Читать книгу Spook Hole: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

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The man had one arm. Hence, to load the revolver, he had to crouch and grip the barrel between his knees while he thumbed fresh cartridges into the cylinder. The gun had been fully loaded before, but he was replacing the cartridges, apparently fearing they had gotten wet. The night air was full of soaking mist. It was very dark down here by the New York water front. The one-armed man had been skulking, and doing it most furtively. He had made scarcely a sound. Once, more than five minutes ago, he had frightened an alley cat out of a rubbage can, but that had made only a slight noise.

“Devils!” the man gritted. “Almost twenty of us, they would kill!” He mumbled some more, unintelligibly, and finished up, “Damn ’em! They know I won’t go to the law for protection!”

His mumbling was a mistake. A bare twenty feet away, the second skulker heard him. This man had two arms well filled with muscle, and his face was chiefly notable for the lack of space between the eyes, and an oversized jaw. This man gripped a two-foot length of heavy wire hawser which had been wrapped with adhesive tape. It was an instrument that could kill a man.

The one with the bludgeon waited. The one-armed man was coming straight toward him.

Uptown, an elevated train clanked south. Out on the harbor, a bell buoy clanged. Somewhere far above, thunder gave a great whoop, but there was no lightning.

The man with the hawser lifted his weapon. He took his tongue between his teeth, as one who intends to strike hard.

The thunder gobbled and chuckled and went romping off into the infinite distances, while down among the water front warehouses, it left echoes not unlike that of a big metal barrel tumbling end over end. Large drops of rain began to splash the cobbles. They were very cold.

The man with the bludgeon took his teeth out of his tongue to suck in a breath, then set himself again, ready for the killing blow.

He got a surprise.

A noise sounded from ahead. There was also a sound as if some one had pushed down on a tire valve and let the air leak out for an instant.

The man with the taped hawser sprang forward. He whipped out a flashlight. He thought that his one-armed quarry had fallen. He wanted to take advantage of that fact.

The flashlight popped a white cone. The man with the hawser let out a loud grunt. He tried to stop, slipped on the wet cobbles, went down flat on his back, and the big raindrops wet his face. He turned over, got up, and without looking back, ran.

He had left his flashlight behind. It was still on, pointed so that the beam was on him. He wore oilskins and a seaman’s sou’wester. He ran madly, with great leaps, and did not look back as long as he was in the flashlight’s glow, which was for some distance. He had seen an apparition.

The apparition was huge and black, shiny from the rain, and it crouched over the prone figure of the one-armed man. The latter was not entirely prone; his head and shoulders were off the cobbles, for the fabulous black figure had him by the neck.

An instant later there was a dragging noise, and a water puddle gurgled as if something had been hauled through it. The nearest warehouse was a score of yards distant. A plank squeaked inside of it.

The big raindrops fell like solid things on the warehouse roof. Thunder let loose another great bumping. The elevated train clanked on downtown.

Inside the warehouse, a thin rod of brilliant white light appeared. It undoubtedly came from a flashlight, but the beam was little thicker than a pencil, even at the end. It prowled over the one-armed man’s figure.

The fellow was bound now, with lengths of that very stout-tarred cord known to sailors as Italian marline. Both his wrists and ankles were secured, and these were lashed together so that he was doubled over in such a manner as to discourage rolling. A sponge was held tightly in his mouth by a wire which could not be chewed through.

The one-armed man had changed. Changed in a startling way. He actually had two arms.

Obviously one of his arms had been confined tightly to his side by a long bandaging of canvas. The canvas had been stripped off. The thin flash beam picked up its snaky length on the floor.

Several times the flashlight prowled along the arm which had been strapped under the coat in such a manner as to be almost unnoticeable. It was as if the matter of the arm constituted some mystery which needed solving.

There was not enough of light from the thin flashlight to show the giant black apparition who was doing the examining. The light string collapsed. The squeak of a floorboard was the only sound as the big black figure departed.

