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

as devious as the future. Even in a mind freed of bodily restraints there are bound to be blank
spots, times and places that remain forever unremembered. And in the Necroscope's life entire
years were lost like pages torn from a book.
Perhaps the answer lies there . . .

PHUT one
IMAGES

1
IMAGES OF THE PAST
Ben Trask and his people were home again, but there was little enough time for rest and
recuperation. The world might well be described as a small planet, but it was still a big place,-
its evils were many, and England had always had its fair share.
Compared with what Trask and his principal espers-David Chung the locator, and lan Goodly the
precog-had encountered in Australia, the routine of E-Branch HQ seemed drab and almost boring.
Almost. But here in the heart of London, in Trask's own even smaller world of gadgets and ghosts,
he knew that he could never really get bored. For even when the ghosts were quiet, the gadgets
would keep right on going, and vice versa, though often as not they were active at the same time.
Right now the gadgets-in the shape of the HQ's telephones, its ground-based and satellite
communication systems, its computers, TVs, and video screens-were in ascendance, catching up on
time lost when Trask, a handful of his espers and technicians, plus a couple of new people, had
been out of touch by virtue of their work on the other side of the world. But the Head of E-Branch
knew that the ghosts would come into their own soon enough. He knew it because he commanded them.
Ghosts of a sort, anyway.
And for eight days now he had been steadily working his way through all the paperwork, sorting the
priority jobs, detailing his workforce to whichever tasks best suited their various talents, and
generally breaking up the logjam. It had to be done, because Trask knew that sooner or later he'd
be on his way once again-that he, personally, would be on his way, for this was a personal thing


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now-out into a world threatened by the greatest of all possible evils.
An evil born in another world, with a name that was similarly alien and undisguisably evil . . .
Wamphyri!
Despite that there was other work to be done, this was the name, and the

21
thought, that was uppermost in Trask's mind where he sat at his desk, in his office at the end of
the main corridor in E-Branch HQ, pen in hand but stilled for the moment, not scratching away at
one or another of a hundred different documents and forms. Stilled, brought to an abrupt halt by
this sudden thought-or perhaps not so sudden, because for some three years now it had never been
far from his mind-that in a world where Zek was no more, in this monstrously, unbelievably
depleted world, the Wamphyri were. They were here, and because of them, she was not.
And he was surprised to hear the rumble in his throat that was a growl trying to escape, surprised
to see his hand turning white where it now gripped the pen like a dagger. The Wamphyri: Malinari,
and Szwart, and Vavara, alive or undead in his world, the world where they had murdered Zek! And
still her last words-her last thoughts, which she had sent winging to him-sighing in his memory,
from which he could never hope to erase them and would never want to, but guessed he'd be the