Читать книгу The Czar of Fear: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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The midget radio squawked away noisily beside a cardboard sign which read: “Our Special To-day—Roast Beef Plate Lunch, Twenty-five Cents.”

The man on the lunch-room stool sat sidewise, so he could watch the door. His eyes were staring; pale fright rode his face. He wolfed his sandwich as if it had no taste, and gulped at his fourth mug of scalding coffee. He was tall, light-haired, twentyish.

One of the two women beside him was also tall and light-haired, and in her twenties. She was some degrees more than pretty—hers was a striking beauty. A mud-freckled raincoat and a waterlogged felt hat seemed to enhance her charm.

Her eyes were dark-blue pools of fear.

The other woman was a pleasant-faced grandmother type. Around sixty was probably her age. She had a stout, efficient look. Her cheeks were ruddy as apples, and pleasant little wrinkles crow-tracked from her eyes.

Her jaw had a grim set, as if she expected trouble, and was steeled to meet it. She was not eating, and she was watching the door more intently than the man.

The young man and the girl were obviously brother and sister. The elderly woman was no relative, but they called her Aunt Nora.

“You had better eat, Aunt Nora,” said the girl. Her voice was liquid, quiet, with a faint quaver that went with the terror in her eyes. “It is more than an hour’s drive to New York. And we may be very busy for several hours, trying to find Doc Savage.”

“Eat!” Aunt Nora snorted. “How can I, Alice? The way you and Jim are acting takes a body’s appetite away. Bless your Aunt Nora, honey! You children are acting like two rabbits about to be caught!”

The girl forced a faint smile, reached over impulsively, and gripped the older woman’s arm.

“You’re a brick, Aunt Nora,” she said gratefully. “You are just as scared as we are. But you have control enough not to show it.”

“Humph!” Sniffing, Aunt Nora grabbed her sandwich. Squaring both elbows on the white counter, she began to eat.

Rain purred on the lunch-room roof. It crawled like pale jelly down the windows. It fogged the street of the little New Jersey town. The gutters flowed water the color of lead.

The little radio made steady noise. It was picking up canned music from Prosper City, a manufacturing town in the Allegheny Mountains. Aunt Nora had tuned it to the Prosper City station when they first entered the lunch-room.

“Good little set,” she said, nodding at the instrument. “Prosper City is quite a ways off, and the set brings in——”

She stood up suddenly, splayed both hands tightly to her cheeks, and screamed.

The young man whipped off his stool and spun to face the radio. His face was distorted; his eyes bulged.

His sister also leaped erect, crying out shrilly. Her coffee cup, knocked to the concrete floor, broke with a hollow crackle.

Even the noise of the breaking cup was not enough to drown the strange sound which had come abruptly from the radio.

It was a tolling, like the slow note of a big, listless bell. Mixed with the reverberations was an unearthly dirge of moaning and wailing. The din might have been the frenzied crying of some harpy horde of the ether, shepherded by the moribund clangor of the hideous bell.

The lunch-room proprietor got off his stool behind the cash register. He was startled, but more by the terrified actions of his three customers than by the hideous uproar from the radio. However, the bewildered stare he directed at the set showed he had never heard this sound before.

The fanfare in the radio ended as unexpectedly as it had arisen. The lunch-room owner smiled, evidently from relief at the thought that he would not have to pay a repair bill. The three customers stood in a sort of white-faced, frozen immobility.

Rain strings washed moistly on the roof and swept the street like the semi-transparent straws of a great broom.

Aunt Nora was first to break the rigid silence.

“Prosper City is around three hundred miles from here,” she said hoarsely. “It’s not likely the Green Bell was tolling for us—that time!”

“I suppose—not,” blond Alice shuddered violently. “But that sound was the Green Bell, and it always means death!”

Jim made his voice harsh to hide a quaver. “Let’s get out of here!”

They paid a puzzled, curious proprietor for their lunch, and also for the broken cup. He watched them leave, then shrugged, winked at his cook, and tapped his forehead. He had decided his three late customers had been slightly touched with insanity.

A somewhat ancient touring car stood at the curb, forlorn in the rain. The side curtains were up, but the windows were cracked, some entirely gone, and the car interior was almost as damp as the drizzling dusk.

“Got plenty of gas, son?” Aunt Nora asked with gruff kindness.

Jim roved his fear-ridden eyes alertly. “Sure. You remember we had her filled at the last town. The gauge isn’t working, but the tank should be nearly full.”

Starter gears gritted worn teeth. Sobbing, the motor pulled the old car away in the streaming gloom, in the direction of New York.

