Читать книгу Murder Melody - Kenneth Robeson - Страница 3

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THE earth shook. Tall fir trees swayed. Brittle branches snapped. Loosened stones clattered from a lighted tower. These bounded and plummeted several hundred feet. They splashed in a turmoil of white-slashed blue water.

The tower was a government lookout station. It was concreted at the peak of a rocky wall. Lights of red and white knifed alternately into the misted darkness. Their timed luminance guided shipping into and out of Burrard Inlet, the canyon-deep harbor of Vancouver. Their radiance could be picked up far out over the Bay of Georgia.

On a trail hewn through the firs back of the lookout tower a tall man staggered, holding his balance. His compactly knitted figure seemed to have been poured into his garments. Small bulbs of incandescence were haloed by the fog. These were spaced at intervals of perhaps a hundred yards along the woodland trail.

This dim illumination revealed the passage of some inner pain across the man's regularly molded features. His face was of the smoothest texture. He might have been an actor grease-painted with a silvery mixture. Even in this misted gloom it glowed strangely.

Under the man's feet the ground trembled. The earth jerked spasmodically. The motion was both lateral and forward. The man stumbled as he walked toward an iron bench placed in a secluded niche.

Dried cones from a lone pine tree pelted about the bench. The quivering earth rumbled as if some monster of tremendous size and weight were stalking past. Though he was apparently the only person in the many square miles of Vancouver's wilderness park, the man on the bench began talking. He spoke rapidly, but not loudly.

As the terse, clear words tumbled from his twitching lips, the man fumbled with the buttons set in a double row along a tuniclike garment. Except for unusual looseness and length, the garment might have been a vest.

One hand found a button. The fingers lingered upon it. They pressed inward and turned the button slightly. Immediately there was another voice. This was faint, but its enunciation was clear.

"Three Zoromen have departed. Andro, Namos and Lamo. Beware! Write quickly the message as instructed."

The word Zoromen was spoken as if this was the name of a clan. The speech had that perfection which a well-educated foreigner gives to a new language. The man on the bench spoke only three words in reply to the mysterious voice.

"Lanta is understood."

Through the rumbling of the apparent earthquake a weird melody had been permeating the misty night. This was low but shrill, as if played upon a flute. Its cadence became higher. The mystic music was drifting nearer.

WITH the three final words, the man quickly pulled a roll of dull yellow substance from under his coat. He next produced what might have been a stylographic pencil. This gleamed in the misty light. A section of the yellowish roll was removed.

The man already was sagging forward. But the parchment-like scrap was on his knee. He wrote rapidly with the stylographic instrument. The yellowish roll fell among the rotting leaves at his feet.

The shrill, piercing melody increased in volume. Shadowy figures flitted among the still-shaking bushes in the vicinity of the bench in the isolated niche. The man upon it was no longer sitting erect. He was doubled over in a silent contortion of agony. The stylographic instrument dropped to the ground. The man's feet shuffled it into the loose gravel.

Under a repetition of the earth shock of a minute before, one towering tree snapped near its base and came crashing down. The tree was an ancient spruce. The supporting ground had betrayed it after two centuries of growth.

The man of the shining face clapped both hands to his ears as if to exclude the weird melody. His body crumpled on the bench. He writhed as if he were being tortured. One hand came slowly downward.

He thrust a small yellow roll into his mouth.

"It is done, Lanta," he gasped.

As if the little roll of yellow parchment had cut off his breath, the man stiffened and died. The eerie melody ceased abruptly. The bushes behind the bench, rustling as the ground trembled, closed like a green wall upon the shadows that had been near.

THE mysterious earthquake, which apparently had made Stanley Park, on the Bay of Georgia front of Vancouver, one of its damaging centers, was recorded on the seismograph at the University of British Columbia. The first awakened savant to reach the observatory of the provincial university saw the recording stylograph had fixed the time of the first shock at four and a half seconds after two a. m.

From the sharply defined inclination of the lines, the center of the tremor seemed to have been under the barrier mountains to the northward. This serrated range of peaks and canyons extended from back of North Vancouver, across Burrard Inlet, past The Narrows for several miles to the lighthouse promontory in the Bay of Georgia.

Other members of the university faculty were awakening to find telephone inquiries and reports pouring in.

Chimneys had been shaken down in North Vancouver.

Rocks were still rolling from the heights and blocking the highway along the northern shore through the suburban section of West Bay.

White Cliff reported windows broken, dishes rattled and the summer residents fleeing to boats.

After the second mysterious temblor, which followed at an interval of one and three-quarter minutes, Nanaimo and Victoria on Vancouver Island, reported lesser effects from the quake. Port Angeles on the American side, and much of the Olympic Peninsula, had experienced slight tremors.

Much slighter recording on the seismograph at Washington University in Seattle brought the quick deduction that the earthquake was unusually localized.

