"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 10 - Lost Years 02 - Resurgence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

There are desperate, dangerous times ahead for Harry and Bonnie Jean - not least because the Necroscope's mind is under her control.
Already, many of the things that have happened to him are blank spaces in his memory, missing from his life like pages ripped from
a book.
As such, they are part of the lost years...
o
s
I
Two of them waited in the snow, both predators however disparate in means and motives. The first was a man, while the other...
was Other. It was other than wholly human. That of humanity was in it, but there was a great deal of something else. It was
part-human female, and part Other.
Though the man was unaware of the Thing's presence, it had been here for some time, watching him put the finishing touches to his lair. This
was something that it understood well enough: the compulsion to build a lair, a base of operations, a secret, private place to call one's own.
Indeed, far to the north, inaccessible in a mountain fastness, the Thing knew of just such a lair: not its own, but that of a Higher One.
Normally at this time of the year, the month, the thirty-day cycle -at this oh-so-dangerous time - the she-Thing might even be
there, attending her Master in his lair. But not this time. For this time one of her own was threatened, which meant that she herself
was threatened. And this was her response: to watch and wait, for the moment, while the human predator prepared his lair.
But there are lairs and there are lairs...
The man's lair wasn't intended as a permanent structure. Scarcely a structure at all, it was... a hollow, a burrow, a low cave
scooped out of the snow drifted against the side of a knoll at the foot of the hills, like a play-place such as children might make;
except it wasn't a play-place, and he wasn't a child. Its roof was the hard, crystallized snow that crusted the drift, layered now with the grey,
camouflaging cover of a fresh fall; its floor was of hard-packed snow, compressed by the body weight of the man during the process of
excavation. The cavity was eight feet long, four and a half wide, three and a quarter deep. A fragile/temporary place at best, yet still a lair. The den
of a monstrous human beast And the beast had completed his work on it a full ten minutes ago.
Ntcroscope:TheLostYears-Vol.II
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Brian Lumley
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Something less than one hundred and fifty feet away, and seventy higher up the steep hillside in the lee of a rocky outcrop, the
Thing sat, watched, scented - generally sensed - the man's activity. She knew what he had done, the preparations he had made
and those he was making even now. Her eyes, of a penetrating feral yellow with crimson cores, yet alive with a sentience far
beyond the ken of the wild, a more than merely animal cunning, gazed down on the snowcapped knoll and the man's lair at its
base. She watched the soft outlines and silhouettes disrupted by his work gradually regaining their bland white anonymity, as the
snow continued to fall.
Penetrating eyes, yes: they saw the fault red glimmer of a torch switched on, even through the cave's ice-crystal roof; and a
second torch, to lend the lair a sensual, blood-hued illumination. At last all grew still, except - to the Thing's differently intelligent
mind, her alien perceptions - a sense of the man's actions inside his lair, his final preparations. At which she knew that the
human predator intended to go through with it
Then, maintaining a low profile - her chest ploughing the snow, which tumbled before her in a small, silent avalanche - the
Thing came down from the hillside. Where the ground was uneven she wriggled; where the snow was thin she slid on belly and
paws; but on a weathered snow-covered scree saddle between the hillside and the knoll she halted, crouched down low,
listened, and continued to sense. She was now less than sixty feet from die man's lair and only twenty feet higher.
As yet, the Thing's telepathy wasn't of a high order - it could scarcely be compared with the 'mentalism' of her Master in his
northern lair - but there are other arts, and the human predator wasn't unknown to her. For which reason she
attempted to reach out to him across the distance of two dozen paces and implant this message in his mind:
 You were given a warning. There is still time to heed it. What you do now is of your own free will, and its result win be as you willed it.
Perhaps something of it got through to the man; he switched off a penlight torch, paused in his pig-eyed scrutiny of grotesquely
lewd photographs in a wallet of pornographic poses, cocked his head on one side and adopted a frowning, listening attitude. But
there was nothing to hear - except in his head, like a memory: This one is not for you. To pursue and take her will place
you in extreme jeopardy!