"Lumley, Brian - Necroscope - The Lost Years Volume 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

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icy surface. If he hadn't caught her she would have fallen. And with his right arm under her neck, breast, and armpit, and his other hand in her hair, he dragged her writhing form back across the road to the side of the knoll.
He was tittering now but couldn't help it -- little girl's laughter that bubbled up in his throat to spill from his mouth in short bursts -hyena laughter, excited but muted: the call of a wild dog to the pack as it tracks its wounded prey. Hooting and giggling, but softly. And between each crazed burst, a guttural, frothing spray of obscenity: 'Fuck, fuck,/we*/ Fuck, fuck, fuck? And his flesh hard and throbbing under the zipper of his track-suit trousers.
The girl was making a recovery. She fought harder as he dragged her round the foot of the knoll to his snow-cave's low entrance. He paused to grip her throat and crush it, shake her head like the head of a rag doll until she went quiet Then he was dragging her into his den...his red-glowing lust-lair.
Inside, he hauled her up alongside, kneeled over her. She moaned and clutched her throat, trying to breathe as he showed her his mad smile, his teeth, his pig eyes. He wrenched at his zipper and his steaming meat jerked and nodded into view. Smelling it, her eyes went wide with knowledge; she knew his intention, what he would do! Her coat was open; his hand raked down the front of her blouse, caught at her bra, popped buttons and ripped material. Her breasts lolled out, hot and quivering.
'For you!' He waved his swollen, throbbing penis at her.
'Ur-ur-urghf She gurgled and choked, trying to rise up on her elbows. He backhanded her -- not too hard, just a slap to let her know who was boss here, which rocked her head back and stretched her prone -- then reached down, snatched up her short skirt and groped between her legs for her panties. God! He'd be into her in a minute...biting her tits...shooting his spunk! A whole year's worth into her hot, slimy little --
-- His obscene giggling and mouthings were cut short in a moment. For holding her neck, looking down between her legs, looking back at the burrow entrance...someone was there!
He recognized the scene immediately, the prescience of it falling like a hammer blow on his mind, so that he jerked back from it as if shot. His dream, but no longer a dream! The dark tunnel and yellow headlights; except, as he now saw, the headlights were eyes! Great yellow eyes, triangular, unblinking, hypnotic, and oh so intelligent! And the voice when it came -- that soft burr of a Scottish brogue, more growled than spoken, but hinting of a monstrous strength -- no longer the suppressed memory of a conversation but real, immediate, now!
You were warned, were ye no? /warned ye!'
ХWha -- ?Wha -- ?Wha -- ?'
'I warned ye: this one was no for ye. To pursue her would place ye in jeopardy most extreme! Aye, but ye ignored mah warning! So be it...'
ma -- ? Wha -- ? Wha -- ?' He groped for his knife, found it; the blade gleamed red in red torchlight But the Thing inching forward in the tunnel wasn't in the least afraid.
And suddenly: it was as if the predator were really there, back in his dream! Once again he stood on a black road gazing into the yawning black throat of a tunnel, and as before he was frozen, unable to move a muscle, as something awesome bore down on him in a dreadful, inexorable slow-motion. Its yellow eyes shone on him, freezing him rigid, while the darkness surrounding those eyes grew darker yet...
It had never been a dream (he knew that now), but it was a nightmare! The headlight eyes expanding to envelop him. The darkness opening to swallow him whole. The rumbling growl that wasn't the roar of an engine. But the eyes -- those awful eyes -- no longer feral yellow!
The face emerging from the darkness wasn't human. It was triangular. Ears pointing forward, pointing at the man; bottom jaw yawning open; great yellow headlight eyes...turning luminous red. As red as blood!
'Eh?!' said the man; simply that It scarcely qualified as a question, and wasn't even close to a scream -- no more than a squeak or a whimper -- as a hand, a paw, something, reached out of the tunnel, arched for a moment like a great grey furry spider over his leg, and drove home inches deep through track-suit trousers and flesh to scrape the bone of his thigh.
TJien he screamed, dropped the knife, tried to hang on to the girl where she had finally managed to sit up...and where she sat there smiling at him! But there are smiles and there are smiles.
And her eyes were as yellow as the Thing's had been just a moment ago, rapt on him, watching him being dragged into the tunnel; and her ears seemed to reach tremblingly forward, like the Thing's ears, eager for his panting, bubbling screams and the terrible rrrip! of his clothing and flesh, as talons sharp as razors opened him up the middle like a steaming, screaming joint of meat
After that, amid all the slobbering, snarling and panting it was as much as the girl could do to cram herself in a corner and so avoid the hot red splashes.
Knowing the Thing the way she did, she knew how dangerous it would be to try to take her share.
Well, not for a little while, at least...
PART ONE:
THE SLEEPING AND THE UNDEAD
INSPECTOR IANSON INVESTIGATES
It was ten in the morning, but at this time of year, in this place, it might just as easily be four in the evening. Under a heavy blanket of lowering snow clouds and in the shadow of the hills the time made little or no difference: everything looked grey...except that which now lay exposed, with the snow shovelled back from it, under the canopy of a scenes-of-crime canvas rigged up by the local police. That -- what was left of it -- was not grey but red. Very red. And torn...