"This is a strange coincidence," remarked one of the professors at the University of British Columbia. "The two American coasts have had similar tremors within forty-eight hours."

His fellow savants recalled the newspaper accounts of only the previous day. These had been, briefly:

Fishing villages and towns in the vicinity of Provincetown, Mass., at an early hour today, were visited by slight but distinct earthquake shocks. The seismograph at the University of Harvard recorded the center of the disturbance 77½ miles from Harvard--at Provincetown. Audiences fled from motion picture theaters and apartment buildings, but none has been reported injured. A Coast Guard station reported the shock was such as might have been caused by some ship being blown up at sea.

SELDOM is an earthquake so accurately anticipated as to have a recording close to its point of origin. Such was the case with this mysterious double tremor in the British Columbia mountains.

A tall, bony man was standing with two others near the cement reservoir topping the main trait above the zoological gardens in Vancouver's Stanley Park. At the moment the trembling earth and the weird wailing melody sent the man staggering to die on the bench below the lookout station, the skeletonish figure placed a leather, boxlike case on the ground.

The lid of the case was opened. There was a low whirring sound from the leather-covered box. A stylographic needle moved so sharply it jumped from the recording roll. The only light was a finger as thin as a pencil playing upon the portable seismograph.

"This prearranged phenomenon might well be merely some combustible manifestation," spoke the dry voice of the bony man. "We are at considerable distance from the identified geological fault from which a major temblor might be promulgated."

"It don't seem possible," piped up a thin voice, all the more remarkable because the childish tone was emitted from a barrel chest set between shoulders a jungle gorilla might have envied. "You think, Johnny, that's what's doin' it?"

The first speaker, "Johnny," or world-noted as William Harper Littlejohn, eminent geologist and archeologist, never employed words of only one or two syllables when multi-syllables would serve.

The second speaker was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, a quite impressive and dignified name for his quite undignified person. For his long, dangling arms, his sloping forehead and general anthropoidal contour had given him the name of "Monk." Though Johnny's high flights in the English language often went far over his head, Monk was one of the world's greatest industrial chemists.

The seismograph needle continued its abrupt gyrations. Johnny steadied the case by holding it in his long, thin hands.

The third man, the one holding the flashlight with its steady pencil ray, swayed easily to the movement of the jumping ground. He was in darkness like the others, but the slight reflection from the pencil ray showed a face of smooth, golden bronze. His eyes, too, were of a flaky golden hue.

Just now, as he watched the demonstration being given by Johnny, the bronze man's eyes were stirred by whirlwinds of motion, as if they were pools suddenly rippled. His voice seemed low when he spoke, but it was possessed of a carrying, penetrating quality that made each calm, unhurried word distinct.

"Perhaps our friend will arrive with the demonstration," he stated. "It was exactly two o'clock."

As if his words had signaled it, an eerie, flutelike melody quivered through the grumble of the complaining ground.

"Whatcha hear, Doc?" questioned Monk instantly.

Johnny shifted the recording seismograph and peered intently into the gloomy tunnel of the main trail under the canopy of firs.

"Is some one approaching? I haven't heard anything but the underground rifling of strata."

Both men then shifted their gaze to Doc.

The eerie melody, though it was faint, was similar in its musical running of the scale to the weird whistling emanation which always came from Doc Savage in periods of deep concentration or at the moment of some impending happening. The companions of the bronze man always took it to mean that danger; swift action might be expected in such a moment.

The weird music really was coming from up the main trail.

Doc snapped off the generator flashlight. For seconds he stood as motionless as a carved rock. The heaving of the ground did not disturb the bronze man's balance. His massively corded legs were immovable as pillars of granite.

When Doc Savage spoke, the weird wailing in the distance continued.

"The woman has spoken the truth," he said quietly. "There is danger. We shall investigate."

JOHNNY and Monk knew the bronze man referred to the mysterious message which had brought the world's most amazing adventurer and his five companions to the British Columbia coast. This message had required much extra postage because of its weight, though it had been contained in an envelope of ordinary size.

The letter had been addressed simply to "Clark Savage Jr., New York City." Such general address was sufficient. The postal authorities of the big city knew of only one such man. His regular address was the eighty-sixth floor of Manhattan's most impressive skyscraper.

The message had been sent by registered mail from Seattle. It was unique in that the "paper" on which it was written was not paper at all. It was thinner than the average onionskin parchment, but it was very heavy.

For it was, amazingly enough, of rolled gold leaf, virgin gold.

The writing upon this was stylographic, couched in perfect English. The words seemed to have been etched into the gold leaf with what might have been "silver ink," or some similar chemical.

Doc had known instantly a woman had written it. A young woman. The letters were firmly formed. The style was gracefully flowing.

The bronze man had read the character of the writer. He knew she was a girl of determined and extraordinary personality.

