Читать книгу Cold Death - Kenneth Robeson - Страница 4

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SHORTLY before the eight o'clock telephone call made by Doc Savage, a battered old roadster turned off a paved New Jersey highway. Headlight beams laid ghostly fingers across a foggy strip of marshland.

When he was perhaps a mile and a half from the main highway, the driver abruptly switched off the lights. He parked the little car in concealment of bushes beside a crooked lane.

Climbing from the car, the driver walked cautiously ahead. Dim lights made a blur in the fog. They indicated some habitation.

Close up, this might have been seen to be an old log house. It appeared to squat gloomily in the murky depths of the Jersey marsh. The bulk of its presence was marked only by faint illumination from an upper window and one slanting finger of dancing, vari-colored light emanating from what seemed a mere slit at ground level.

From the basement, or some underground chamber, came a low throbbing. A trained observer would have said delicate machinery of some sort was being operated. Apparently, there was but one outside watcher. And his figure was only a furtive shadow among other sinister shadows cast by this strange, penetrating light.

At times, the escaping light gave forth a rainbow glow.

A rutty, obscure road that was little more than a twisting trail through overgrowths of waving swamp grass apparently was the only traffic communication between the old house and the highway of civilization, some two miles distant.

Across the swamp a pair of telephone wires had been strung along available trees, most of them gaunt-limbed and dead.

In the upper story of the old house there was no movement. Except for the faint light at the one window, there was no evidence the structure was then occupied by a living person.

THE man from the roadster apparently feared something or some one within the old log house. As he walked, it might have been observed he was a vague, catlike figure. He kept to the tall marsh grass beside the road, pausing every few yards to listen intently.

In the swamp at a point off the road, some considerable distance from the old house, was a single glowing eye of fire. The man hissed an oath under his breath. He crossed the soggy, yielding ground with such quick lightness his feet seemed to leave no imprints.

Before he reached the spot, the red eye of fire winked out.

"Hunter maybe," the man murmured. "Well, he's picked a poor spot for a camp."

As if the possible presence of another human no longer interested him, the luminous-eyed man retraced his steps. He glanced at the radium hands of a wrist watch.

"The time is near," he mumbled, "if old Jackson hasn't been having hallucinations."

Picking out a slightly higher, dry spot some two hundred yards to one side of the house, the thin figure became a motionless part of the deeper marsh shadows. His thin lips continued to emit whispered words.

"The great Doc Savage will be calling at eight o'clock, or old Jackson has guessed him wrong."

Again he glanced at his watch. It lacked five minutes to eight o'clock. There was no doubt but he had some objective which was closely related with the phone call Doc Savage had been requested to make from Manhattan.

"It won't work out," he muttered suddenly through gritted teeth. "And Doc Savage saw me. I could feel him looking at the back of my head. I never really touched him, but somehow I believe he knew I was there."

The radium hands of the wrist watch showed two minutes to eight o'clock. To the watcher's apparently raw-nerved senses, the lonely marsh had become alive with voices. His teeth chewed nervously at his lower lip.

He glanced at a dead-armed tree. It seemed almost as if he were waiting to read the message that might go out over the wires he knew were strung there. The thin threads of communication between this eerie desolation and the teeming modern heart of Manhattan.

One minute to eight o'clock. The spear of multi-colored light piercing the slit of the underground window of the squatting old house winked out. The wind moaned a little, as if the withdrawal of the rainbow gleam were a signal.

The catlike man became rigid. He glanced over his shoulder. The red eyes of fire deeper in the marsh had not reappeared. Perhaps this unexpected camper was no longer in the swamp.

Eight o'clock.

From the heart of the marsh, from no definite direction, came a low whirring sound, vicious as the warning of a poisonous rattler.

The cat-eyed watcher had reared to his feet. He had turned and was running away. The soggy ground of the swamp rocked and swayed. The earth heaved with a convulsive, shuddering blast.

THE explosion started at the place of the old house. A knife of giant flame shot upward and moved with ripping effect across the marsh.

The fleeing man was twice hurled from his feet. Each time, his face and clothing were befouled by the ooze in which he fell.

The man staggered at last to the side road. The slicing destruction that had seemed almost to be racing with him, had died as swiftly as it had come. The blast had been accompanied by an expanding phosphorescent glowing of steely blue light.

As the fugitive from his own apparent terror reached the spot where he had concealed his roadster, darkness again had enwrapped the silence that was of itself, by contrast, terrific. Over all of the marsh, the air had taken on an icy chill.

The dank, sulphuric odor of death permeated the country for many miles. Shuddering, the man leaped into the roadster. He glanced only once at the place where the old log house had squatted evilly in the marsh.

Only blackness, emptiness was there. There was no light of any sort. Not even the deeper, bulking shadow that had been the house.

Something like hatred twisted the man's thin face. His lips slavered and his eyes burned. Then he turned the old roadster and sent it leaping away over the rutty side road toward the main highway.