It had not taken long. The slamming of the elevated train was still audible. An extremely keen ear might still have heard the running of the man with the hawser bludgeon—had there been no rain.

The man with the hawser bludgeon had suddenly acquired a great dislike for the wet night. He was making for the only spot of light visible among the piers. This was a single electric bulb, encased in a wire shield, which glowed above a gangplank that led, through a hull hatch, into the black innards of a ship.

The man crossed the gangplank without slackening speed. He brought up smack against the snout of a short rifle.

“Where’s the fire?” growled a coarse voice back of the gun.

The man with the hawser countered, “Where’s Captain Wapp?”

“You see a big bad spook?” grinned the rifleman.

“Where’s Captain Wapp?” the other shrieked.

“In his cabin.” The rifleman stepped aside. “What’s wrong?”

The hawser carrier ran on without answering.

Captain Wapp had to pass sidewise through more than one door on his ship. He was big. But he never had to stoop, even for the low bulkhead doors down near the bilge. The shortest man in his crew was taller by a head. His belt was a cotton rope that had once been white. Maybe he could not get a leather one large enough. The rope belt fastened with a gold snap and ring, set with diamonds which could not be classed as small.

He was cleaning his finger nails with a big clasp knife. When the door exploded open, he twisted the knife in his hand, holding it so that the hilt pointed at the door. The knife hilt was one of those deadly little novelty weapons, chambered for a .22-caliber cartridge.

“You bane in big hurry,” he said dryly.

The newcomer still carried his length of taped hawser.

“Something is screwy!” he gulped.

Captain Wapp absently uncocked the firing mechanism in the haft of the knife. This made a faint click.

“Dot be not so good,” he grunted. “Tell us about it very snappylike.”

The other held his hawser bludgeon with both hands and spoke with the mad speed of an auctioneer closing a brisk sale.

“I’m standing watch on the dock, like you ordered, see,” he said. “All of a sudden, I get a look at a man who heaves up between me and a distant light.” The man hefted his hawser. “I get ready to pop him, see, because he’s cruisin’ around mighty snaky.”

“You bane do right thing,” advised Captain Wapp.

“Only I didn’t do it,” corrected the other. “I didn’t get a chance to lay aboard this skulker with my little persuader, here. Something else got him.”

Captain Wapp looked interested, “Something?”

“Well, it didn’t look human,” grumbled the man with the bit of wire hawser. “It was big and black. And I’ll be damned if it made any sound at all. It wasn’t none of Braski’s crowd.”

They were silent. The bell buoy gonged slowly out in the harbor. Thunder cascaded in hollow salvos high above in the leaking night sky. It sounded muffled in the cabin.

That thunder had a more robust quality at the gangplank where the watchman with the rifle was stationed. The latter was very much alert and somewhat puzzled; from time to time, he looked over his shoulder, as if expecting some one to come from the direction of Captain Wapp’s cabin and tell him what had gone wrong.

The thunder chased itself away, and almost instantly a fresh burst crashed, accompanied by a flash of lightning across the whole southwestern part of the sky. Lightning glow showed the wet dock planking, the puddles, the big raindrops. It also illuminated the watchman faintly, so that he could be seen from the wharf, but he did not realize that.

“Dang that hog, Braski,” the watchman muttered. “Dang old Hezemiah Law and his Spook Hole and the whole dizzy business. We gotta kill a lot of people, too.”

He scowled, hefted his rifle and sighed loudly.

“But, blast it, a million bucks is a million bucks,” he added. “And any part of it ain’t to be sneezed at.”

His own mumbling occupied his attention, and when a voice called from behind him, “Hey, you—look here a minute!” he gave a start. Wheeling, he peered into the ship. The voice had been strange, very faint.

“Whatcha want?” he growled.

The faint, strange voice came again.

“Look closely,” it requested.

The watchman squinted, straining his eyes. He could see no one. He thought that strange. It was strange, but not so much so that it could not be explained. The man knew little about ventriloquism, hence did not dream that the small, weird voice did not come from within the ship, but from outside, on the dock.

