"Goulart, Ron - Vampirella 01 - Bloodstalk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

Bloodstalk
by Ron Goulart
PROLOGUE
Sleet knifed down through the dying day, slashing across the grey and darkening sky. The cold hard rain pelted the weedy fields which surrounded the ramshackle carnival grounds. The chill wind made the once bright and gaudy banners flap like the battle flags of an army defeated long ago. While pellets of ice danced and clattered on the swayback roofs of the carnival concessions, the insinuating wind caused the old timbers to creak and groan. Through the rainswept gloom the lights of Blackston's Mammoth Carnival showed dim and hazy. Dark, hunched birds roosted on the slanting plank fences.
The old man who ran the shooting gallery had bright clothes and a dead-white face. He huddled beneath his tattered canvas awning, leaning heavily on his yellow cane. He made no attempt to attract the few carnival patrons who came wandering by. Farther down the midway the strong-man sat in a folding chair in the front of the Freak Show tent, reading a discarded newspaper. The tattooed lady, wrapped in a loose-fitting rayon robe, stood watching the muddy street through a flap in the canvas. The magic show was housed in a paint-peeling wooden shed. "See The Great Pendragon!" invited a weatherbeaten sign. The string of lights over the entry door was dark, and the sleety wind rattled the padlock.
Wild laughter sounded above the howling of the wind - a few harsh notes of laughter repeated again and again. "Fun House!" read the neon sign over the freshly painted two-storey building. "Thrills! Laughs! Chills! Don't Miss the Mirror Maze!" Sitting in the ticket booth was a thickset smiling man. He wore a straw hat and a checked suit. The smile never left his face. Thrills! Laughs! Chills!" he called out, echoing the electric signs. "Don't miss the mirror Maze!"
A lone figure, a middle-aged man in a wrinkled suit, stepped up to hand the smiling man a ticket. "Might as well," he said. Though, if you ask me, this is a pretty dead carnival."
"Rainy night, friend." The smiling man ripped the ticket in half.
"This better be fun or -"
"Nothing like it on the face of the earth, friend," promised the smiling man.
"We'll see." The middle-aged man walked up the wooden gangway and through the arched entrance of the Fun House.
The wild laughter swirled all around him, coming at him from everywhere in the dark corridor.
"Don't let it bother you," he told himself. They're only trying to scare you."
He felt out, groping like a newly-blinded man, and found a doorknob.
There was light on the other side of the door. Glaring light on hundreds of images of himself.
His left side, his right side, all reflected over and over in the glittering glass.
"Wait a minute." Out of the corner of his eye he noticed an image that wasn't right. It was his reflection, but not the way he looked now.
He spun around. The image was gone.
Some kind of trick, an illusion. But it had certainly seemed to be the young man he had been more than twenty-five years ago, back when he'd known -
There she is!"
It was the girl, the girl he'd known then. Her image glowing in one of the mirrors. Looking exactly as she had that last time, but smiling, holding out her arms to him.
He made his way among the images of himself toward the image of the girl. Halting before the beckoning image of the girl, he held out his hand to touch the mirror surface.
But there was no surface. His hand went through the image. Then something seized his wrist.
A moment later the mirrors reflected no one.
The blind man looked toward the hazy afternoon sky. "He won't be here," he said to his son.
Adam Van Helsing said, "Plane's delayed by bad weather, that's all, Dad." Adam was dark-haired, wide-shouldered, in his late twenties. A glass of Chivas Regal Scotch sat on the licorice-coloured glass table before him.
His gaunt face still turned toward the window of the airport cocktail lounge, Conrad Van Helsing replied, "I don't like to play the old blind prophet all the time, Adam, but I do have a fair amount of extrasensory ability."
His son frowned at him. "Didn't realize that's what you meant," he said. "You feel something's happened to Uncle Kurt's plane?"
The blind old man nodded. "Not yet, but very soon," he answered. Too late to warn anyone now, we can only sit here and wait for the news."
"A crash?"
"Yes, in the mountains. I see the airliner going down in the mountains, breaking to pieces in the snow."
"And Uncle Kurt?"
"Some of the passengers willЕ no, only two of them will survive." Van Helsing touched his fingertips to his dark glasses. "My brother is one of -" He gave a sudden cry of pain and clutched at his chest.
"Dad, what is it?"
"Something wrong, sir?" A red-coated waiter had come trotting over to their table.
Slowly the blind man placed his hands on the table top. "Nothing serious," he said.
When the waiter was gone, Adam asked in a low voice, "What did you see?"
Van Helsing reached out and took hold of his son's hand. "A vampire," he said in a whisper. "A vampireЕ"
After the enormous, shattering crash there was a great silence. A white silence engulfing her. Silence fragmenting into thousands of tiny pieces, drifting down on her. Slowly, patiently, covering her.
Vampirella tried to sit up. The falling snow seemed to weigh her down, forcing her to remain sprawled on the ground, legs spread wide, leopard-skin coat tangled around her.
She must rise. She opened her eyes wider. It was growing dark; the day was ending. Night was coming, and with it hunger.
Vampirella pushed herself to her knees. Hundreds of yards uphill, mangled, ripped in half, was the carcass of the airliner she'd been flying in, flying to California. Only silence there. She sensed at once there could be no one left alive in the wreck.
"I was thrown clear," she realized.
But what good did that do? She was alone here, somewhere in the mountains. Night would soon close in, night and the need to -
Someone moaned.
Another survivor?
Unsteadily, the long-legged girl stood up.
"Yes, there he is. Down there."
About two hundred feet downhill, half buried in the thick snow, a man lay. He was tall, thin," grey-haired. And still alive.
Weaving, stumbling, Vampirella made her way down through the snow to the injured passenger.