"Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 2 - The Last Aerie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

'See,' she said, 'my Jim was a talker. Lord, Jim could talk! Of a night before we'd go ter sleep, he'd just talk and talk and talk! About all and everything, and nothing very much. I used ter tell him, "Jim Wills, yer'll likely talk yerself ter death one day!" And bless him, he did. A heart attack, anyway. But ... well ... yer see, I was so used ter Jim's voice, that sometimes I 'ears it even now! And even if I never did know Mr 'Arry, whoever he is, it seems my Jim must 'ave known him, or 'eard of him, anyway. Truth is, my Jim says an 'ell of a lot of 'em knows - or knew - 'Arry Keogh.'
That did it. There may be plenty of Harrys in the world, but by Trask's reckoning there could only be one Harry Keogh. The Necroscope's second name had never been mentioned - or it shouldn't have been - in front of Mrs Wills. Her knowledge of his Christian name was easy to explain: she'd been reading it five days a week, plainly visible on the plaque on the door. But his surname? Trask glanced at Chung.
David Chung was thinking much the same thing as his boss. Through Harry, the espers of E-Branch had learned that death is not the end but a transition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go beyond that. People, when they die, do not accompany their bodies into dissolution but become one with the Great Majority; and merging into a sort of limbo - a darkness where thought is the all - the minds of the teeming dead occupy themselves naturally with whatever was their passion in life. Great artists continue to visualize magnificent canvases, pictures they can never paint; architects plan faultless, world-spanning cities they can never build; scientists follow through the research they weren't able to complete in life, whose benefits can never be passed on to the living.
And Jim Wills, the cleaning lady's husband? In life he'd just overflowed with words; and the one he'd loved to talk to most of all ... had been his wife. Was it so strange? And how many other lonely people 'hear' their absent loved ones talking to them, Trask wondered? But out loud he only said, 'What else has Jim told you, Mrs Wills?'
Perhaps there was a tear in the corner of her eye as she looked at him, but she hid it and smiled anyway. 'Only how I should be a good girl,' she said. 'And treat others the way I'd expect to be treated. And remember that Jim loved me, and only me, all his days.'
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PART TWO
Nestor's Story
Trask nodded. 'That's all good advice,' he said, softly. 'But I meant about Harry. What did Jim tell you about Harry?'
She shrugged and sighed. 'Not much. Just ter look after his room and keep it spick-'n-span, that's all. "Meg, me love, whatever else goes ter the wall, you look after 'Arry's room," he says. And when I asks him why, he shrugs and says, "Well, yer never knows when he'll be needin' ter use it again, now does yer?'"
She looked at the two espers and smiled, and the tears were gone now. 'Anyway, that's what my Jim always says ...'
I
Sunside
Three days earlier (by Earth's chronological system), at the dawn of a long Sunside 'day', the vampire Lord Nestor had gone to earth in the forest a mile or two north of the leper colony on the fringe of Sunside's prairie belt. In fear, loathing, and great trepidation -- trembling, aye, even the necromancer Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri! - he had plunged headlong through the deep dark woods, away from the gold-stained horizon where the sun rose inexorably, menacingly in the south.
There in the gloom of the forest, stumbling into a stream, he had stripped naked and washed himself scrupulously clean in every part, until even his metamor-phic vampire flesh was raw, red, and broken from his furious scrubbing. And in his shrinking mind (known also to his parasite vampire, of course) one terrifying thought eclipsing all others: that he'd spent last night among Szgany lepers, watched over by lepers, tended and fed by lepers, and .. . infected, perhaps? By lepers?
Leprosy: Great Bane of the Wamphyri! And Nestor had been with these stumbling, crumbling people from sundown to sunup, in their place, unconscious in one of their beds and covered by their blankets ...
They'd discovered him where his crippled flyer had come down in the forest close by; they had touched him, lifted him up, taken him to their colony. Their wooden spoons had carried soup to Nestor's dribbling
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mouth, while his lungs had breathed air which theirs had breathed out! Their bandages and healing salves had covered his wounded face and eyes . .. but what were ointments against the curse of leprosy? And so he had scrubbed his body raw, then dressed himself in his soiled leather clothing, and with something of his composure regained followed the stream east and a little north.
Mainly Nestor had walked in the shallow water, shaded by dense foliage along the banks. His eyes had been half-blinded by silver shot, and though the lepers had pricked most of the tiny poison pellets out of his flesh, it would be a while yet before his parasite leech could heal him completely. By sticking to the water he avoided obstacles: he couldn't crash into things and further damage himself. But always he'd been aware of the furnace sun's rising, however gradual, and had known he must find shelter before its lethal rays could strike through the trees and discover him there.
And shortly, where the stream slowed, broadened out and flowed deep over its bed, in a cave under a rocky vine-draped outcrop that jutted over the water, there Nestor had collapsed on a shingly ledge and stretched himself out to sleep, hopefully to regain his strength. But sleep was difficult; he was not long awake following a night's rest in the place of the lepers; his mind wove this way and that as he considered and reconsidered his position, his chances.
Actually, they were good: so long as he stayed here in this cave through the hours of daylight, he would survive. At sundown, avoiding the makeshift camps of Travellers, he would venture north, climb the barrier mountains by the light of the stars, and send out a mindcall through the passes in the peaks to his Lieutenant Zahar Lichloathe, once Sucksthrall.
