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

friend. It was Trask, the human lie detector, who saw the "truth" of Harry: that he would never
turn on his own kind,- but still, best to take no chances, and Trask had been tasked to hound him
from Earth.
Nevertheless, when at last the Necroscope returned to Sunside/Starside, to fight his last great
battle there, he went of his own accord and not because he was driven out.
And it was Ben Trask, too, along with many more members of E-Branch, who saw-who were given to see-
Harry's passing on the night he died.
It was a vision, a hologram, a real yet unreal thing. They saw The End of Harry as if it were here
and now when in fact it occurred in an alien world on the other side of space-time.
Thirteen witnesses in all, in the ops room at E-Branch HQ; they all saw the same thing: that
smoking, smouldering, hideous corpse, cruciform and crucified in midair, tumbling backwards, head
over heels, free of the floor as on an invisible spit. And despite the crisped and blackened face,
Ben Trask had known who it was, that this was Harry.
And for all that they encircled it, still the thing seemed to fall away from them, growing
smaller, receding toward a nebulous origin-or destiny?-out of which ribbons of neon light reached
like myriad writhing tentacles to welcome it.
The figure dwindled, shrank to a mote, and finally disappeared. But where it had been-
An explosion! A sunburst of golden fire, expanding hugely, silently, awe-

NECROSCOPE: DEFILERS 11
somely! So that the thirteen observers had gasped and ducked down,- and despite that this thing
was in their group mind, they instinctively turned away from the blinding intensity of its glare-
and of what flew out of it. All except Trask, who had shielded his eyes but continued to watch,
because that was his nature and he must know the truth.
And the truth of it had been fantastic.
Those myriad golden splinters speeding outwards from the sunburst, angling this way and that,
sentient, seeking, disappearing into as many unknown places. Those, what, pieces? Of the
Necroscope, Harry Keogh All that remained of him, of what he'd been and what he'd meant? And as
the last of them had zipped by Trask and vanished from view, so the writhing streamers of red,
blue, and green ghost-light had likewise blinked out of existence . . .


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. . . Returning the ops room's illumination to normal. Then everyone had known that Harry was no
more, that he had died in Starside in an alien vampire world. And only Ben Trask-Trask the human
lie detector-recognized the "truth" of what he had seen, and knew that death, especially in the
Necroscope's case, simply wasn't like that. . .
Time has passed, twenty-one years of time, during which a different Necroscope-but a true son of
his Earth father-has come to manhood in that same alien world that claimed Harry. And no less than
his father, Nathan Kiklu (called Keogh by his friends in our world) is a vampire hunter. But
Nathan has his own problems and hunts his enemies in Sunside/Starside.
Between the Earth and Nathan's parallel vampire world are two "Gates." One is natural, the other
came into being when an ill-conceived Soviet experiment backfired. The first Gate lies along the
route of a subterranean river flowing through a cavern system under the foothills of the frowning
Carpatii Meridionals, the Transylvanian Alps.
The second Gate lies in an artificial complex built in the late '70s and early '80s by the Soviets
in the base of the Perchorsk ravine in the northern reaches of the Uralski Khrebet-Russia's Ural
Mountains. While E-Branch has access to and control of the natural Gate, the Perchorsk Complex