A few seconds after the elderly machine had gone, a blot stirred under the trees which lined the village street. In the dripping murk, it seemed to possess neither substance nor form.

Down the street, a lighted window made pale luminance across the walk. The moving black blotch entered this glow. It suddenly became a thing of grisly reality.

There was, however, little of a human being about its appearance.

It was tall, tubular, and black. It might have been a flexible cylinder of black rubber standing on end, had an observer chanced to glimpse it in the fitful light.

On the front of the thing, standing out lividly, was the likeness of a bell. The design was done in a vile green.

Close against the sepia form hung a tin pail of ten gallons capacity. It was full to the brim with gasoline. Gripped in the same indistinguishable black tentacles which held the pail was a long rubber siphon hose of the type used to draw fuel from automobile tanks.

The dusk and the rain sucked the eerie figure into a wet black maw.

A moment later, a moist slosh denoted the bucket being emptied. Smell of gasoline seeped along the street, arising from the gutters where the stuff was flowing away.

Silence now enwrapped the small town, broken only by the sound of the rain and the occasional moan of a car down the main street, which was traversed by one of the main highways leading to New York.

The ancient touring car was laboring along at perhaps forty miles an hour. Jim drove, hunched far over the wheel, wan face close to a small arc the swiping windshield wiper kept clear of water.

The two women huddled in the rear, raincoats drawn tight against the spray which sheeted through the broken side curtains.

“I guess—that belling—couldn’t have been meant for us,” the girl, Alice, said jerkily.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that!” Jim called back sharply.

Aunt Nora leaned forward, jaw out, arms akimbo.

“Jim Cash, you know something you haven’t been telling us women!” she said, almost screaming to get her voice above the roar of car and rain. “I can see it in your actions! You know more about the Green Bell than you let on—what the thing is, or something! You can’t fool me! You do know!”

Jim Cash replied nothing.

Aunt Nora snapped: “Answer me, boy!”

“You’re a good guesser, Aunt Nora,” Jim managed a gray smile.

“What is it?” Aunt Nora bounced forward anxiously. “What do you know?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Why?”

“For the good and simple reason that it would mark you for death! Alice, too! The Green Bell would kill you so you couldn’t tell what you know!”

“Rubbish!” Aunt Nora tried to sound as if she meant it. “They would have no way of telling——”

“Yes, they would, aunty. It looks like they know everything.”

Aunt Nora whitened. The tendons stood out on her plump hands.

“Listen, sonny—is the Green Bell aware that you know what you do?”

Jim Cash squirmed, almost losing control of the car.

“I don’t know!” he cried shrilly, wildly. “Maybe he does! I’m not sure! The suspense—expecting death any instant, and in the same breath wondering if I’m not safe enough—has been getting me! It’s driving me crazy!”

Aunt Nora settled back on the wet cushions. “You’re silly not to tell us, Jimmy. But that’s just like a man, trying to keep women out of trouble. It don’t show good gumption, but I respect you for it. Anyway we’ll soon be talking to Doc Savage and you can get it off your chest.”

Jim Cash muttered doubtfully: “You seem to have a lot of faith in this Doc Savage.”

“I have!” Aunt Nora sounded vehement.

“But you admit you don’t even know him.”

Aunt Nora snorted like a race horse. “I don’t have to know him! I’ve heard of him! That’s enough.”

“I’ve heard a little talk of him, too.” Jim Cash admitted. “That’s the only reason I let you and Alice talk me into going to him.”

“A little talk!” Aunt Nora sniffed. “If you would have kept your ears open you would have heard more than a little talk about him! Doc Savage specializes in things like this. He makes a life work out of going around getting other people out of trouble and punishing lads who need it.”

Jim Cash began skeptically: “I don’t think any man can——”

“Doc Savage can! Take the word of an old woman who knows enough to discount half of what she hears. Doc Savage is a man who was trained from the cradle for the one purpose in life of righting wrongs. They say he’s a physical marvel, probably the strongest man who ever lived. And moreover he’s studied until he knows just about everything worth knowing from electricity and astronomy to how to bake a decent batch of biscuits.”

“Maybe you’ve been putting too much stock in wild talk Aunt Nora?”

“Didn’t I tell you I only believe half of what I ever hear?” Aunt Nora demanded.

Jim Cash smiled. The elderly lady’s optimism seemed to cheer him.

“I hope Doc Savage is up to expectations,” he said grimly. “Not only for our sake but for those other poor devils back at Prosper City.”

