"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 4 - Deadspeak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

Gasping his shock
Gasping his shock, his horror - feeling his blood running cold in his veins - Laverne tremblingly held out the torch over the trench. His disbelieving eyes took in the bed of spikes and the
figure of his friend, crucified and worse, upon them. George Vulpe squirmed there. Impaled through his body and all his limbs, his life's blood was pumping from each dark wound,
staining the rusty spikes, flowing in thickly converging streams around and between his twitching feet. . . and down towards the stone spout. Beneath that spout, as the first of the scarlet
rain slopped and spattered, the black urn began to belch! Puffs of vapour issued like smoke rings from its obscene clay mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, blistered on the cold
rim like congealing tar. And as Vulpe's blood was consumed, so something formed and expanded within the urn. Like some monstrous alchemical catalyst, his blood transformed the dust
of the centuried Thing which was within!




PROLOGUE


Harry Keogh:
A R├йsum├й and Chronology




1


Necroscope




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Gasping his shock




Christened Harry 'Snaith' in Edinburgh, 1957, Harry is the son of a psychic sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (who is herself the daughter of a 'gifted' expatriate Russian lady) and Gerald
Snaith, a banker. Harry's father dies of a stroke the following year, and in the winter of 1960 his mother marries again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor
Shukshin. Like Mary's mother before him, Shukshin has fled the USSR a supposed 'dissident', which perhaps accounts for Mary's initial attraction to him in what will soon become an
unmitigated mismatch.

Winter of 1963: Harry's mother is murdered by Shukshin at Bonnyrig outside Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alleges that while skating she crashed
through a thin crust and was washed away; there was nothing he could do to save her; he is 'distraught, almost out of his mind with grief and horror'. Mary Keogh's body is never found;
Shukshin inherits her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.

Within six months the infant Harry (now Harry 'Keogh') has gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the north-east coast of England. The arrangement is more than
satisfactory to Shukshin, who could never stand the child.

Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery village. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few friendships (with fellow pupils, at any
rate) and thus falls easy prey to bullying and the like. And as he grows towards his teens, so his daydreaming spirit, psychic insight and instincts lead him into further conflict with his
teachers. But he is not lacking in grit - on the contrary.