"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 1 - Defilers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

metaphysical mind dispatched into the darker corners of the myriad Universes of Light. Thus, to
all intents and purposes, he is dead.
Death: the cessation of life. The absence of life, and the End of Being. Or at least, the living
have always deemed it so. But as the Necroscope above all others (except perhaps the dead
themselves) was aware, death isn't like that. Mind goes on.
For how may any great poet, scientist, artist, or architect simply dissolve to nothing? His body
may quit, but his spirit-his mind-will go on, and what he pursued in life he will continue to
pursue in death.
Great paintings are planned, and landscapes scanned in the dead mind's eye, and never a brush
applied to canvas. Magnificent cities rear, and ocean-spanning roadways circle the planet, but
they are only the dreams of their dead architects. Songs as sweet and sweeter than anything
devised by Solomon in his lifetime are known to the teeming dead, which can never be known to the
living; for he sang the ones we know more than two thousand years ago, and time has improved him.
But here a seeming contradiction: if death is such an empty, silent place, how then all the


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singing, painting, building? How do the dead go on?
To questions such as this there was no answer until there was the Necroscope: a man who could look
into the graves of men and into their dead minds. And through him-only through Harry Keogh-the
dead were enabled. He taught them deadspeak, how to converse with one another, and joined them up
across the world,- he brought sons and daughters to long-lost mothers and fathers, reunited old
friends, resolved old doubts and arguments and reinspired the brilliance of great minds guttering
low. And without ever intending it- scarcely realizing what was happening-he became a lone candle
flickering in the long night of the dead. And they basked in his warmth and loved him for it.
But as much as Harry Keogh gave the dead, just so much and more he received. From his mother, who
in life had been a psychic medium, the germ of that metaphysical skill from which his greater
abilities derived. From August Ferdinand Mobius, a long-dead mathematician and astronomer,
knowledge and

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mastery of the Mobius Continuum, an undimensioned place (for want of a better description)
parallel with all time and space. And from Faethor Ferenczy, the history of a vampire world and
its undead inhabitants, some of which-much like Faethor himself-had from time to time found their
way into our world. But it should be stated that this latter knowledge was obtained more out of
the extinct vampire's longing for life than his love of the Necroscope . . .
And from that time on-from Harry's discovery of vampires in our world, to the time of his "death"
in Starside-the Necroscope was dedicated to their destruction. For he knew that if the terrible
Lords and Ladies of the Wamphyri weren't put down, then that they must surely enslave mankind.
But in the end-himself a vampire and righting the Thing within him to his last breath-even Harry
gave in, "died," and was no more. Oh, really . . . ?
But for every rule there has to be an exception, and Harry Keogh, Necroscope, was-he is-the
exception to the rule of negative interaction between the Great Majority and the living. For in
life he was the master of the Mobius Continuum, and used it to pursue vampires. So that now, in
death . . . ?
Harry Keogh was not alone in his lifelong war against the Wamphyri. Recruited into E-Branch as a
youth, he had the backing of that most secret of secret organizations almost to the end. And even
when Harry was himself no longer entirely human, still Ben Trask, the Head of E-Branch, was his