Читать книгу Fortress of Solitude: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6
ОглавлениеIS A DIPLOMAT DEAD?
Serge Mafnoff was an idealistic man, a fine citizen of the Soviet, and ambitious—all of these facts his superiors in the Russian government recognized. They kept a kindly eye on Serge Mafnoff, and shortly after he did his fine stroke of work by catching John Sunlight and sending him to Siberia, a reward was forthcoming.
Serge Mafnoff’s reward was being appointed as an important diplomatic representative to the United States of America, with headquarters in New York City. It was a pleasant job, one an ambitious man would like; and Serge Mafnoff enjoyed it, and worked zealously, and his superiors smiled and nodded and remarked that here was a man who was worth promoting still again. Serge Mafnoff was very happy in New York City.
Then one evening he ran home in terror.
Actually ran. Dashed madly to the door of his uptown mansion, pitched inside, slammed the door. And stood with all his weight jammed against the door, as if holding it shut against something that pursued him.
His servants remarked on the way he panted while he was doing that. They told the police, later, how he had panted with a great sobbing fright.
It was interesting. And Serge Mafnoff had servants who liked to gossip. They gathered in the chauffeur’s quarters over the garage, the most private place, and discussed it. They were concerned, too. They liked Serge Mafnoff.
Everyone liked Serge Mafnoff. He was quite a newspaper figure. A fine representative of the type and character of man the Soviet is trying to create, he was called.
Liking Serge Mafnoff made what happened that night infinitely more horrible to the servants.
The house of Serge Mafnoff in New York City was one long popular with residing diplomats, because it had an impressive dignity and a fashionable location and other things that were desirable for a diplomat.
It was made of gray stone and sat, unlike most New York houses, in quite a considerable yard of its own in which there was neatly tended shrubbery. There were two gates. From one gate a driveway led around to the rear, where there was plenty of lawn and landscaped shrubbery and the two-car garage with the chauffeur’s quarters above.
The other gate admitted to a walk which led straight to the mansion door. The house itself was generally square; had two stories and an attic, part of which Serge Mafnoff had walled off and air-conditioned for his private study. Behind the house was a sloping park which slanted down, unbroken except for two boulevards, to the wide, teeming Hudson River and the inspiring Palisades beyond.
Serge Mafnoff screamed in his study.
Every servant in the great mansion heard the shriek, and each one of them jumped violently.
The cook cut the forefinger of her left hand to the bone with the butcher knife, so great was her start. The finger leaked a thread of crimson for some time thereafter—which turned out to be important.
The scream brought all the servants running upstairs. They piled into the study. They stopped. It was impossible to believe their eyes.
Impossible to comprehend that Serge Mafnoff could have become a black man.
Serge Mafnoff was all black. Not only his skin, his fingernails, his eyes, his teeth—his mouth was open in the most awful kind of a strangling grimace. All black. That evening he had put on pants and vest of a gray suit, and a robe the nationalistic red color of the Soviet: but these were now the hue of drawing ink.
A jet-black statue, standing.
The butler moaned. The chauffeur made a croaking noise. The cook’s hand shook, and her cut finger showered red drops over the floor.
“Comrade Mafnoff!” shrieked the maid, who was a Communist.
The black statue turned to a writhing black ghost. Or so it seemed to the servants. The whole man—they knew it was Serge Mafnoff, because the features of the all-black statue had been recognizable as his—appeared to turn into a cloud of sepia vapor.
A black ghost, it was like. It swirled and changed shape a little, then came swaying toward them, a ghostly, disembodied, unreal monstrosity.
Straight toward them, it floated.
The cook screeched and threw more crimson over the walls and floor. But the chauffeur snatched a pair of heavy pliers out of his hip pocket and hurled them at the black horror.
The pliers went through the thing and dented the plaster of the opposite wall.
Then, suddenly, impossibly, and before their eyes, the black thing silently vanished. It did not spread; it seemed to fade, disintegrate, go into nothingness.
“I killed it!” the chauffeur screamed.
Then the only sound in the room, for long moments, was the frightened rattling of the breath in their throats. The cook’s hand dripped.
They were looking for some trace of Serge Mafnoff. Hurting their eyes with looking. And seeing nothing.
“I—I couldn’t—have killed him,” the chauffeur croaked.
“Ugh!” the butler said.
They were all primed for the next shriek. It came from downstairs, a man’s voice in a long peal of imperative supplication and terror.
The cook barked out something hoarse, and fainted. She fell directly in the center of the door, just inside the attic den which was Serge Mafnoff’s study.
The other servants left her lying there and raced downstairs to find out who had given that last scream, and what about.
There was a second bellow, just about the time all the servants, excepting the unconscious cook, reached the ground floor. This whoop was out in the back yard, and the whole neighborhood heard it.
Out into the back yard dashed the servants to investigate. They didn’t know what they expected to find. Certainly it wasn’t what they did find. Which was nothing.
Nothing at all. Only dark, cold night, and the gloomy clumps of shrubbery, which was evergreen and hence unaffected by the fact that the time was winter. Crouching black wads of bushes, and the sounds of the city—honking of automobile horns, a distant elevated, and the bawling of a steamship down on the Hudson.
They searched and searched.
Then they told the police about it. The police told the newspapers, who printed a great deal about the affair.
Doc Savage read the newspapers regularly.
