"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 1 - Necroscope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

very creepy feeling. And -
In the dream he had held the file up to himself. Now the thought set the act in motion. Feeling
foolish - not understanding why he did it, but at the same time feeling his skin charged with alien
energy - he held up the file to the empty room, as if to a ghost from his own recent past. And just as
a thought had triggered the action, now the action triggered something else - something away and
beyond all of Alec Kyle's previous experience or knowledge.
God almighty! Gadgets and ghosts!
The room had been comfortably warm just a moment ago. Centrally heated, the offices were never
cold. Or should not be. But now, in a matter of seconds, the temperature had plunged. Kyle
knew it, could feel it, but at the same time he retained enough of instinctive reasoning to wonder if
perhaps his own body temperature had also taken a tumble. If so, it wouldn't be hard to explain.
This must be what shock felt like. No wonder people shivered!
 'Jesus Christ!' he whispered, his breath pluming in the suddenly frigid air. The file fell from his
twitching fingers, slapped down on the desk. The sound of its falling - that and what he saw - galvanised
Kyle into an almost spastic reaction of motion. He jerked back in his chair, causing its legs to ride
through the pile of the carpet, tilting it backwards until it slammed against the window sill and
rebounded.
The - apparition? - the thing, where it stood half-way between the door and the desk, hadn't
moved. At first Kyle had thought (and had dreaded the thought) that it could only be himself he
saw standing there, somehow projected forward from the dream. But now he saw that it was
someone - something - else. Not once did it enter his mind to question the reality of what he was
seeing, and not for a moment did he consider it to be anything other than supernatural. How could it
be anything else? The scanners where they constantly swept the room, the entire suite of offices, had
detected nothing. Entirely independent, if they had picked up anything at all intruder buzzers would be
going off right now, and getting louder by the minute until someone sat up and took notice. But the
alarms were silent. Ergo, there was nothing here to scan - and yet Kyle saw it.
It, he, was a man - a youth, anyway - naked as a baby, standing there facing Kyle, looking directly
at him. But his feet weren't quite touching the carpeted floor and the bars of green light from the
windows penetrated into his flesh as if it had no substance at all. Damn it - it had no substance at all!
But the thing stared at him, and Kyle knew that it saw him. And in the back of his mind he asked
himself: Is it friendly, or - ?
Inching his chair forward again, his eyes spied something in the back of the open drawer. A
Browning 9mm automatic. He'd known Gormley carried a weapon but hadn't known about this
one. But would the gun be loaded, and if it was would it be any good against this?
'No,' said the naked apparition with a slow, almost imperceptible shake of its head. 'No it
wouldn't.' Which was all the more surprising because its lips didn't move by the smallest fraction of an
inch!
'Jesus Christ!' Kyle gasped again, out loud this time, as he once more gave an involuntary start
away from the desk. And then, controlling himself, to himself, he said:
You . . . you read my mind!
The apparition smiled a thin smile. 'We all have our talents, Alec. You have yours and I have
mine.'
Kyle's lower jaw, already agape, now fell open. He wondered which would be easier: to simply
think at the thing or to talk to it.
'Just talk to me,' said the other. 'I think that will be easier for both of us.'
Kyle gulped, tried to say something, gulped again and finally gasped out: 'But who . . . what . . .
what the hell are you?'
'Who I am doesn't matter. What I have been and will be does. Now listen, I've a lot to tell you and
it's all rather important. It will take some time, hours maybe. Do you need anything before I begin?'
Kyle stared hard at the . . . whatever it was. He stared at it, jerked his eyes away from it, peered at it