Читать книгу The Giggling Ghosts: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4
ОглавлениеCHANGED MINDS
The girl stared at the derringer.
The gun was not much longer than the middle finger of the man who held it, and the barrels were one above the other so that looking into their maws was like looking at a fat black colon. She could have inserted her little fingers in either barrel without much difficulty. She could see the bullets, like lead-colored bald heads.
“This thing”—the man moved the derringer—“will do as much damage as any other gun.”
The girl moved, pressed herself into a corner of the elevator, and went through swallowing motions several times.
The man said, “When we get back to the lobby, we say the elevator operator fainted, see? Then you walk out with me.” He gestured again with the gun. “Make any cracks, sis, and they’ll be your epitaph!”
The girl tried to swallow again.
The man folded his newspaper carefully and tucked it in a pocket so it wouldn’t be left lying around for fingerprints. He stepped to the elevator controls. When the operator had dropped after being slugged, he had instinctively shifted the control lever to the center, so that the cage had come to a stop.
The man set the control at, “Down.” He seemed confident. He leaned against the side of the cage, cocking an eye on the girl, whistling idly as he waited. Abruptly his confidence got a puncture.
“What the devil?” he gulped.
The elevator was not going down. It was going up. Up! The man doubled over, stared at the controls. The handle was on “Down.” But the cage was going up.
The man yanked at the handle, thinking control markings might be reversed—but the cage kept going up. The controls now seemed to have absolutely no effect on the elevator.
The man’s mind leaped instantly to the conclusion that he was in a fantastic trap. He made snarling noises, even fired his derringer at the elevator controls, but accomplished nothing except to deafen himself and the girl.
His eyes, searching for escape, found the safety escape hatch in the top of the cage. He jumped at that until he got it open. With a great deal of grunting, kicking and snarling, he managed to pull himself through the hatch at the top of the slowly rising cage.
The girl let him go.
The man crouched on top of the cage; there was no stable footing. He clutched at a cable to steady himself, but the cable was moving, and he cursed.
The elevator was rising very slowly, although it was an express lift, and expresses in this building normally traveled at high speed. Obviously there was some kind of emergency mechanism in operation.
The skyscraper was served by a battery of elevators, all operating side by side. There was no division between the shafts—only the vertical steel tracks on which the cages operated.
The man peered upward, saw another cage descending in the adjacent shaft. He made a lightning decision to take a long chance; he jumped for the top of the other cage as it passed. And he made it!
The elevator in which Miami Davis was left alone with the senseless operator continued its snail-like progress upward.
The girl stood with her back against the cage, palms pressing against the side panels. When the elevator stopped, the girl took hold of her lower lip with her teeth and giggled a little.
For a moment there was silence.
Then, outside, a voice spoke. An unusual voice. It was a calm voice, with a remarkable tonal inflection, a quality of repressed power.
“The door will be opened in a moment,” the unusual voice said. “The best thing you can do is to come out peacefully.”
A moment later, the elevator door did open, and Miami Davis saw a giant bronze man.
The bronze man was so remarkable that she knew instinctively that his was the voice which had spoken a moment before. It had been a striking voice, and this bronze giant was striking.
There was a symmetry about his physical development which took away from his apparent size, until he was viewed at close range. He seemed normally built at a distance. His features were regular, his skin was an unusual bronze hue, and he had eyes that were like pools of flake gold being stirred by tiny winds.
The bronze man stood not more than a pace in front of the elevator door—where, Miami Davis thought suddenly, he could have been shot down by any gunman inside the elevator.
The bronze man was so close that he saw the elevator was empty, except for Miami Davis and the unconscious operator.
“You slug the operator?” the bronze man demanded.
Miami Davis shook her head and giggled. “No, I——”
“There has been trouble before in elevators that lead up here,” the bronze man said. “We installed a mechanical device, that, if the operator doesn’t hold the control in a certain fashion, causes the cage to rise slowly to this floor. Also, an alarm bell rings. Now what happened?”
