"Brian Lumley - The Pit-Yakker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

The Pit-Yakker
by Brian Lumley


Born in Harden, Durham on December 2, 1937, Brian Lumley began selling
short fiction in the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s he was chiefly known for
a series of books based on the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft: The Caller of the
Black, The Burrowers Beneath, Beneath the Moors, The Transition of Titus Crow,
and others. While Lumley still likes to muck about with the Cthulhu Mythos, during
the 1980s he concentrated on massive novels of contemporary horror, most
notably his Psychomech and Necroscope sagas. Lumley's latest novels include The
House of Doors and Necroscope IV: Deadspeak. He has just completed the fifth
and final Necroscope novel, Deadspawn, and is now putting together two
collections of his short stories, "to be titled Fruiting Bodies & Other Fungi, and
(some other silly title)." Tor Books will be bringing out Psychomech I and II as a
single volume, to be followed by Psychamok.

Retired from the army after twenty-two years, Brian Lumley now lives with
his wife, Dorothy, in Devon. Like "Fruiting Bodies" in last year's Year's Best
Horror, "The Pit-Yakker" makes strong and effective use of the sort of English
locales that won't be included in your tour package.



When I was sixteen, my father used to say to me: "Watch what you're doing
with the girls; you're an idiot to smoke, for it's expensive and unhealthy; stay away
from Raymond Maddison!" My mother had died two years earlier, so he'd taken
over her share of the nagging, too.
The girls? Watch what I was doing? At sixteen I barely knew what I was
doing! I knew what I wanted to do, but the how of it was a different matter entirely.
Cigarettes? I enjoyed them; at the five-a-day stage, they still gave me that
occasionally sweet taste and made my head spin. Raymond Maddison? I had gone
to school with him, and because he lived so close to us we'd used to walk home
together. But his mother was a little weak-minded, his older brother had been put
away for molesting or something, and Raymond himself was thick as two short
planks, hulking and unlovely, and a very shadowy character in general. Or at least he
gave that impression.
Girls didn't like him: he smelled of bread and dripping and didn't clean his
teeth too well, and for two years now he'd been wearing the same jacket and
trousers, which had grown pretty tight on him. His short hair and little piggy eyes
made him look bristly, and there was that looseness about his lips, which you find in
certain idiots. If you were told that ladies' underwear was disappearing from the
washing-lines, you'd perhaps think of Raymond. If someone was jumping out on
small girls at dusk and shouting boo!, he was the one who'd spring to mind. If the
little-boy-up-the-road's kitten got strangled...
 Not that that sort of thing happened a lot in Harden, for it didn't. Up there on
the northeast coast in those days, the Bobbies on the beat were still Bobbies,
unhampered by modern "ethics" and other humane restrictions. Catch a kid drawing
red, hairy, diamond-shaped designs on the school wall, and wallop!, he'd get a clout
round the earhole, dragged off home to his parents, and doubtless another wallop.