"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

terrible moment which follows midnight."

VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables

He had never feared tight places, closed-in confinement. There were other
terrors, small ones, left over from childhood -- cinders in the eye, certain
soft insects with too many legs -- but not the dark clothes closet, not the
chilly dark basement, not the cobwebby shadowland under the back porch. But this
was the weight of the entire ocean. This was the dungeon at the bottom of the
world. Everything was up there above him, as he was borne below in the gentle,
unremitting arms of a shipper of mythology.

For the first time in his life, Dennis Lanfear felt the paralyzing fear of
claustrophobia; no rapture, in this deep.

The sound of wind rushing down through a great tunnel, the faint background
memory sound of a great assembly line, the clank of metal on metal, the
heartbeat regularity of machinery impacting on bendable steel. Dark and cold,
like eternal midnight.

The sweet and gentle mermaid's face that had appeared for an instant in the
Perspex, the fogging viewplate of his highly planished tinned copper diving
helmet . . . and then was gone . . . as unlikely crimson water and sucking
thunder took him through to the other side of unconsciousness.

A place that was always midnight.

Where the altar was closed for repairs, and the place of worship was boarded up.
Watery, deep, high-ceilinged with misty vastness stretching up, up beyond sight.
But always out of reach, and always at that terrible moment which follows
midnight.

Dennis Lanfear was dissolving in a world of red thunder.

He was out, gone, blanked and insensible; but his flesh continued to listen in
on the secret messages of the deep.

Instinctively, as his air-hose had been severed when she had wrenched him off
the ledge of the Wall of Andros, he had knocked his head against the spindle of
the regulating air outlet valve. The valve was usually made to be adjusted by
hand but -- like the Perspex faceplate that had replaced the original
plate-glass built into the gun-metal frames when the "hardhat" diving suit was
new in 1922 -- someone had re-rigged the valve so the spindle was extended
through to the inside of the helmet, fitted at its inner extremity with a small
disc. Instinctively, he had knocked the disc with his head, trapping what air
remained in the deep-sea dress. He could breathe. Oblivious, descending, bright
with delirium, his listening molecules followed the passage of the story of his
deep fall.

In this aspect of the Bermuda Triangle the water was always Nassau warm. But as