"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 14 - Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

now I see that the two tales are entirely different.)
One last thing. Harry Keogh, like many another weird hero whose
exploits we've followed, was a hell of a vampire fighter. As the stories in
this volume attest, however, the Necroscope's battles weren't restricted to
the undead; he frequently had to deal with the alive and viciously kicking,
too.
Whatever your tastes—alive, dead, or undead—the people and creatures
in the stories that you'll read here are all fictitious. Of course they are, but
let's not forget: there really are monsters out there, very real, very terrible
monsters, and the ones we need to be most concerned about are those who
apparently don't care if they're alive or dead!
 INTRODUCTION

And oddly enough—or perhaps not, considering what happened in
New York—neither do I . . . .

—Brian Lumley
Torquay, Devon, England
MARCH 2002
TITUS CROW
 INCEPTION


December 1916. One week before Christmas.
London, in the vicinity of Wapping, an hour before dawn . . .
Mist-shrouded facades of warehouses formed square, stony faces, bleakly
foreboding with their blind eyes of boarded windows; Dickensian still, the
cobbled riverside streets rang to the frantic clatter of madly racing foot-
steps. Except for the figure of a man, flying, his coat flapping like broken
wings, nothing stirred. Just him . . . and his pursuer: a second male figure,
tall, utterly silent, flowing like a fog-spawned wraith not one hundred
yards behind.
As to who these two were: their names do not matter. Suffice to say
that they were of completely opposite poles, and that the one who feared
and ran so noisily was a good man and entirely human, because of which
he'd been foolish . . .
And so he fled, that merely human being, clamorously, with pounding
heart, tearing the mist like cobwebs in a tunnel and leaving a yawning
hole behind; and his inexorable pursuer flowing forward through that hole,
with never the sound of a footfall, made more terrible because of his sound-
lessness.
London, and the fugitive had thought he would be safe here. Panting,
he skidded to a halt where a shaft of light lanced smokily down from a
high window and made the cobbles shiny bright. In a black doorway a
broken derelict sprawled like a fallen scarecrow, moaned about the night's
chill and clutched his empty bottle. Coarse laughter came from above, the
chink of glasses and a low-muttered, lewd suggestion. Again the laughter,
a woman's, thick with lust.
 HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE AND OTHER WEIRD HEROES!