Miami Davis heard an electric bell buzzing steadily somewhere. Probably that was the alarm which the bronze man had said rang when something went wrong in the elevators.
“There was a man in here.” She pointed at the roof of the cage. “He climbed out. I think he jumped to a cage in another shaft.”
From below came shot sounds: two reports; a pause about long enough for the man to have reloaded the derringer followed; then came two more reports.
A man screeched. The screech was faint, with an eerie quality lent by the great distance it traveled up through the elevator shaft.
“You see!” the girl gasped. “He’s down below! Shooting!”
Miami Davis then stepped out of the elevator, advanced—brought up with a gasp. She had walked into something she couldn’t see! She explored with her hands. Bulletproof glass, she decided. It must be that.
She fumbled for a way around. The panel was like a fence in front of the elevator door. No wonder the bronze man had felt so safe!
The bronze giant moved to a second elevator, entered, and sent the cage down. This was a private lift, and it sank with almost the same speed with which it would have fallen free, then brought up at the first floor with enough force to cause the bronze man to brace himself. He got out.
People were running around in the lobby, and the proprietor of the cigar stand was under the counter for safety. Out on the street, a cop was blowing his whistle furiously.
“Anyone hurt?” the bronze man asked.
“Something queer just happened, Mr. Savage. A man rode down on top of one of the cages. We started to ask him questions. He fought his way out.”
“He shoot anybody?”
“No, Mr. Savage. He had a derringer, and you can’t hit much with one of them things.”
The bronze man went out to the street.
A cop said, “He got away, Mr. Savage. A guy in a car picked him up.”
When Doc Savage returned to the eighty-sixth floor, Miami Davis had given up trying to get past the bulletproof glass around the elevator door.
She had discovered the panel did not quite reach to the ceiling, and that accounted for her having been able to speak to the bronze man. She didn’t feel like trying to climb over the top.
Doc Savage went to a wall panel in the corridor, opened it, and disclosed a recess containing small levers. He moved a lever and an electric motor whirred and the glass panel sank into the floor, its edge then forming part of the modernistic design of the floor. Miami Davis looked at the bronze man.
“What I read about you in the newspapers must’ve been straight stuff,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I read you were a remarkable guy with a lot of scientific gimmicks.”
“Oh.”
“And I was told that your business is helping people out of trouble. Is that right?”
“It isn’t far from the truth,” the bronze man admitted.
“I’ve got trouble. That’s why I am here.” Miami Davis made a grim mouth. “More trouble than I thought, it begins to seem.”
Doc Savage led the way into a reception room which was furnished with a huge safe, an exquisitely inlaid table, a deep rug and comfortable chairs.
The window afforded a startling view of Manhattan spires, and an open door gave a glimpse of another room—a great paneled room, where all available floor space was occupied by bookcases.
“Have a chair, please.”
The girl sat down weakly.
“Now, suppose you give me some idea about this trouble of yours,” Doc Savage suggested.
“That man on the elevator tried to stop me from coming here——”
“Go back to the beginning.”
“Oh—well—” Miami Davis took a moment to assemble her information. “It began this afternoon when I saw the ghost sneaking into a water-front storehouse and I followed it.”
“Ghost?”
“Well—I thought so.”
The girl giggled a little, helplessly.
“You were curious and followed a ghost into a storehouse,” Doc Savage said. “So far, it’s—well, unusual. But go on.”
“Then I began to giggle,” the girl said. She shuddered.
“You what?”
“Giggled.”
“I see.”
Miami Davis knotted and unknotted her hands. “It sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
“Well, at least extraordinary,” the bronze man admitted.
“It was horrible! Something just—just came over me. I seemed to go all to pieces. It frightened me. So I fled from the storehouse.”
“And after you fled from the storehouse, then what?”
Miami Davis did not look at Doc Savage. “A policeman told me about you. It just occurred to him you might be interested. So I came here.”
Doc Savage’s metallic features gave no indication of what he might be thinking.
“Let us hope,” he said unexpectedly, “that you are telling the whole story.”
“Oh, but I am.”
