Shadows Bend: A Novel of the Fantastic and Unspeakable

Начало книги

IN THE STIFLING CONFINES of the earthbound bus, Lovecraft was dreaming of the stars. Constellations beaming their lucid light through the cavernous blackness of space, and touching, ever so briefly, the eye and the soul of some hapless traveler in the night their light was ancient, millions and billions of years old. Even in his dream, Lovecraft had the lingering presence of rationality to know that the bright birth of a nova might come from the demise of an ancient star as old as time itself. The old and the new, beaming their brilliant lumens through the absolute cold of space, their rays piercing the dark silence like the birthing cries of an infant.

The baby four rows ahead was crying again, its high-pitched wail cutting through the rumble of the engine. The rattles and squeaks that had become a sort of steady, soothing background drone marking the bus’s progress through the desert suddenly seemed to drop away, and the wailing played rhythmically up and down the register; it became an oddly wet sound, with a guttural, almost gurgling quality behind it, as if the infant were slowly drowning in its own fluids, and it was the humanness of this noise-no, not the humanness, but the fleshy, animal quality-that was so disconcerting to Lovecraft. Disconcerting enough to puncture his sleep and wake him into a restless alertness.

Читать дальше →