Читать книгу The Mystic Mullah: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 3

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It was a drizzling gray evening full of moaning ghosts. The rain came down in occasional flurries, but most of the time it remained suspended in the air as mist that the newspapers next day were to call “the thickest fog within memory.” Harbor traffic was almost at a standstill, and only those boat captains who were foolhardy, or those pressed by absolute necessity, were abroad. The foghorns of the boats were the moaning ghosts.

One ghost was especially persistent. It had the particular strident voice peculiar to tugboat whistles, and it came up through the Narrows from the open sea at a clip that put cold chills on the spines of boatmen who knew how thick that fog was.

There was something scared, something imperative, and maybe something a bit mad about the tooting of that tugboat. A coast guard cutter became interested and nosed over to investigate. Coast guardsmen will go out in anything.

The cutter skipper nosed in close, saw that the tug was the Whale of Gotham, and that there was a picture of a spouting whale painted on the bows. Then, after the manner of coast guard skippers with tugboat captains, the cutter commandant swore a blue streak.

“What’s the idea of tearing in here like an express train?” he finished.

The tugboat master swore back. He would have been very polite to another tugboat captain, but a coast guard skipper was fair game.

“Sheer off!” he yelled. “I’ve got a man aboard, who’s been hurt! We’re rushing him to a hospital. He’s dying!”

It was a story that satisfied even the coast guardsman, so he sheered off and betook himself away in the fog. And that set the tugboat captain to chuckling.

A voice at the tugboat captain’s elbow spoke an English that was entirely too perfect.

“Why did you tell him that?” it asked. “We have no dying man aboard.”

The tug master jumped as if a transatlantic liner had shoved out of the fog at full speed. He turned, an angry exclamation on his tongue, for he did not like to be startled, especially in this fog, with his nerves already on edge. But he held his counsel, for the man at his elbow did not look like one who would take a tongue-lashing; and furthermore, it would be bad policy to insult a man who is paying a tremendous sum for the services of your tugboat.

The man had a big hooked nose and a beard that was small and pointed. His skin was a yellow-brown, dry and wrinkled, and did not appeal to the eye. He wore strange garments.

The tugboat skipper had done his life’s traveling in New York harbor, so he did not know that the long, flowing white mantle which reached down from the hook-nosed man’s head was an abah, or that his embroidered cloak was a jubbah, or that the queer-looking trousers were shirwals. Only one who had traveled in Central Asia would know what the garments were called.

On the hook-nosed man’s forehead was a strange design, an affair of lines which might have been construed as a likeness of a serpent coiled around a jewel, as if protecting it. The lines looked as if they were put on with ink, but actually they were tattooed into the skin with a fluid that one of the master sorcerers of Asia had insisted was composed partially of the dried blood of Genghis Khan, the original.

To the tugboat captain, the mark looked like a dirty smear; and had he known its true significance, he might have fallen off the bridge of his grimy craft. For it was the Sacred Seal of the Khan Nadir Shar, Son of Divinity, Destined Master of Ten Thousand Lances, Khan of Tanan, Ruler of Outer Mongolia. Maybe the tug skipper would not have known what all of that meant. Probably not.

It meant that the hook-nosed man, Khan Shar, was a king, absolute ruler of the city of Tanan, beyond Outer Mongolia, and monarch over the surrounding provinces.

“Advise me when we tie up at the dock,” requested Khan Shar in his too-perfect English.

“Sure,” said the skipper.

“This dock you have selected—it is secluded?” asked the Khan.

The skipper rolled his tobacco quid in his jaws. The man made him nervous.

“It’s an out-of-the-way dock,” he said.

“Excellent!” said the Khan, and left the tugboat bridge, or more properly, the pilot house.

The tugboat captain rolled his eyes and directed tobacco juice at the feet of one of his two deckhands, who had come in out of the foggy night.

“Damned if I like this,” he said in a tone which showed he wanted to talk to relieve his mind.

The deckhand, who knew that tone, let his boss talk without interruption.

“Damned if I like it,” repeated the skipper. “I get a radio to go out to the Atlantic Queen, that new liner that’s fog bound, and take off a passenger. I get out there, and, by golly, if it ain’t three passengers, and two of ’em the queerest-lookin’ ducks you ever saw! Take that one who was just in here.”

“I’d rather take him than the other man,” said the deckhand in a queer tone.

The skipper scowled. “Whatcha mean?”

“I mean that the other duck has a knife as long as your arm up his sleeve,” said the deckhand. “I just saw it. He’s standin’ outside the door of your cabin. Looks like he’s guardin’ the girl.”

“The girl!” The skipper sighed. “Now she’s what I call a nifty number. She’s white, too. Wonder what she’s doin’ with these two funny-lookin’ buzzards?”

The skipper was not a bad judge of femininity. The girl was a “nifty number.” In fact, she would have put a movie casting director up on his toes.

She was tall, with dark hair and lashes that were altogether delectable. But there was something else about her. She was businesslike, capable. Her person radiated efficiency.

Her clothing was thoroughly modern, and so was the blue automatic which she held in her hand as the door opened.

