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

No, not like a memory, it was a memory - but from where, from when? Some thought he'd had? Some premonition? The
customary lump in his throat as the final phase of an operation moved towards its inevitable conclusion? An attack of... what,
conscience? Scarcely that! His 'good' side, then (did he have one?), telling him this need not be inevitable?
But it was! It was, and he must have her! (A glance at the luminous dial of his wristwatch... 7:30 p.m.) By now she would at
be on her way, coming. Soon he'd be coming, too! Then her blood coming... hot spurts from the raw red gash of her throat, gradually
slowing, likeawell dryingup:the well ofher life.Herhot breasts cooling, elastic fornowbut slowly stiffening.Herfacepaleasthesnow, eyes glazed as the ice
onthebeck.
He shuddered. It was awful... and it was wonderful! Like being a strange dark god: the power of life and death. But not really,
for a god has a choice and the man had none. Afterwards ... she must die. Only let her live and she'd talk; it would be the end of
everything. They would find him; she'd identify him; they'd crucify him! Not like the son of a god but like a beast Not on a cross
but in a cell, behind bars, forever - or for as long as the other inmates allowed him to live. Strange how even the most vile and
violent men hated his sort...
He had been to the place where she worked. (Funny, but he couldn't remember much about it) A darkish place, and red like
his snow cave of red light So she'd lived and so she would die - like a temptress. All who lived as she had lived, luring and
teasing and promising, but never living up to the promise, took their chances. So she'd taken hers.
And he had taken his, just going there, to the place where she worked... but of course he must in order to know all about her.
He'd gone there two or three times, yet couldn't remember a thing about it except... it was dark, red-lit with dark-eyed Loreleis
serving drinks.
The Lorelei... a legend out of Germany... it was associational. There'd been places like it hi Hamburg: low music, low lights,
lowlife...
He had been a Sergeant then, but his rank had given him no special privileges with the nightclub girls. Oh, the men in his
platoon had had them - whores galore! - but the only way he'd been able to get it was to pay for it How he'd hated that the fact
that they rarely took him a second time, not even for his lousy 'geld*. There'd been something about his eyes, something... cold,
in his eyes.
Cold, yes. For other men it was heat that went with lust but for him it was the cold that turned him on. Six years ago in die
Harz Mountains, on a winter warfare course (before various misuses of rank and privilege had come to light sufficient to see
him reduced from a promising middle-ranker to an out-of-work bum in a society with little or no use for die specialized skills of
a commando), he remembered being holed-up for a week on a snow-covered mountain, allegedly acquiring survival skills
while in fact fantasizing about sex with hot quivering, naked women. That was where die notion had first occurred to him: in die
Harz, in Germany...
BrianLumley
Necroscope:TheLostYears-Vol.II
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... But snow is snow the world over, and women are women: good for nicking but small use for anything else. Except a man
can't be a 'real* man without he at least has the use of a woman's body; but only the use, since the permanent possession of a
woman, the burden of ownership, will very quickly reduce him to less than a man! That was the lair-bunder's understanding of
male/female relationships, anyway - a paradox where the man always came out the loser. And it had seemed to him that there
ought to be an alternative.
Well, and so there was, and this was it But since it served only the needs of a minority of one (namely himself) it was
unacceptable to the majority. So... fuck the majority! How he wished he could, except from his point of view the society that
rejected him had its own predators. They were called police and he was their prey; or would be, but he was wily and they
hadn't caught him yet Almost but not quite, not yet
There are predators and predators, known and unknown. Even among the known sort you are only a small creature of the kind, while
among the unknown things you are a speck, a mote, a minuscule! So back off now, while yet you may...
What? Talking to himself again? That recurrent dream he'd been having: of something awesome stalking him? Not
conscience, no, but guilt pure and simple. For he was the stalker, the Awesome One. He shrugged off the feeling of eyes where
there were no eyes, and warning voices where there couldn't possibly be.
A short distance away, the Thing crouching at the crest of the scree saddle sensed the man's rejection of her - her