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

a hospital, that's all."
The corpse was amazingly clean, Manolis thought. Eleni had done a very good job. Well, better she
than he! "Will you continue with the postmortem?" "I can see no point," she answered. "I shall
take a sample of the stomach contents, though of course they will have rotted down, degraded. But
don't concern yourself. There's no need for you to be present, really. In any case I won't be able
to complete an analysis until I'm on the mainland. So, if I may make a suggestion.- why don't you
go and have a drink?"
"No," said Manolis, "but I'll take you for one later. Meanwhile, what have you done with the . . .
that thing?" He couldn't help the shudder that had crept into his voice, but hoped she'd think it
was a late reaction to what had happened.
Manolis had caught only a glimpse of the thing in Eleni's hand before the interruption (or
eruption) of the dead woman's body, but there had been something about it. Something that reminded
him of a time more than twenty years ago when he'd been out in the islands-Rddhos, that time-on a
different case. Different entirely from any other he'd ever handled or been involved with. That
was when a group of men-and one very special man, who could not be denied-had told him about just
such organisms as he had seen dangling from the pathologist's hand. Or perhaps not, for he had
never seen one himself and couldn't be sure.
"The sea cucumber?" Eleni Barbouris was denying his morbid suspicions even now. "Well, that didn't
kill her, if that's what you're thinking. It's under the sheet there."
"Sea cucumber?" Manolis frowned, but at the same time felt a great wash of relief flooding over
him.
"A holothurian," she answered. "A cousin to the sea slugs. They normally live in holes in the
rocks. This one crawled into a different hole and died there. It might even have battened on her-I
don't know that much about them- but if it did, its own gluttony killed it. It got fat and stuck
in her gullet."
The sheet, defrosted now and limp, lay on a small occasional table in a corner of the room. Two
paces took Manolis to it, but he paused a moment before turning back the sheet. The thing lay
there, lifeless, some fourteen inches long, blunt and spatulate at one end, tapered at the other.
It was like a blind, cobra-headed leech, its body corrugated or segmented, with rows of erectile
hooks lying flat along its back and sides. Rooted in nodules at the base of the tapering neck, a
frill of sticky, dew-beaded strings like the byssus threads of mussels lay limply on the glass top
of the table.
Manolis took a ballpoint out of his pocket and lifted the tail. Protruding from a short tubular
organ-an anus, or perhaps an ovipositor-a greyish, flaccid spheroid the size of a marble was half
visible. It oozed a few droplets of a silvery, glistening liquid that slimed the glass.
"And that?" Manolis looked at Eleni where she had followed him to the small table.


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NECROSCOPE: DEFILERS
She answered him with a shrug. "Some kind of sea mouse? I really can't say. Something the
holothurian ate but didn't have time to digest?"
"A sea mouse?" Manolis said. "First sea cucumbers, now sea mice?"
And again her shrug, but a trifle impatient now. "An annelid, Aphroditidae, iridescent and quite
pretty when alive. When I was a child, I was interested in every aspect of biology. But now I've
put aside my childish interests and I'm a pathologist, not a marine biologist! What is it with
you, Manolis-and why are you sweating?"
"I ... still don't feel too good," he told her, which was true enough.
She'd taken off her elastic surgical gloves and now began to reach out her naked hand towards the