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

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grating of his booted feet,

his now obscene chuckle, and the squeal of a key turning in the exterior screen door's lock as he
shut her in.
Hell! But this could quite literally be hell! Along with her talent - held back far too long by
her desire not to alert anyone or anything to her real purpose here - Liz's worst fears were now
fully mobilized, realized. She knew what the creechur in the mineshaft was, knew what it could do.
But even now she wasn't entirely helpless.
Tucking the torch under her arm, she found her beeper and pressed its alarm button ... at the
precise moment that it commenced transmitting Jake's own cry for help!
The shock of hearing that rapid beep! beep! beeping from her pocket almost made Liz drop the
torch; she somehow managed to hold on to it, held her hands together, pointed the gun and the
torch both through the inch-thick bars of the cage. But as the weak beam swept the bars, it picked
out something that she hadn't previously noticed; there had been little enough time to notice
anything. The cage had a door fastened with a chain and stout padlock - but the padlock hung on
the inside, the other side, where it dangled from the hoop of its loose shackle!
She knew what she must do: reach through the bars, drive home the shackle to close the padlock. A
two-handed job. Again she put the torch under her arm, fumbled the gun back into her pocket. Then,
in the crawling, tingling, living semi-darkness, Liz thrust her trembling hands between the bars
... and all of the time she was aware of the thing advancing towards her, its slanted, sulphurous
eyes alive on her ... and the beeper issuing its urgent, staccato mayday like a small, terrified
animal... and on top of all this the sudden, nightmarish notion: But what if this thing has the
key to the padlock!?
At that moment it was Liz Merrick who felt like some small, terrified, trapped animal - but a
human animal. While the thing striding silently, ever closer to her along the shaft was anything
but human, though it might have been not so long ago.
It was almost upon her; she smelled the hot stench of its breath!

22


CHAPTER TWO
Dark Denizens
Liz had squeezed her eyes shut in a desperate effort to locate the padlock. Now she opened them
...
... And it was there, it was there! Its face, caught in the upward-slanting beam of yellow light
from the torch in her arm-pit, looked down on her! And:
'Ahhh!' It - or he, the 'creechur' - sighed. 'A girl. No, a woooman. And a fresh one. How very
good to meet you here.' How very ... provident. AM!' And as simply as that his cold, cold hands
took the padlock from hers, freed it from the chains, and let it fall with a clank to the dirt
floor ...

24
Meanwhile, Jake Cutter had proceeded maybe a hundred yards down the gradually sloping shaft, deep
into the earth. The shaft was quite obviously the entrance to an old mine; the walls and roof were
timbered, and there were sleepers and rusty, narrow-gauge rails in the fairly uneven floor. In
places there was some evidence of past cave-ins, where holes in the ceiling and boulders on the
floor told their own story. Since the surviving supports seemed stout enough, Jake wasn't worried