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

stranger powers still. She knew E-Branch, and she knew-or she had known-other vampires before
Malinari. And I can't help but wonder: when he locked on to Zek, did he see Harry Keogh in her
mind? Did he perhaps glimpse the Necroscope in her memories? Ah, but just think how that would
have given him pause: to have fled from one such in Starside, only to discover that there were, or
had been, another or others of a like kind here! And so he must play this world with extreme
caution, in the knowledge that he might call down metaphysical powers at least as great and
possibly greater than his own . . .

"All of this is entirely conjectural, guesswork of course, but our experience of events-and
nonevents-has shown it to be near to the mark. Malinari and the others, they have kept low
profiles while they prepare to do ... whatever. And the extraps' eighteen months are past, and
likewise the maximum three years to Armageddon . . . yet until we got that whiff of mindsmog it
was as if nothing was happening. So what has been happening, and what have they been up to?
"Well, in Australia we found a number of clues. But first the clear evidence, which hit us right
between the eyes: Malinari, for one, hasn't been hiding himself away in a ruined castle in the
Carpathians! Indeed, he was where we might least expect to find him. Which begs the question, what
of the others, Vavara and Szwart? Are they, too, in residence in places where we wouldn't dream of
finding them?
"Okay, I see what you're thinking.- that this isn't so much what they are doing as where they are
doing it. But there might yet be answers to both questions in what we found under Xanadu. We-and


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by that I mean Liz and Jake Cutter-found a midnight garden, a mushroom farm of sorts, a breeding
place for vampires. And while the rest of us didn't see it, Jake formed the opinion that Malinari
had 'planted' his lieutenant out of Starside down there to fester in the earth. That's not such a
wild notion,- he would probably have been the only one of The Mind's retinue who was 'matured' or
rotten enough to produce spores. And again according to Jake and Liz, the cave where they found
this monstrosity was full of that filthy spawn.
"Worse, our Gibson Desert liaison person-someone called Peter Miller, who for his own crazy
reasons had run off on us-was also down there. He'd been vampirized and. . . and something had
been done to him. He had metamorphosed,- he'd been converted, reduced to a mass of nutrients for
black, spore-producing, vampiric fungi. And all of that loathsome corruption in the earth, it was
feeding off his juices, \lcj\a}" Trask's shudder was by no means faked. "Anyway, Jake torched the
place and everything in it... "But the point is, Xanadu was a spawning ground, literally. What if
Malinari had cropped all of those spores, released them into the casino's air-conditioning or
ventilation system? What? Legionnaires' disease wouldn't have a look-in! Forget it! But in fact we
can't forget it because I might just have it right. And Xanadu wasn't The Mind's only place in
Australia.
"Anyway, that's a job for the next Australian team, so maybe they're not the lucky ones after all.
Malinari's 'bolt-holes' may have been more than just places to escape to. We've really no notion
what may be hidden away, breeding and waiting out its time, down in that old mine in the Gibson
Desert. So we'll have to open it up again. As for Jethro Manchester's Capricorn Group island: we
burned what was on the surface, but who can say what may have been- and what might still be-
underneath?
"Let's for the moment just suppose that these three Great Vampires were preparing to seed the
world with spores. Okay, so we've delayed the scheme for one of them, but what of the other two?
That's why now, after three years of nothing, there's this sudden urgency. Or rather, that is why