“You said a mouthful!” Aunt Nora agreed. “If Doc Savage isn’t able to help us and Prosper City I hate to think what’ll happen!”

The touring car rooted on through the rain and gloom for nearly a mile. Then the engine gave a few pneumatic coughs, died, coughed a few more times and silenced completely.

“You’re out of gas!” Aunt Nora snapped.

Jim Cash shook his head. “But I just got gas. It must be water on the distributor——”

“Out of gas!” repeated Aunt Nora firmly. “I know how these old wrecks act!”

Easing into the drizzle Jim Cash got a measuring stick from under the seat, walked to the rear and thrust it into the tank. His gasp was startled.

“Empty! I don’t understand how that could happen!”

“Maybe that filling station was a gyp!” called blond pretty Alice Cash. “They might not have put in any gas.”

“I guess that was it honey,” Aunt Nora agreed. She opened a road map, peered at it by the glare of a flashlight. “There’s a little jumping-off place down the road about two miles. You’d better walk to it Jim.”

Jim Cash hesitated. “I don’t like to leave you two.”

Aunt Nora opened a capacious leather hand bag. She produced two big, businesslike blue revolvers. She gave one of them to Alice Cash, and the blond young woman handled it in a way that showed she could use it.

“Anybody who monkeys with us won’t find it healthy!” Aunt Nora said dryly. “You go on, Jim. We’ll be all right.”

Relieved at sight of the weapons, Jim Cash slopped off through the rain. He walked on the left side of the pavement, where he could see the lights of oncoming cars and evade them.

A few machines passed him, going in both directions. He did not attempt to flag them, knowing it would be useless. Motorists who pick up strange pedestrians late at night are few and far between.

He descended a small hill. At the bottom, he crossed two bridges—one over a stream, the other spanning the line of an electric railroad.

He had barely crossed the second bridge when several flashlights gushed brilliant white upon him. In the back glow of the flashes, he could discern the figures holding them.

Each was a tall cylinder of black. And upon every figure was the green likeness of a bell.

There was something hideous in the way the raven figures stood there, saying nothing, not moving. The rain, streaking down their forms, gave them a shiny look.

Jim Cash stood as if blocked in ice. He had been pale before, now he became positively white.

“Green Bells!” he said thickly. “That radio—the tolling was meant for us as a——”

His own words seemed to snap the chill spell which held him. He exploded in action. His right hand dived into his raincoat pocket like a frightened animal. He wrenched wildly at a pistol which he carried there.

Another eerie black form glided out of the murk behind Cash. It whipped convulsively upon him. Taken by surprise, he was carried down.

The flashlights now went out, as if directed by some occult signal. The cavernous gloom which followed was filled with swishings and slappings, as the ebony-cloaked, green-belled figures charged.

Cash’s gun was dislodged, and went clank-clanking across the pavement.

His raincoat tore. He tried to scream. The yell was throttled, and ended in a sound which might have been two rough rocks rubbing together.

The fight noises trailed off. Several moments of ominous quiet followed. Then the entire group moved back to the bridge spanning the railroad.

They turned off and came to a high fence. There was another short, terrific fight while Cash was being put over the fence. Then they descended to the railway tracks.

Once a light came on briefly. This disclosed the darksome figures in a compact wad, with Cash helpless among them.

The railroad was electrified. The current, instead of being carried by an overhead line, was conducted by a third rail which ran close alongside the track. Use of such third rails was common in the vicinity of New York, where the presence of numerous switches and sidings made overhead wiring too intricate. The charged rail was protected by a shedlike wooden shield.

A light came on. A wad of black cloth between Cash’s jaws kept him from crying out.

He was thrown headlong at the electrified rail. With a frenzied contortion of his muscles, he managed to avoid landing upon it.

The somber figures pounced upon him, and again hurled him at the rail. Again he saved himself. He was fighting madly for his life. The shed protector over the rail helped him.

But one touch upon the strip of metal beneath, which bore a high voltage, would mean instant death.

The third time, Cash got an arm across the wooden shed and preserved his life. He tore the gag from his jaws with a desperate grasp and emitted a piercing bleat for help!

The Green Bells swarmed upon him, silent, murderous. This time, they pitched him at the rail feet first. One of his legs fell across the highpowered conductor.

There was a tiny hissing play of electric flame. Cash’s body seemed to bounce up and down. It convulsed, tying itself in a tight knot around the rail of death.

It stayed there, rigid and still. A wispy plume of brownish smoke curling upward might have been the spirit departing from his body.

The Green Bells eased away in the rain-moist night like dread, voiceless ghouls from another existence.