Nor was the watchman aware that the author of the deceptive call, a giant form swathed in black, was gliding silently up the companionway.

The watchman’s first inkling of danger was a terrible grasp which fell upon his neck. He tried to cry out. His vocal cords would not work.

He tried to fire his rifle. But, strangely enough, the weapon fell from his fingers, and was caught by the dark assailant before it made a noise on the planking.

The watchman tried to get a look at the features of his assailant. He failed there, too. The huge one was shrouded completely in some black cloth, probably of silk, which seemed waterproof.

A mysterious listlessness began to come over the watchman. It seemed to come from the terrific pressure on a particular portion of his neck.

At first, that pressure had been painful, but now it was only a tingling. The man’s whole body seemed to go to sleep. He could see, could hear, but could not move a muscle. Even his eyes could observe only what was immediately before them, for the watchman now possessed no power to roll his eyeballs.

The fantastic giant in black left the watchman lying in his queer helplessness and moved on into the interior of the ship.

The flashlight beam of remarkable thinness leaped out at intervals, roving. It picked up a ring life preserver which some one must have brought down from deck.

The life preserver bore the name of the ship, Harpoon.

In the master’s cabin of the Harpoon, short, broad Captain Wapp absently cocked and uncocked the pistol’s mechanism in his big clasp knife.

“Somebody bane prowl around,” he said slowly. “So vot? Some feller dot Braski sent, Aye bet.”

The man with the taped length of hawser fingered his weapon. He batted it against one oilskinned leg.

“You don’t worry enough, captain,” he complained. “There was two of ’em. Maybe one was a Braski man, sure. We expected Braski to try to lay aboard us. But who was the other one?”

“Dot feller?” Captain Wapp held the knife with one hand, gave his rope belt a hitch with the other. “A cop, maybe.”

“No.” The hawser whacked oilskin. “There ain’t no one-armed cops. And who ever heard of a cop working like that big black guy did?”

Captain Wapp looked pained.

“Dis business, Aye bane afraid she give me a headache,” he complained.

“Listen,” grunted the other. “Why can’t we pull out of here? Let’s head for Spook Hole and finish it up.”

Captain Wapp shook his head. “She bane too risky.”

“You mean the woman?”

Wapp’s head shook again. “Woman, she bane easy to get rid of. It’s dot monkeyshiner, Oliver Orman Braski.”

The hawser length made two angry pops on the other’s oilskins.

“Braski knows enough to make trouble, eh?” he demanded.

“He could ruin the whole works,” said Wapp. “He would, too.”

“Scuttle him,” the other suggested. “Bat his brains out and leave him in an alley. Hell! We gotta kill nearly twenty, anyway!”

Captain Wapp sighed mightily.

“For vun whole week, we have try to do dot very thing,” he said. “And vot did it get us?”

The man with the hawser scowled uneasily.

“You think old Hezemiah Law smells anything?” he questioned anxiously.

“Law bane smart feller,” Wapp mumbled. “But Aye not tank he smart enough.”

The other frowned at his hawser length.

“Well, we gotta handle this right,” he said. “With maybe a million dollars——”

“More dan dot,” interposed Captain Wapp. “From what Aye laid eyes on, dot Spook Hole has enough of de stuff to pay each feller on my ship not less than——”

A gun banged loudly in the corridor outside. A man cursed, then began yelling a mad alarm.

Captain Wapp lunged to the door, wrenched it open. He had the little pistol knife almost hidden in one broad, red-furred hand. The man with the hawser trod his heels. They did not dive into the corridor, but put their heads out cautiously.

One of the crew was in the corridor, crouched back against a bulkhead, standing rigidly, not moving any part of his body other than his features as he screamed terribly. His arms were bent in a grotesque fashion.

“The blasted thing went aft,” the man moaned, and tried to pick up his gun, which lay on the floor at his feet. His strangely bent arms refused to function.

Without coming from the shelter of his cabin, Captain Wapp swore at the man.

“Vot you say?” he roared.

