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

No refuge here, where the air itself seemed steeped in decay and in-
grown vice—but at least there was the light, and humanity too, albeit
dregs.
The fugitive hugged the wall, fused with it and became one with the
shadows, gratefully gulped at the sodden, reeking river air and looked
back the way he had come. And there at the other end of the street,
silhouetted against a rolling bank of mist from the river, motionless now
and yet full of an awesome kinetic energy, like the still waters of a dam
before the gates are opened—
The guttural laughter came again from above, causing the fleeing man
to start. Shadow figures moved ganglingly, apishly together in the beam
of light falling on the street, began tearing at each other's clothing.
Abruptly the light was switched off, the window slammed shut, and the
night and the mist closed in. And along the street the silent pursuer once
more took up the chase.
With his strength renewed a little but knowing he was tiring rapidly
now, the fugitive pushed himself free of the wall and began to run again,
forcing his legs to pump and his lungs to suck and his heart to pound as
desperately as before. But he was almost home, almost safe. Sanctuary lay
just around the next corner.
"London" . . . "Home" . . . "Sanctuary." Words once full of meaning, but
in his present situation almost meaningless. Could anywhere be safe ever
again? Cairo should have been, but instead, with the European war spilling
over into the Middle East, it had been fraught. Paris had been worse: a
seething cauldron on the boil and about to explode shatteringly. And in
Tunisia . . . In Tunisia the troubles had seemed endless, where the French
fought a guerrilla war on all sides, not least with the Sahara's Sanusi.
The Sanusi, yes—and it was from the secret desert temple of an ancient
Sanusi sect that the fugitive had stolen the Elixir. That had been his folly—
it was why he was a fugitive.
Halfway round the world and back their Priest of the Undying Dead
had chased him, drawing ever closer, and here in London it seemed that
at last the chase was at an end. He could run no further. It was finished.
His only chance was the sanctuary, that secret place remembered from the
penniless, friendless childhood of a waif. It had been more than thirty



18
 INCEPTION

years ago, true, but still he remembered it clearly. And if a long-forsaken
God had not turned from him entirely . . .
Wrapped in mist he rounded the corner, came out of the mazy streets
and onto the river's shoulder. The, Thames with all its stenches, its poisons,
its teeming rats and endless sewage—and its sanctuary. Nothing had
changed, all was exactly as he remembered it. Even the mist was his friend
now, for it cloaked him and turned him an anonymous gray, and he knew
that from here on he could find his way blindfolded. Indeed he might as
well be blind, the way the milky mist rolled up and swallowed him.