The message read:

Clark Savage, Jr.--Your safety is threatened. Watch Aleutian Islands. Come to Stanley Park, Vancouver, B. C., at 2 a. m. on the 16th. Be at old reservoir above zoological gardens. Perhaps slight earth shaking will precede my messenger. You will learn more.

This message had been unsigned. The uncanny intuition of Doc Savage made him know when one of the countless communications he received was of great importance. Then he had received the letter the previous day. About that time came the inexplicable temblor in the New England coastal region.

Doc and his five companions had arrived on Burrard Inlet in two of his special airplanes only this evening. One of the planes had immediately taken off for the north, at Doc's order.

AS always, when the bronze man said, "We shall investigate," he was already many yards in advance of Johnny and Monk. The three followed the gloomy tunnel of the main trail in the direction from which the queer melody had come.

Doc's swift gliding movement always was soundless. Johnny was likewise jungle trained to catlike progress. Monk's feet scuffed some in the trail gravel. The hands at the ends of his long arms swung below his knees.

The occasionally spaced light bulbs gave them little illumination. Doc's ultrasensitive ears, however, were guiding him directly to the secluded bench on which a man was in the final throes of death. The bronze man's auditory nerves were several times as selective as those of an ordinary man.

Doc surprised the others by suddenly placing his finger tips in his ears. For some reason, he was not surprised when this did not seem to lessen the impact of the music. It had a knifelike piercing quality.

"Sounds like a whole hive of giant bees," stated Johnny. "And I can almost feel them stinging."

"Nothin' but some dag-goned mosquitoes buzzin' around," complained Monk, slapping at his small ears buried in tufts of gristly hair.

"Keep your ears plugged," advised Doc. "This is strange to me."

Johnny and Monk hastily followed their leader's example. Anything which might be strange to the bronze man must be strange indeed.

Even with his ears thus stopped by his fingers, Doc heard the final, faint scuffling of a man's feet in the dead leaves and gravel just off the main trail.

The earth shook again. The weird music ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The rumbling crash of the dead tree obliterated all other sound.

Doc had led the way around the trunk of a massive fir tree.

Here the yellowish, misty glow of the string of trail lights played into a niche where sat a bench. The bench was of carved iron. It was painted green.

"Some guy's sleepin' on it," whispered Monk. "Gosh! You'd think all them trees jumpin' and crackin' woulda waked him up!"

Doc had glided to the bench. His flashlight was held down close, its presence nearly obscured by his corded bronze hands.

"This one will never awaken," he said quietly.

He was lifting the man's head.

"Looks like he has been strangled," said Johnny. "Say, he's wearing some kind of make-up!"

Doc said nothing. He lifted the dead man's head gently. The mouth of the corpse was gaping open. The man had every appearance of having been choked.

But there was total absence of any discoloration such as would appear from strangulation. The man's thin throat bore no marks of any character.

The face was smooth, even calm. It had a silvery glowing texture, which had caused Johnny to remark the make-up effect. The skin seemed poreless, as if encased in a layer of tinfoil, only of a much finer color.

Outwardly, the man was normally clad. A tan raincoat was pulled around his body. Doc lifted the man's chin. The mouth gaped open with ghastly effect. The raincoat fell open.

"Lookit!" exclaimed Monk. "He's the fella was playin' that crazy tune, Doc!"

THEY could see the dead man apparently carried no weapon. Under his coat was a curious, tightly woven shirt of some silken substance. It came down like a tunic. Glass buttons of an obsidian character ornamented the front of the garment, but they were irregularly spaced. They were not employed to fasten the garment.

Monk pushed forward. A slender metal tube was sticking under what seemed to be the loose belt of the tunic. Doc said nothing as Monk removed the instrument. The bronze man's fingers had moved so rapidly the eyes of his companions had not followed them.

He had removed a small roll of papery gold from the throat of the corpse.

Johnny took the slender tube from Monk. He fiddled it over his long, thin fingers. He tested it experimentally with a thumbnail. The weight of it was obtained by delicately balancing it over his finger tips.

"This is an example of remarkable metallurgical craftsmanship," concluded Johnny. "This has one-fifth the specific gravity of aluminum with a carboniferous molecular density. I have never before encountered such an alloy."

"Huh?" piped up Monk's childish treble. "It ain't nothin' but one of them flutes what the fella plays marchin' in that picture of Washington crossin' the Delaware in the Revolutionary War."

Monk's knowledge of chemistry was vast, but history was mostly an unexplored region to him.

"That dead man's the fella was playin' it, I'll betcha," Monk added. "I used to know how to blow a horn. Lemme show yuh."

One of his hairy paws extracted the flutelike instrument from Johnny's hands. Monk placed it to his lips.

Doc hardly seemed to move. But the "flute" did not reach Monk's mouth for him to demonstrate how he had once blown a horn.

"It was death music," stated Doc. "But this man was not playing it."