"Brian Lumley - Psychomech 03 - Psychamok" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

There had been twenty years of a tranquillity beyond all of Man's former expectations, such as
never before existed in all his long and bloody history. Hot wars had simmered down into cold wars,
into uneasy, puzzled periods of dialogue and treaty, finally metamorphosing into blossoming
friendships. Border disputes and territorial arguments had fizzled out, been replacedfby mutual
trust, sharing and understanding. The Great Nations had made a prolonged, concerted effort to
help the Not So Great, with the result that they were finally seen to be great and were no longer
feared for their might; and the Lesser Lands in their turn had adopted those so long neglected or
ignored technologies by use and means of which they were at last able to help themselves.
Economic crises had receded; creeping ideological terri-torialism had crept to a halt; the population
explosion had not novaed but had in fact sputtered and gone out like a damp squib. The old
agricultural science of the land and the new science of sea-farming, together with an expanded and
sympathetic awareness of Nature beyond the wildest dreams of the early conservationists, had for
the first time provided food aplenty for the world's billions.
It was an age of peace and plenty.
Twenty years, and 1984 left in the wake of the world's well-being (and Big Brother nowhere in
sight), and the old arts and cultures revitalized and the new sciences surging ahead, reaching for a
fair tomorrow. The turn of the Century only four years past, and life never so good on the green
clean planet Earth . . .
And then the plague - or at least recognition that it had come amongst us. A plague not of vermin,
not born of the new sciences or the atom, not of radiation or of wild chemicals or poisons - not
physical in any way. A plague of madness!
The doctors had no explanation, no cure for it. To them and to those who suffered it, it was known
only as The Gibbering. . .

The hospital was set in fifteen acres of landscaped gardens, its three floors spaciously appointed, its
many-windowed, fresh-air appearance belying the conditions existing within. Not the physical conditions, for
they could not be better - not in the circumstances. But the twelve-foot tall tight-meshed wire security
fence surrounding the entire estate spoke all too ineloquently of its function. Tucked away in belts of
shrouding pines and oaks, still that fence could not be hidden completely - neither it nor the fact that it was
not there to keep people out.
Typical of dozens of similar retreates the hospital was new, had been standing for less than five years, was
wholly state supported - and was filled with inmates. With poor mad people who had heard and heeded The
Gibbering. The hospital had a name, Calm Lawns, but the lawns were the only calm things about it.
It was a sunny Saturday, early June of 2004 when the Stones made their eleventh monthly trip seventy
miles north from their Sussex home to Calm Lawns in Oxfordshire, for it was just a month short of a year
ago that their son, Richard Stone, had been committed. The thing had first come to him on a hot Friday night
last July.
A tall, well-built youth of previously sound physical and mental strength, he had suddenly got up from his
bed to prowl the house and complain of a sound in his ears: a faint mumur like the beating of waves heard
in a sounding shell. A susurration of whispers growing ever louder, a tumult of tiny voices in chaotic
conflict. In short, he heard The Gibbering.
The symptoms were unmistakable, their development inevitable. Before the eyes of his stricken parents
Richard Stone's deterioration had accelerated with demonaic speed. Friday night the first shaking of his
head, as if to dislodge some leech of the brain, to still the murmuring in his ears; Saturday his reeling and
rushing about, and the sickness, the bile, the maelstrom of mad winds or waters howling in his skull; and
Sunday . . . Sunday his imitation of those imagined sounds, the gabbled cries of souls in torment. The
Gibbering.
Snatched aloft by unseen harpies, by Monday Richard had been a candidate for the strait-jacket.
Heartbroken, they had visited him every third day through that first month; following which their visits had
been restricted. It was known that too much proximity tended to induce the symptoms in certain people, and