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

'Boris Dragosani,' said Krakovitch, pointing. 'The thing pinned to his chest is what controlled
him, I think.' He stepped carefully across the room to stand gazing down on what was left of
Dragosani and his parasite creature; Gulharov was right behind him, not wanting to get too close.


Both of Dragosani's legs were broken and lay at weird angles. His arms hung slack down the
wall to the skirting, elbows just off the floor, forearms at ninety degrees and hands projecting well
beyond the cuffs of his jacket. They were hands like claws, big, powerful and grasping, frozen in
Dragosani's final spasm. His face was a rictus of agony, made worse by the fact that it was hardly a
human face at all, and worse still by the gash that split his skull ear to ear.


But his face!
 Dragosani's jaws were long as some great hound's, gaping open to display curving needle
teeth. His skull was misshapen, and his ears were pointed where they curved forward and lay flat
against his temples. His eyes were ruptured red pits above a nose long and wrinkled and flattened
to show gaping nostrils, like the convoluted snout of some great bat. That was how he looked: part
man, part wolf, part bat. And the thing pinned to his chest was worse.


'What... what is that?' Gulharov gasped out the question.


'God help me, Krakovitch shook his head, 'I don't know! But it lived in him. I mean, inside
him. It only came out at the end.'


The trunk of the thing had the form of a great leech some eighteen inches long, but tapering to
a tail. There were no limbs; it seemed to cling to Dragosani's chest by suction, and was held there
by a sharp stake formed of the splintered hardwood stock of a heavy-duty machine gun; its skin
was grey-green, corrugated. Gulharov saw that its head, flat and cobra-like - but eyeless, blind - lay
on the carpet a little apart.


Like... like some gigantic tapeworm?' Gulharov's horror was plain on his face.


'Something like that,' Krakovitch nodded grimly. 'But intelligent, evil, and deadly.'


'Why have we come up here?' Gulharov's Adam's apple bobbed. 'There are fifty million better
places to be.'


Krakovitch's face was white, pinched. He could fully appreciate Gulharov's feelings. 'We've
come up here because we have to burn this, that's why.' His talent again, warning him that both
Dragosani and his symbiont must be destroyed, utterly. He looked around, saw a tall steel filing
cabinet standing against the wall to one side of the door. He and Gulharov tore out the shelving,
turning the cabinet into a metal coffin. They lowered it onto its back and dragged it across the floor
to Dragosani.