'Animal,' said old Angus McGowan, giving a curt, knowing nod. 'A creature did it, an' a big yin at that!'
'Aye, that's what we thought,' Inspector lanson returned the old man's nod. 'A beast for sure. That's why we called you in, Angus. But now the big question: what sort of a beast? And how a beast...I mean, up here in the snow and all?'
'Eh?' Angus McGowan looked at the Police Inspector curiously, even scathingly. 'Up here in the snow and a'? Why...where else, man?'
lanson shrugged, and shivered, but not entirely from the cold. 'Where else?' He frowned as he pondered his old friend and rival's meaning, then shrugged again. 'Just about anywhere else, I should think! The African veldt, maybe? The Australian outback? India? But Scotland? What, and Auld Windy, Edinburgh herself, little more than seven or eight miles away? No lions or tigers or bears up here, Angus -- not unless they escaped from a zoo! Which is the other reason I called you in on it, as well you know.'
Angus glanced at him through rheumy, watering eyes. The cold -and, just as the Inspector himself had felt it, maybe something other than the cold -- had seeped through to the old vefs bones. But then, the sight of bloody, violent, unnatural death will have a similar effect on most men.
Necroscope: The Lost Yean -- Vol. II
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Brian Lumley
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Inspector lanson was tall, well over six feet, and thin as a pole. But for all that he was getting on a bit in years, George lanson remained spry and alert, mentally and physically active. Homicide was his job (he might often be heard complaining, in his dry, emotionless brogue, 'Man, how I hate mah work! If s sheer murrrderl'), and this was his beat, his area of responsibility: a roughly kite-shaped region falling between Edinburgh and Glasgow east to west, Stirling and Dumfries north to south. Outside that kite a man could get himself killed however he might or might not choose, and his body never have to suffer the cold, calculating gaze of George lanson. But inside it...
'Africa? India?" Angus echoed the gangling Inspector, then squinted at the tossed and tangled corpse before shaking his head in denial. 'No, no, George. She was no big cat, this yin. Nor a dog...but like a dog, aye!'
It was lanson's turn to study the other, dour old Angus McGowan, whom he'd known for years. A living caricature! Typically a 'canny old Scotsman,' hugging his knowledge as close to his chest as a gambler with his cards, or a rich man with his wealth. His rheumy grey eyes -- the eyes of a hawk for all that they were misted -- missed nothing; his blue-veined nose seemed sensitive as a bloodhound's; his knowledge (he'd been a recognized authority in zoology for all of thirty years) brimmed in the library of his brain like an encyclopaedia of feral lore. Quite simply, as the Inspector was gifted to know men -their ways and minds and, in his case especially, their criminal minds -- so Angus was gifted to know animals.
Between the two of them, on those rare occasions when the one might call upon the other for his expert knowledge, it had become a game, a competition, no less than the chess game they played once a week in the Inspector's study at his home in Dalkeith. For here, too, however serious the case, they vied one with the other, trying each other's minds to see which would come closest to the truth. The beauty of it was this: in chess there's only one winner, but here they could both win.
'Like a dog?' lanson looked again, deeply into McGowan's watery eyes, his wrinkled face. Old Angus: all five foot four or five of him, shrivelled as last year's walnuts, but standing tall now with some sure knowledge, some inner secret that loaned him stature. Nodding, and careful to avoid the bloodied snow, he went to one knee. Not that it mattered greatly -- no need to worry about the destruction of evidence now, the scenes-of-crime men had been and gone all of an hour ago -- but Angus didn't want this poor devil's blood on his good overcoat
Looking up at lanson from where he kneeled -- and had the situation been other than it was -- the slighter man might well have
grinned. Instead he grimaced, tapped the side of his dripping nose with his index finger, and answered, 'Shall we say -- oh, Ah dinnae ken -- a dog o' sorts? Shall we say, a dog, or a bitch, o' a different colour? Like maybe, grey?'
A great grey dog. Angus could mean only one sort of beast. Ridiculous! Except he wasn't given to making ridiculous statements. Wherefore:
'From a zoo?' lanson gripped McGowan's shoulder as he made to straighten up. 'Or maybe a circus? Have you heard of an escape, then? Has one got out?'
'One what?' The other was all wide-eyed innocence.
'Come now, Angus!' The Inspector tut-tutted. 'A wild creature of the snows, like a great, grey, handsome dog? You can only be hinting at a wolf, surely?'
'Hintin', is it!' the other chuckled, however drily, and was serious in a moment. 'Ah'm no hintin', George. Ye want mah opinion? This was a wolf, aye! An' one hell of a wolf at that! But escaped frae a zoo...?' He shook his head; not in denial, more out of puzzlement 'Ah've never come across a beast this size -- no in any zoo in England, Scotland or Wales, at least. And as for yere circuses -- what, at this time of year? Certainly no up here! An' so, well, Ah really canna say; Ah mean, Ah wouldnae care to commit mahsel'.'
'But you've done exactly that,' the Inspector pointed out. The piece is moved, Angus. You can't put it back.'