"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 2 - Wamphyri!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Wamphyri!
by

Brian Lumley

Book 2 of the Necroscope Series




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Many and multiform are the dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from the prime.
They sleep beneath the unturned stone; they rise with the tree from its root; they move
beneath the sea and in subterranean places; they dwell in the inmost adyta; they emerge
betimes from the shutten sepulchre of haughty bronze and the low grave that is sealed with
clay. There be some that are long known to man, and others as yet unknown that abide the
terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are the most dreadful and the loathliest of
all are haply still to be declared. But among those that have revealed themselves aforetime
and have made manifest their veritable presence, there is one which may not openly be
named for its exceeding foulness. It is that spawn which the hidden dweller in the vaults has
begotten upon mortality...



They say foul beings of Old Times still lurk In dark forgotten corners of the world, And Gates
still gape to loose, on certain nights, Shapes pent in Hell...




Chapter One



Afternoon of the fourth Monday in January 1977; the Château Bronnitsy off the Serpukhov
road not far out of Moscow; 2.40 p.m. middle-European time, and a telephone in the temporary
Investigation Control Room ringing... ringing... ringing.


The Château Bronnitsy stood central on open, peaty ground in the middle of a densely
wooded tract now white under drifted snow. A house or mansion of debased heritage and mixed
architectural antecedents, several recent wings were of modern brick on old stone foundations,
while others were cheap breeze blocks camouflaged in grey and green paint. A once-courtyard in
the 'U' of polyglot wings was now roofed over, its roof painted to match the surrounding terrain.
Bedded at their bases in massive, steeply gabled end walls, twin minarets raised broken bulbous
domes high over the landscape, their boarded windows glooming like hooded eyes. In keeping with
the generally run-down aspect of the rest of the place, the upper sections of these towers were