, both ceased.
There was a millisecond of silent darkness.
An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within the
mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud convulsed,
earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible pinkness, a
sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the clouds, and then
the light sank and the night at last was deeply, hideously dark. There was