“Outside your cabin,” groaned the sailor. “It was black. Never had much shape. I thought it was a pile of clothes or something from the laundry. When I came up, it grabbed me.”

He cried out wordlessly from the effort of trying to move his arms.

Captain Wapp yelled, “Which way?”

“Aft,” whined the sailor. “I told you that.”

Captain Wapp leaped forward, seized the sailor and gave each of the fellow’s arms a rough, terrific yank. Pain caused the man to burst into tears. But his arms straightened. They had only been out of joint.

“Get up and help hunt!” snapped Wapp.

They ran aft, yelling an alarm, turning on the excellent electric lighting system with which the vessel was equipped.

They found no one. They located no one who had seen anything suspicious, except the watchman at the gangplank, who was in no condition to say anything.

“Vot ails you?” Wapp asked him.

The watchman said nothing, did nothing, acting in all like a man alive and yet dead. More of amazement than rage on his features, Wapp turned upon the man who carried the taped bit of hawser. He asked no question with words, but the other read his expression.

“I dunno what it was,” he disclaimed. “Same thing that grabbed the one-armed man on shore.”

They hastily rigged big floodlights along the rail—lights which were undoubtedly ready at hand for night work at sea. The vast quantity of illumination showed the nature of the Harpoon. It was a whaling ship, one of the modern type, a gigantic pot-bellied thing, with a runway aft where the whales could be hauled up to the processing plant in the innards of the craft.

Captain Wapp and the others on the Harpoon, having found nothing, stood at the rail, muttered, and looked very puzzled indeed.

Unknown to those aboard the Harpoon, a sinister, fantastic figure stood and watched. The form, huge and black, stood in the shadows of the pier, beyond the floodlight glare. The strange being had gotten off the whaling ship before the search was well under way.

Not for long did the personage of darkness linger to observe. He moved away, and the silence of his going was almost supernatural, eerie.

Some moments later, the giant of blackness stopped at the spot where the one-armed man—rather the man who had pretended to have only one arm—had been left, securely bound. The monster of the night paused there, rigidly, and there came into the darkness around him a fantastic sound.

It was low, that sound, and eerie, a note defying definition by word. It was not a whistle; it did not seem the product of vocal cords. It had the qualities of a trilling.

Probably most fantastic of all was the way the sound seemed to come from no definite source, but to come from the very air itself, as if it were the ventriloquial note of some exotic tropical bird. Certain it was that the note had a musical quality which was inspiring to an appreciable degree.

Certain also was the fact that the strange one of the darkness was making the sound. And undoubtedly the strange trilling denoted surprise over a discovery which had just been made.

The one-armed man was gone.

The lengths of very stout-tarred marline rope which had bound the one-armed man lay on the warehouse floor. Some had been untied. Most had been cut.

The giant of darkness produced his flashlight which projected the thin, infinitely white beam. He searched. There was no visible sign to show whence the one-armed man had gone, or how he had managed to get free.

After a bit, the dark titan moved out of the warehouse and down a side street which was full of the thunder’s muttering and occasional small drops of rain. It was very dark.

The giant of the night reached a parked car. No glimmer of light showed from the machine, but when he opened the door, light spilled out. It was a sedan, a very well-curtained car. Bathed in the illumination, the giant began changing his appearance.

He stripped off a dull-black rubber cape and hood combination which served the double purpose of keeping off the rain and making him almost invisible in the night. He removed black gloves.

It was an amazing individual who stood revealed, a giant man, a Herculean figure, whose remarkable body might have been cast from hard bronze.

The sedan was large, yet as the man stood beside it, the car seemed none too ample. The man was not fat. His body was a huge machine of sinew.

There was more of the unusual about the bronze man than his physique. His eyes, for instance, were like pools of flake gold always in motion, and possessed of a magnetic quality. His hair, a bronze hue but little darker than his skin, was straight and fitted like a metal cap.

He got into the sedan.

Two men were already there. One of them spoke.

“Doc,” he said. “What did you learn?”