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

He led the way through the chaos of shattered rooms and piled rubble, from the covered-in
courtyard area into the main, original building, then up two flights of time-hollowed stone stairs into
one of the twin towers. This was where Gregor Borowitz had had his office, which Dragosani had
turned into his control room on the night of the horror.


The stairwell was scarred and blackened, with tiny fragments of shrapnel, flattened lead bullets
and copper cases lying everywhere. The stink of cordite was still heavy in the air. That would be
from blast grenades, tossed down here from above when the tower came under attack. But none of
this had stopped Harry Keogh and his Tartars. On the second floor landing the door to a tiny
anteroom stood open. The room had served as an office for Borowitz's secretary, Yul Galenski.
Krakovitch had known him personally: a generally timid man, a clerk with no extrasensory talent.
Just staff.


Between the open door and the stairwell's safety rail, face down on the landing, lay a corpse in
the Château's duty uniform: grey coveralls with a single diagonal yellow stripe across the heart. Not
Galenski (he had been a 'civvies only' man) but the Duty Officer. The corpse's face lay quite flat on
the floor in a pool of blood. Flatter than it should. That was because there was very little of actual
face left, just a raw flat mess.


Krakovitch and Gulharov stepped carefully over the body, entered the little office. Behind a
desk, crumpled in one corner, Galenski sat clutching a rusty curved sword where it stuck out of his
chest. It had been driven home with such force that he was pinned to the wall. His eyes were still
open, but no longer terrified. From some people, death steals all emotion.


'Mother in heaven!' Gulharov whispered. He'd never seen anything like this. He wasn't even a
combat soldier, not yet.


They went through a second door into what had been Borowitz's office. It was spacious, with
great bullet-proof bay windows looking out and down from the tower's curving stone wall toward
distant woodland. The carpet was burned and stained here and there. A massive block of a desk in
solid oak stood in one corner, receiving light from the windows and protection from the stone wall
at its back. As for the rest of the room: it was a shambles - and a nightmare!


A shattered radio spilled its guts onto the floor; walls were pockmarked and the door
splintered from the impact of sprayed bullets; the body of a young man in Western styled clothes lay
where it had fallen, ripped by machine gun fire, almost in two pieces behind the door. It was glued
to the floor with its own blood. This was Harry Keogh's body: nothing much to look at, but there
was no fear or pain on his white, unmarked face.


As for the nightmare: that lay propped against the wall on the other side of the room.