"Brian Lumley - E-Branch 2 - Invaders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Those were his thoughts as he stepped silently behind the bar, and passed through a second bead
curtain hanging from the timbered ceiling to the floor. And as easily and as quickly as that he
was into a horizontal mineshaft, and almost as quickly into something far less mundane ...
Liz had followed the old man (Bruce? Hell of a lot of Australians called Bruce, she thought. There
had to \>e at least as many as there were Johns in London) along the foot of the knoll to the
lesser shack that leaned into an almost sheer cliff face.
It was quite dark now, and the torch he'd given her wasn't nearly working on full charge. The
batteries must be just about dead. Of course, knowing the place as he did, that wouldn't much
concern the old boy, but it concerned Liz. And despite that she followed slowly and carefully in
old Bruce's footsteps - mainly to give Jake the time he needed to look the place over - still she
stumbled once or twice over large rocks or into this, that, or the other pothole. But, in truth,
much of her stumbling was a ploy, too, so that it was perhaps a good thing after all that the
torch was almost spent. She thought so at the outset, anyway.
Until eventually: 'Here we are,' the old man said, turning a key in a squealing lock and opening
an exterior screen door. Beyond that a second door stood ajar; and as old Bruce, if that really
was his name, reached out an incredibly long arm to one side of Liz

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to push it fully open - at the same time managing to bundle her inside - so she recognized the
smell of a lair.
It was a primal thing, something that lies deep in the ancestral memories of every human being: to
be able to recognize the habitat of a dangerous animal or animals. The musty, feral smell of a
cavern where something dwells - or perhaps an attic where bats have hibernated for untold years -
or maybe the reptile house in a zoo.
But there are smells and smells, and this wasn't like anything Liz had ever come across before; or
perhaps it was simply the tainted, composite smell of all of them. Until suddenly she realized
that it wasn't just a smell - wasn't simply a smell - but her talent coming into play, and that
the stench wasn't in her nostrils alone but also in her mind.'
And then she had to wonder about its origin, the focus or point of emanation of this alien taint.
Was it the shack - or the steel-barred, wall-to-wall cell it contained - or perhaps the night-
black tunnel beyond the bars, with its as yet unseen, unknown 'creechur' ... or could it possibly
be old 'Brace' himself?
There came a sound from the darker depths of the horizontal mine shaft. And just as there are
smells and smells, so are there sounds and sounds. Liz gasped, aimed her torch-beam into the
darkness back there, and saw movement. A flowing, gathering, approaching darkness in the lesser
dark around; an inkblot of a figure, taking on shape as it came, bobbing, wafting on a draft of
poisonous air from wherever and whatever lay beyond. And it had luminous yellow eyes - slanted as
a beast's, and yet intelligent, not-quite-feral - that held her fixed like a rabbit in a
headlight's beam!
But only for a moment. Then-
'You.'' Liz transferred the torch to her left hand, dipped her right hand into a pocket and came
out with a modified Baby Browning, used her thumb to release the safety and aimed it at the old
man ... or at the empty space where he had been. While from outside in the night, she heard the



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