The Innswich Horror

Начало книги

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Foremost, the author must thank the late, great H. P. Lovecraft for providing thirty years of horrific wonder and demented influence. I must also thank the late Brian McNaughton for early influences. Also Tim McGinnis, Bob Strauss, Richard Chizmar, and Ian Levy. I am further in debt to authors S. T. Joshi, Darrell Schweitzer, and Anthony Pearsall for their various preeminent books on the life and works of HPL. Please forgive any misrepresentations and/or errors.

— | — | —

For Wendy Brewer. Be my Cthulheena.

— | — | —

1.

The motor-coach noise provided an aural mental backdrop: I imagined myself as the Master, and fancied I could see what he would see beyond the drab window. Not common fields, unremarkable treelines, and a typical New England summer sky but scenes much more sinister. Blasted heaths pocking malnourished meadows and dying scrubland, trees twisted and lightning-scarred, and a sky onerous and swollen with menace. And there—yes!—over the rusted iron railing-work of a decades-old bridge, my gaze was commandeered by the sluggish Miskatonic, in whose depths God knew what lurked or lay bloated in death or states worse than death. The prosaic bus window was no longer a simple transparent pane but a prism-obscura, a looking-glass to eldritch sights, nether-chasms, and leaky rives betwixt dimensions and inconteplatable horrors. Then I blinked—

Читать дальше →