"Lumley, Brian - Necroscope - The Lost Years Volume 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

education, did his best to tone down the use of his extraordinary talent-and be a 'normal, average
student.' Aware that he must soon begin to support himself, he began writing, and by the time his
schooling was at an end several short pieces of his fiction had seen print.
Three years later, he finished his first novel, Diary of a 17th-Century Rake. While the book fell
short of the bestseller lists, still it did well. It wasn't so much a sensation for its storyline as for its
historical authenticity; hardly surprising considering the qualifications of Harry's co-author and
collaborator - namely a 17th-century rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!
By the summer of 1976, Harry had his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-storey house
on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stood opposite
one of the town's oldest graveyards; Harry was never short of friends to talk to. But by then, too, his
headmaster of a few years ago had discovered his grotesque secret, and passed it on to others more
secretive yet ...
Blithely ignorant of the fact that he was now under wary scrutiny, Harry let his talent develop. He
was the Necroscope, the only man who could talk to the dead and befriend them. Now that his
weird talent was fully formed, he could converse with exanimate persons even over great distances;
once introduced to a member of the Great Majority, thereafter he could always contact him again.
With Harry, however, it was a point of common decency that whenever possible he would
physically attend them at their gravesides; he wasn't one to 'shout' at his friends.
In their turn (and in return for his friendship), Harry's dead people loved him. He was like a pharos
among them, the one shining light in an otherwise eternal darkness, their observatory on a world
they'd thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not
The End but a transition to incorporeality and immobility. Great artists, when they die, continue to
visualize magnificent canvases they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, continent-spanning
cities, that can never be built; scientists follow up research they commenced in life but never had
time to complete ...

At his flat in Hartlepool, when he wasn't working, Harry entertained his childhood sweetheart,
Brenda. Shortly, finding herself pregnant, she became his wife. But a shadow out of the
Necroscope's past was rapidly becoming an obsession. He brooded over dreams of his poor
Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I 5
drowned mother, and in nightmares revisited the frozen river where Mary Keogh had died before
her time. Finally, Harry resolved to take revenge on his evil stepfather. In this as in all things he
had the blessings of the dead, for knowing only too well the horror of death, cold-blooded murder
was a crime the teeming dead could never tolerate.
In the winter of 1976-77 Harry tempted Viktor Shukshin out onto the ice of the frozen river to skate
with him, as once the murderer had skated with his mother. But his plan backfired and they both
crashed through the ice into the bitterly cold water. The Russian had the strength of a madman; he
would surely drown his stepson ... but no, for at the last moment Mary Keogh - or what remained
of her - rose from her watery grave to drag her murderer down!
And with that Harry had discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knew how far the teeming dead
would go in order to protect him - knew that in fact they would rise from their graves for him ...
The Necroscope's weird abilities had not gone unnoticed; a top-secret British intelligence
organization known as E-Branch ('Ј' for 'ESP' or ESPionage), and its Soviet counterpart, were both
aware of his powers. But he was no sooner approached to join E-Branch than its head, his contact,
was taken out, 'with extreme prejudice,' by Boris Dragosani, a Romanian spy and necromancer.
Dragosani's terrible 'talent' lay in ripping open the bodies of dead enemy agents to steal their secrets
right out of their violated brains, blood, and guts!
Harry vowed to track Dragosani down and even the score, and the Great Majority offered him their
help. Of course they did, for even the dead weren't safe from a man who violated corpses! What
Harry and his friends couldn't know was that Dragosani had been infected with vampirism. What