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

Dragosani's chest. Its tip formed a knob as big as a fist, which in turn formed an eye. Just seeing
that orb, Krakovitch knew there was no thought behind it, no sentience. It was vacant, staring,
made no connections and carried no emotions. Krakovitch doubted if it even saw. Certainly there
was no longer any brain for it to relay its message to. The eye melted back into protoflesh, was
replaced by small jaws which clashed mindlessly. Then it sank down again out of sight.


'Felix, get out of there!' Gulharov was nervous.


Krakovitch backed out of the circle; Gulharov struck a match, tossed it; in a moment the
cabinet was an inferno. Like the oblong mouth of a jet engine on test, the cabinet hurled a pale blue
sheet of fire roaring into the cold air, a shimmering column of intense heat. And then Dragosani sat
up!
 Gulharov clutched Krakovitch, clung to him. 'Oh God! Oh, mother - he's alive!' he croaked.


'No,' Krakovitch denied, tearing himself free. 'The thing in him is alive, but mindless. It's all
instinct with no brain to govern it. It would flee but doesn't know how to, or even what it's fleeing
from. If you spear a sea-cucumber it reacts, spills out its guts. No mind, just reaction. Look, look!
It's melting!'


And indeed it seemed that Dragosani was melting. Smoke curled upward from his blackened
shell; layers of skin peeled away, bursting into flame; the fats of his body ran like candle wax, and
were consumed by the fire. The thing inside him felt the heat, reacted. Dragosani's trunk shuddered,
vibrated, convulsed. His arms shot out straight, then fell to dangle over the sides of the blazing
cabinet, where all the while they jerked and twitched. His clothing was completely burned away by
now, and as Krakovitch and Gulharov watched and shuddered, so his crisped flesh burst open here
and there, putting out frantic, whipping tendrils that melted and slopped down into the furnace.


In a very little while he fell back and was still, and the two men stood in the snow and watched
the fire until it burned itself out. It took all of twenty minutes, but they stood there anyway...



3.00 p.m., 27 August 1977.


The big London hotel, within easy walking distance of Whitehall, contained rather more than
its exterior might suggest. In fact the entire top floor was given over to a company of 'international
financial entrepreneurs', which was the sum total of the hotel manager's knowledge about it. The
company had its own elevator at the rear of the building, private stairs, even its own fire escape.
Indeed the company owned the top floor, which was therefore entirely outside the hotel's sphere of
control and operation.


In short, the top floor was the headquarters of the most secret of all British secret services:
namely INTESP, the British equivalent of that Russian organisation housed just outside Moscow at