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

Instead Jake had "fallen" into the Mobius Continuum-and instantaneously more than five hundred
miles through the Continuum-to Harry's Room at E-Branch HQ in London! Harry's Room, which decades
earlier had provided accommodation for the original Necroscope during his brief tenure as
prospective Head of Branch, and which Branch espers had since maintained in pristine condition.

NECROSCOPE. DEFILERS
Simultaneous with Jake's appearance at E-Branch HQ, so the same espers- especially the locator
David Chung-sensed that something of the Necroscope had returned. Trask, however, remembering what
Harry had become before he quit Earth for Starside, could scarcely help but wonder what facet of
him had come home. And Trask was also given to wonder: when Harry Keogh died, had his vampire been
purged, or had it purged him . . . ?
The three invaders from Starside are Lords Malinari and Szwart, and the female Vavara. Malinari
'The Mind," a mentalist of phenomenal power,- Lord Szwart, who is the very essence of darkness, a
constantly mutating victim (and survivor) of his own metamorphic nature,- and Vavara, whose
hypnotic disguise is that of a beautiful woman when in fact she is a hag.
When these Great Vampires came into our world they brought four lieutenant servitors with them,
one of whom, Korath Mindsthrall (whose name identified him as being "in thrall" to Malinari the
Mind), was sacrificed as a means of gaining entry to the Romanian Refuge.
Thus when the vampire trio destroyed the Refuge, butchered its staff and inmates, and took new
thralls before splitting up and venturing out into our world, Korath Mindsthrall's dead and broken
body was left behind, pulped and drowned in a metal pipe in the shattered sump of the gutted
Refuge. The true death for a vampire thrall whose ambitions were always above his station, or so
Malinari had suspected.
For Korath had been his man for long and long, and a great deal of Malinari had rubbed off on his
lieutenant. Too much for his own good . . .
Meanwhile in the Mobius Continuum, some faint echo-some fragment, residual memory, ghost, or
intelligence-of the Necroscope Harry Keogh had become aware of scarlet life-threads where they
crossed the blue threads of men. One such blue life-thread was Jake Cutter's, and because of its
prevalence in some future conflict, the Harry revenant traced it back to its source ... to Jake in
the Turin prison, and indeed to the rigged jailbreak.
But the revenant had its limitations,- spread throughout all the Universes of Light, Harry's
presence-his ability to effect changes in the mundane world of men-was at best tenuous. Also, his
nature and Jake's were opposites in so many ways, and yet very much of a kind in so many others.
And here he was, the very man, Jake Cutter himself-as unknown to the spirit of the ex-Necroscope
as Harry was to him-about to die under the hammer blows of brutal bullets. But down future-time
streams Harry had seen Jake's blue thread crossed by scarlet vampire threads, and the once-
Necroscope knew for a fact that, "what will be has been," or that it would be. Wherefore Jake's
life couldn't possibly end here. But how to save it?
The answer came in a moment, but without Harry's instigation! A golden dart, one of his myriad
familiars, striking home in Jake's head to enhance whatever there was of the metaphysical in a
currently mundane mind. A dart of knowledge, yes, and a set of scrolling numbers-like a computer
screen running

DKlAINLUMLtY
amok, conjuring the Mobius Continuum-which in its turn bore Jake to Harry's Room, at E-Branch HQ
in London . . .
Australia, and Trask took Jake along for the ride. For whatever Trask's misgivings-and he of all
men should know the truth of things-the rest of his espers saw Jake as a possible answer, and
perhaps the only answer, to their needs: a weapon as powerful as anything the Wamphyri could bring