"Brian Lumley - Born Of The Winds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

“As you are aware,” the judge began, “I was a friend of Sam Bridgeman’s in our younger days. How
this friendship came about is unimportant, but I also knew Lucille before they married, and that is why
she now approaches me for help after all these years. It is pure coincidence that I live now in Navissa, so
close to where Sam died.

“Even in those early days Sam was a bit of a rebel. Of the orthodox sciences, including anthropology
and ethnology, few interested Sam in their accepted forms. Dead and mythological cities, lands with
exotic names and strange gods were ever his passion. I remember how he would sit and dream – of
Atlantis and Mu, Ephiroth and Khurdisan, G’harne and lost Leng, R’lyeh and Theem’-hdra, forgotten
worlds of antique legend and myth – when by rights he should have been studying and working hard
towards his future. And yet … that future came to nothing in the end.

“Twenty-six years ago he married Lucille, and because he was fairly well-to-do by then, having inherited
a sizeable fortune, he was able to escape a working life as we know it to turn his full attention to those
ideas and ideals most dear to him. In writing his books, particularly his last book, he alienated himself
utterly from colleagues and acknowledged authorities alike in those specific sciences upon which he
lavished his ‘imagination’. That was how they saw his – fantasies? – as the product of a wild imagination
set free to wreak havoc among all established orders, scientific and theological included.

“Eventually he became looked upon as a fool, a naïve clown who based his crazed arguments on
Blavatsky, on the absurd theories of Scott-Elliot, on the insane epistles of Eibon and the warped
translations of Harold Hadley Copeland, rather than in prosaic but proven historians and scientists …

“When exactly, or why, Sam became interested in the theogony of these northern parts – particularly in
certain beliefs of the Indians and half-breeds, and in Eskimo legends of yet more northerly regions – I do
not know, but in the end he himself began tobelievethem. He was especially interested in the legend of
the snow- or wind-god, Ithaqua, variously called ‘Wind-Walker’, ‘Death-Walker’, ‘Strider in the
Star-Spaces’, and others, a Being who supposedly walks in the freezing boreal winds and in the turbulent
atmospheric currents of far northern lands and adjacent waters.

“As fortune – or misfortune – would have it, his decision to pay this region a visit coincided with
problems of an internal nature in some few of the villages round here. There were strange undercurrents
at work. Secret semi-religious groups had moved into the area, in many cases apparently vagrant, here to
witness and worship at a ‘Great Coming’! Strange, certainly, but can you show me any single region of
this earth of ours that does not have its crackpot organisations, religious or otherwise? Mind you, there
has always been a problem with that sort of thing here …

“Well, a number of the members of these so-called esoteric groups were generally somewhat more
intelligent than the average Indian, half-breed, or Eskimo; they were mostly New Englanders, from such
decadentMassachusettstowns as Arkham, Dunwich and Innsmouth.

“The Mounties at Nelson saw no threat, however, for this sort of thing was common here; one might
almost say that over the years there has been a surfeit of it! On this occasion it was believed that certain
occurrences in and about Stillwater and Navissa had drawn these rather polyglot visitors, for five years
earlier there had occurred a very large number of peculiar and still unsolved disappearances, to say
nothing of a handful of inexplicable deaths at the same time.

“I’ve done a little research myself into just what happened, though I’m still very uncertain. But conjecture
aside, hard figures and facts are – surprising? – no, they are downright disturbing!