"Smith, Clark Ashton - Tales of Averoigne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

chill, unchanging light was without source or destination, without
beams or shadows.
Gerard surveyed his environment with a cautious eye; and the more
he looked the less he liked it: for some new and disagreeable detail was
manifest at every glance. There were moving lights in the wood that
vanished if he eyed them intently; there were drowned faces in the tarn
that came and went like livid bubbles before he could discern their
features. And, peering across the lake, he wondered why he had not
seen the many-turreted castle of hoary stone whose nearer walls were
based in the dead waters. It was so grey and still and vasty, that it
seemed to have stood for incomputable ages between the stagnant tarn
and the equally stagnant heavens. It was ancienter than the world, it
was older than the light: it was coeval with fear and darkness; and a
horror dwelt upon it and crept unseen but palpable along its bastions.
There was no sign of life about the castle; and no banners flew
above its turrets or its donjon. But Gerard knew, as surely as if a voice
had spoken aloud to warn him, that here was the fountainhead of the
sorcery by which he had been beguiled. A growing panic whispered in
his brain, he seemed to hear the rustle of malignant plumes, the mutter
of demonian threats and plottings. He turned, and fled among the
funereal trees.
Amid his dismay and wilderment, even as he fled, he thought of
Fleurette and wondered if she were awaiting him at their place of
rendezvous, or if she and her companions had also been enticed and
led astray in a realm of damnable unrealities. He renewed his prayers,
and implored the saints for her safety as well as his own.
The forest through which he ran was a maze of bafflement and
eeriness. There were no landmarks, there were no tracks of animals or
men; and the swart cypresses and sere autumnal trees grew thicker and
thicker as if some malevolent will were marshalling them against his
progress. The boughs were like implacable arms that strove to retard
him; he could have sworn that he felt them twine about him with the
strength and suppleness of living things. He fought them, insanely,.я
desperately, and seemed to hear a crackling of infernal laughter in their
twigs as he fought. At last, with a sob of relief, he broke through into a
sort of trail. Along this trail, in the mad hope of eventual escape, he ran
like one whom a fiend pursues; and after a short interval he came again
to the shores of the tarn, above whose motionless waters the high and
hoary turrets of that time-forgotten castle were still dominant. Again he
turned and fled; and once more, after similar wanderings and like
struggles, he came back to the inevitable tarn.
With a leaden sinking of his heart, as into some ultimate slough of
despair and terror, he resigned himself and made no further effort to
escape. His very will was benumbed, was crushed down as by the
incumbence of a superior volition that would no longer permit his puny
recalcitrance. He was unable to resist when a strong and hateful
compulsion drew his footsteps along the margent of the tarn toward the
looming castle.
When he came nearer, he saw that the edifice was surrounded by a
moat whose waters were stagnant as those of the lake, and were