Upon a time, Zahar had been Vasagi the Suck's man; now Nestor's, he had taken his necromancer master's cognomen for his own. Lichloathe was the name that the Wamphyri of Wrathstack had given Nestor out of respect for his talent, which lay in tormenting corpses for their secrets. But it was not that Nestor loathed the dead, rather that they loathed him. As for the Wamphyri: they had grown to respect him, perhaps even to fear him in however small a degree. For with Nestor, something had come among them which seemed worse than dying: the dark and harrowing art of necromancy, by use of which an adept might carry vengeance even beyond death itself. It was an awesome talent. But torturing the dead in Wrathstack was a far cry from this bed of pebbles in a cool dark cave.
So Nestor had lain there making his plans: to climb the barrier mountains and call for Zahar, who would come for him with a flyer to bear him back to the last aerie. Before then, however, a seemingly endless day and the best part of a night had lain ahead, and Nestor would be wise to rest his mind and body both. Yet still sleep eluded him.
In part, it was the agony of rapid metamorphic healing; worse far, it was the terror of dreams he knew he must dream: of sloughing flesh and a crumbling ruin of a man shunned and forgotten, perhaps walled-up and abandoned, fretting to dust little by little in some cold, lonely Starside niche or crevice. A man called Nestor.
So he'd tossed and turned in a fever upon his pebble bed, and as the day wore on the air had grown heavier and more oppressive. Beyond the low mouth of his cave, dragonflies had danced over the slow-flowing water, where sunbeams glanced and sparkled like gold and silver fire on the ripples. It had all seemed so very peaceful out there, harmless; there had been a time in
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some misty mythical past when it was quite harmless, he felt sure. But now -
- Nestor could almost hear the sunlight seething like a refuse pit! Only let him venture beyond the mouth of this cave into those soft yellow rays ... they would eat him alive like the metal-molding acids of the Szgany east of the Great Pass, whose skills in the forging of war-gauntlets alone kept them safe from the raids of the Wamphyri! The sunlight would kill him, reduce him to so much smoke and stench, to tar and sticky black bones. For Nestor was a vampire, and the sun his mortal enemy. And yet it had not always been like this. Except ... he couldn't remember when or how it had been different!
In Nestor's early days in the last aerie, towering tall over Starside's barren boulder plains, he had frequently suffered from sleeplessness. Then the place had been alien to him, and full of fearsome sounds: weird sigh-ings, strange laughter, and screams - a great many of those. Eventually he'd discovered a trick, by means of which he might lull his jittery mind and thumping heart to sleep. It was a simple device: he would try to recall to memory details of that earlier time, before he became Wamphyri. All a waste of effort and useless as counting goats on a crag, for he rarely remembered anything of his life before those days he'd spent in the lonely home of Brad Berea, deep in the Sunside forest.
But in his cave by the gurgling stream, safe for the moment from his terror of the lepers and the sun alike, this time Nestor had tried a variation on the theme. He had attempted to recall all that had occurred since that night when he left the shelter of Brad Berea's cabin, to follow the coldly glittering Northstar and seek out the Wamphyri in Starside. And this time it had worked! Almost before Nestor could begin gathering his few
vague memories of pre-Wamphyri times together, at last he had fallen asleep.
Except his device worked better than he'd supposed, so that even whilst sleeping the chain of thought which he had set in motion continued. Thus, as Nestor's body rested and his metamorphic flesh worked unseen to repair itself, his dreaming mind recounted in vivid detail all of his morbid story.
But few men would have called it dreaming ...
At first it came in flashes:
Nestor's near-drowning ... the burly Brad Berea fishing on the riverbank somewhere east of Twin Fords, and saving Nestor's life when his body came drifting, head-down in the water. Then Brad's cabin .. . his daughter, Glina, who had wanted Nestor for his body. Well, she'd wanted something more than that: a man to call her own, and fill her lonely days and nights. He had been all of a man, certainly ... enough for any woman. As well, though, that she hadn't wanted a mind.
For Nestor had been an amnesiac. Damaged, his head broken, he had no memories, no past. Except a lone voice in the back of his mind, which was wont to repeat insistently, 'I am the Lord Nestor!' But only a notion, for obviously he was not Wamphyri. The sun didn't harm him; he ate common fare, like common men; his senses were less than a vampire's, indeed less than those of a whole man. No, it had been a fantasy, some lone fragment from lost times ... Or a forecast?
Glina made him a man - in part, anyway - but never a whole man. Pondering a vanished past, Nestor's mind was wont to wander; lacking the cohesion of memory, his brain and body seemed detached, as if he lived by the will of another. Knowing Glina's flesh and having
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her (or rather, being made love to by her) became instinctive, an automatic thing; so that in fact there was nothing of love in it. But with blood racing in his veins and his shaft rocking to and fro within her, passion of a kind would light in his eyes, and emotion of a sort blaze up in his heart. But it was never love. Glina had known that.
And sometimes at the climax of Nestor's strange cold passion, as he jerked to a crescendo in her body, she had sensed that he would like to kill her. For then at the height of their sex, his hands would leave her breasts and seek her throat, so that she must protect herself. Sometimes, too, she would hear him speak a name: Misha.
Misha! It had been like a curse, bitter as a wormy apple on his tongue. So that Glina had hated this Misha without even knowing her, because Nestor had known and loved her. Yes, and she'd hurt him more than Glina ever could. Or so Brad Berea's homely daughter suspected ...
Then came the night of the Wamphyri! .. . their flyers wafting high overhead ... the propulsors of their warriors making thunder and stenches in the clear night air! But the house of Brad Berea was hidden in a forest thicket, camouflaged, secret, secure. The Wamphyri passed by like swift-fleeting clouds, heading north for the Northstar, to Starside across the barrier range.
But Nestor had seen them; he felt their weird allure; and in the back of his mind, as always, a small but insistent voice repeating, 'I am the Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!' A vampire Lord? Perhaps he had been, upon a time, and now by some freak of misfortune was changed back to a man. One way or the other, he had to know.