Читать книгу The Majii: A Doc Savage Adventure - J. Allan Dunn - Страница 5
ОглавлениеMAKER OF HORROR
The veiled woman looked down at him and made some slight sound which in her land meant ridicule and disgust.
“You see,” she said. “He awakened before he lost his ears.”
There was absolutely no expression on the round, shiny head on the pillow. The eyes were open, but did not shift. The mouth was open, but the lips did not move when words came.
It was as if the weird-looking fellow were a corpse into the mouth of which a ventriloquist was throwing speech. He spoke English.
“To abuse the dead is sacrilege,” he said. “But maybe your sin is mitigated because you do not have the mind to conceive my powers, my abilities and my condition. To you, I am the enigma of omnipotence, the——”
“You are a clever old fake,” snapped the woman. “You are no different from other men, except certainly, more ugly. Now, you will tell me about those jewels, or my men will take your ears, after the fashion in my land.”
“You are from Jondore?” asked Rama Tura.
“I,” said the woman, “am the Ranee, the widow of the Nizam, ruler of all Jondore, descendant of rulers.”
“Your voice had a familiar sound,” murmured the strange-looking being on the bed. “Why are you here?”
“I will tell you, old fakir,” the woman said angrily. “I am in New York by chance. I was making a trip around the world. And here I heard of this jewel-making seance of yours. I cabled my late husband’s brother, Kadir Lingh, present ruler of Jondore, that I intended to investigate you.”
She hesitated.
“I have a hideous suspicion,” she said.
Rama Tura showed a slight sign of life. “What suspicion?”
The woman did not answer directly, but snapped. “Your organization is wide. I have reason to think my cable did not reach Jondore. I have been followed, my movements checked by men of Jondore. Your men! Once, they shot at me!”
“This cannot be true,” murmured Rama Tura.
“To-night I started to see a man who can handle things like this,” snapped the woman. “I was attacked. Later, I found watchers about the headquarters of the man I wanted to see. They were your men.”
“Who is this one you intended to see?” Rama Tura queried.
“Doc Savage,” said the Ranee. “But you know that.”
“Ah,” murmured Rama Tura.
“You are a devil incarnate,” the Ranee told Rama Tura grimly. “You are scheming to take the lives of many people, in order to accomplish an insane scheme.”
But Rama Tura seemed interested in Doc Savage.
“Of living men,” he said tonelessly, “it may be that Doc Savage has greatest knowledge, but his learning is of the material and the so-called scientific. He has not touched the abstract and invisible, the real power of concentrated thought as a concrete entity.”
“Drivel,” said the Ranee.
“Can Doc Savage make jewels of pebbles?” queried Rama Tura.
“You cannot, either,” snapped the veiled woman. “And you are going to stop it! Otherwise, I am going to put Doc Savage and the police both upon your trail. I am going to tell them what is behind your actions.”
“And what is behind it?” Rama Tura queried.
The woman swallowed. She seemed to brace herself.
“The Majii,” she said.
Rama Tura looked very much as if he had been struck.
“So you have fathomed it,” he mumbled hoarsely.
That, in turn, had a profound effect on the Ranee, for it was obvious now that her early conception had been only a grisly suspicion, but that Rama Tura’s words had convinced her that she had guessed the sinister truth.
“Seize him!” she shrilled at her two companions. “If he is put out of the way now, it will save countless lives!”
Rama Tura sat bolt upright in his bed. His body was a pitiful string of bones. His chest resembled a gnarled, thin brown root. He was entirely hideous to the eye.
“I fear,” he said, “that I shall have to demonstrate.”
He sat perfectly still after that, and if at first he had been unwholesome, a brown, lecherous harridan, he was more so now, seeming to emanate an aura of the indescribable.
There came into the room the feeling of a tomb, the very real yet somewhat impossible sensation which comes upon those who stand in the presence of those that no longer live.
The Ranee struggled visibly against the feeling.
“Old buzzard!” she snapped. “You have practiced these tricks all of your life. Of course you are good at them!”
Rama Tura said nothing. His eyes had not moved. His mouth had not closed.
Suddenly, there appeared in the far side of the room an incredible thing, a monster of shapelessness, a fantastic ogre of a thing.
The Ranee, her two guards, stared at it. The light from the bedlamp hardly reached that far, and they could not make out the exact identity of the thing, except that it was a creature possessing eyes, and so large that it might have difficulty getting entirely into the room.
The air in the room began to change, to take on a definite odor, vague, repulsive, a bit warm, as if it might be the breath of the horror which had appeared so weirdly and was watching them.
“It is my servant,” the death-faced Rama Tura said tonelessly. “It is here for a purpose.”
The Ranee continued to stare.
“It is my guard,” said the man in the bed again, referring to the thing in the door. “It is lent to me by my master, the Majii. It does strange things to men.”
As if in verification to his words, both the guards now did an incredible an unbelievable thing. They presented their own guns to their own heads and calmly committed suicide. A single long breath could have been drawn between the time the first hit the floor and the other followed him.
The Ranee made a hissing sound of horror, spun and ran wildly. She did not go toward the door and the thing she could see there, but toward another door, and tore it open wildly, finding beyond a sitting room, a luxurious parlor of a place.
She plunged on and slammed against another door, which was unlocked and let her, luckily, out into the corridor, from which a passing elevator cage carried her, silent and quivering, to the street.
The night swallowed her.
