The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху

Оглавление

Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт. The Call of Cthulhu / Зов Ктулху

The Call of Cthulhu

I. The Horror in Clay

II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

III. The Madness from the Sea

At The Mountains of Madness

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

The Dunwich Horror

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Cool Air

The Festival

Dagon

The Other Gods

The Picture in the House

The Nameless City

The Outsider

The Rats in the Walls

From Beyond

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Shadow out of Time

I

II

III

Отрывок из книги

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

.....

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

.....