The hook-nosed Khan Shar looked at the gun and smiled as if it might have been a cocktail the young woman intended offering him.

“I do not feel there is danger,” he said. “We have not heard of the Mystic Mullah since our caravan left the Gobi.”

The girl kept the gun in her hands. “A thousand lives depend on what we are doing,” she said dryly. “If you want to be dramatic, you can put the figure higher.”

The Khan’s dark face drained of its color, giving him a stark, agonized look.

“You could put the figure higher—and not be dramatic,” he said thickly.

Neither spoke again, for the tugboat engine had changed its regular pulse and was running slowly; it accelerated, then pounded, as if the craft were backing. Shouts rang out, and scraping sounds on deck indicated ropes dragging. There was a bump, rather violent, then lesser bumps and the tug heeled so that the Khan put out a hand to steady himself. There were four large rings, each with a big jewel, on his fingers.

“I trust we have tied to a secluded dock,” said the Khan.

“Hadim!” called the girl.

The door opened and a lean man with a long, brown face came in. He was dressed in a flowing jubbah and shirwals that fitted his legs tightly, and he carried his left arm stiffly, as if not wishing to disturb the long knife which the deckhand had seen up that sleeve.

This Hadim did not present an appealing picture, for some one had made a pass at him with a sword or a knife in the past, and had come just close enough to groove his face with a permanent scar from forehead to chin. He bowed deeply to the girl.

“Yes, Miss Joan,” he said.

“You will leave at once, Hadim,” said the girl. “You know what you are to do, the message you are to deliver. And you know how much depends upon our finding this man.”

“Yes, Miss Joan,” said Hadim. “My four brothers, my father and mother and my sisters have died when touched by the green soul of the Mystic Mullah. Need I more to remind me?”

“You will die if you make a mistake,” said the girl. “And if we do not reach this man we have come to see, many more may follow you. Just how many, there is no telling.” She extended her automatic. “Better take this.”

Hadim tapped his sleeve. “I know better how to use this.”

Joan directed, “Have the man get in touch with us.”

Hadim murmured, “Aye, and this man’s name is——”

“Doc Savage,” said Joan. “Hurry. We must find him, or learn where he is.”

There was rawness in the fog, a damp chill, and the vapor had long since washed the moon and stars out of the sky and had put the dank water-front streets in the grip of the clammy mist from the sea.

Hadim embraced the soupy fog as one at home in his element, and he took to the shabby, narrow water-front thoroughfares without hesitation. He did, however, walk in the middle of the street—until almost run down by a prowling taxicab. Hadim looked the hack over carefully, after the driver stopped to see if he had done any damage. The driver had an honest face, so Hadim used his cab to go uptown.

Hadim, let out at his destination, stared up at the building which he was to enter, and stark amazement sat upon his scarred, brown face. This building was the pride of native New Yorkers. To Hadim, it was an architectural wonder such as he had not dreamed existed. It was a modernistic structure, somewhere near a hundred stories in height, and was a blinding exhibition of white stone and shining metal.

“What a lot of camels would be needed to haul the stones for this house,” Hadim murmured.

Then he went inside, asked questions, made a few mistakes, but eventually got in an elevator which let him out, after a frightsome ride upward, on the eighty-sixth floor. The corridor was as impressive as the building exterior.

“Even the palace of the Khan does not excel this,” Hadim told himself.

Then he jerked to a stop. He could feel a slight breeze through the corridor. And he had heard a hissing sound. This last was very faint.

Hadim turned slowly—and his voice went out in a sudden, wild shriek of terror. It was ear-splitting, that shriek. In it was all of the agony of a man who knows he has met death.

Down the corridor, floating in the air, strange, fantastic things were approaching. They were like fat snakes, their color an unholy green, their diameter perhaps that of a human wrist, their length the span of an arm from hand to elbow. They whirled, contorted with a sort of dervish dance. They seemed to grow fatter, then thinner.

Most hideous of all was the fact that these flying serpentine things seemed unreal. They were ghostly, nebulous, without any real body or shape.

Hadim, screaming again, had his long knife out of his left sleeve. He retreated. The green things overhauled him. He began to run backward. They still gained.

Hadim came to the end of the corridor, to a window. He beat it, knocking the glass out, but the metal crosspieces defied him, thwarting him in his mad desire to jump through.

The green horrors reached him and Hadim struck with his knife, only to shriek out in fresh horror as the blade passed completely through the green atrocity and nothing happened. He struck again; then the serpentine things were upon him.

They brushed against his arms, his chest. One rolled like a hideous green tongue, caressing his face, lingering about his mouth, his nostrils, then rolling up over his eyes. Hadim fought them with his hands, shrieking again and again; he writhed down to get away from them, and squirmed on the floor.

Then the green things arose and drifted out through the holes which Hadim had beaten in the skyscraper window with his fists. They went slowly, as if satisfied with the work they had done. They had changed shape materially by now; one had been knocked to pieces and had resolved itself into half a dozen thin, green strings, so pale that the eye could easily see through them, distinguishing the frames of the window behind them.