Читать книгу The Mystic Mullah: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Down the corridor a way, and around a corner, there was a plain metal door, the panel of which bore a name in small letters of a peculiar bronze color:

CLARK SAVAGE, JR.

This door whipped back and a tall, incredibly bony man popped out. The man was thinner than it seemed any human being could be and still exist. He wore no coat, and a rubber apron was tied about his midsection. Rubber gloves were on his hands, and one hand held a magnifying glass made in the shape of a monocle.

He peered about, blinking, searching for the source of the shrieks which had drawn his attention. But there was a crook in the corridor and he did not see the form of Hadim immediately.

The bony man absently stowed the monocle magnifier in a vest pocket under his rubber laboratory apron, and advanced. He rounded the corner, jerked up and stared.

Hadim was now motionless on the floor, and his head was angled back in a grotesque posture which no man could attain normally.

The bony man in the rubber apron suddenly snapped a hand to an armpit and brought it away gripping a weapon which somewhat resembled an oversize automatic pistol. He flipped this up and tightened on the trigger; the weapon shuttled, smoked and made a noise like a gigantic bullfiddle. It was a machine pistol with a tremendous firing speed.

One of the sinister green wraiths was still inside the corridor, rolling against the window as if seeking blindly to escape. The stream of bullets from the machine pistol passed through it, disturbing it, fattening it a little, but not destroying it or seeming in any way to affect its unholy life.

The stream of lead broke glass out of the window. The green harpy squirmed through the opening and floated away into the gloom, losing itself over the nest of skyscraper spires.

The skeleton of a man stood very still for a long minute.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” he muttered finally.

Stooping, he examined the body of Hadim—body, for Hadim was dead. When Hadim’s head was moved, there was a grisly looseness about its attachment to the body, as if it were only connected by a cord no stiffer than a wrapping twine.

The bony man eyed Hadim’s extraordinarily long knife.

“Sixteenth century Tananese,” he decided aloud. Then he employed the monocle magnifier briefly. “Wrong. Tananese, all right, but of modern construction, using sixteenth century methods of tempering and moulding. Most peculiar.”

The wall beside Hadim’s body was of plaster, painted over, and it was scarred with numerous rather odd-looking marks. These came to the thin man’s attention.

“I’ll be superamalgamated!” he gulped again, using what was evidently, for him, a pet ejaculation. He stared harder at the marks. Down the corridor, an elevator door clanked to a stop. Before the door opened, voices could be heard. They were very loud voices, angry. It sounded as if a fight was about to occur in the elevator. The cage door opened and a man came skidding out.

This man was slender, waspish, with a high forehead and a large orator’s mouth. His attire was sartorial perfection from silken topper to the exact hang of his tail coat. He carried a thin, black cane.

He yelled at the open elevator door, “You hairy accident! You awful mistake of nature! You insult to the human race!”

A most striking-looking individual now came out of the elevator. His height was no greater than that of a young boy; his width was almost equal to his height. His face was mostly mouth, with a broken nubbin of a nose, small eyes set in pits of gristle, and scarcely a noticeable quantity of forehead. His long arms dangled well below his knees and the wrists were matted with hair that looked like rusted steel wool.

Had the corridor been a little less brilliantly lighted, the hairy gentleman might have been mistaken for an amiable gorilla.

The hairy man squinted little eyes at the dapper one, and said, “Pipe down, you shyster, or I’ll tie a knot in your neck!”

Then they both saw the tall skeleton of a man down the corridor. They could not help but note his excitement.

“What’s happened, Johnny?” demanded the apish fellow.

They could not see the body of Hadim, which lay around the bend in the corridor.

“Johnny,” the bony man—he was actually William Harper Littlejohn, world-renowned expert on archæology and geology—gestured over his shoulder with the monocle magnifier.

“Come here, Monk,” he said, then included the dapper man. “You too, Ham.”

“Monk,” the homely gorilla of a man, and “Ham,” the immaculate fashion plate, advanced hurriedly. A moment before, they had seemed on the point of blows; now their quarrel was suddenly suspended. It was always thus. No one who knew these two could recall one having addressed a civil word to the other.

Monk, whose low forehead did not look as if it afforded room for more than a spoonful of brains, was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, generally conceded to be one of the most accomplished of industrial chemists; while Ham, the fashion plate, was Major General Theodore Marley Brooks, a lawyer who possessed probably the sharpest legal mind ever trained by Harvard.

Monk and Ham, rounding the hallway angle and sighting Hadim’s body with its grotesquely twisted head, jerked to a stop and became slack-jawed.

“Blazes!” Monk sniffed, sampling the air like an animal. “I smell burned gunpowder. Who shot the guy?”

“No one,” said Johnny. “I fired a few shots subsequently.”

Monk ambled over to the body, hands swinging below his knees, and stared intently.

“What’s wrong with his neck?” he asked.

“Broken,” Johnny replied.

Monk asked, “Who broke it?”

“No one,” answered the gaunt geologist. “As far as I can tell.”

“Yeah,” Monk growled. “Then who’d you shoot at?”

“A peculiar, nebulous green corporeity with the optical aspects of a serpentine specimen suspended aërospherically,” said Johnny, his expression not changing. “It bore similarity to a phantasmagoria.”

Monk lifted one hand and snapped thumb and forefinger loudly.

“Now do it again with little words,” he requested.

Johnny had once held the chair of natural science research in a famous university where he had been known as a professor who stunned most of his students with his big words, and he still had the habit. He never used a small word when he could think of a large one.

“A green thing was floating in the air above the body,” said Johnny. “I shot. The bullet went through it, breaking the window. Then the thing floated out through the window and away.”

Monk said unsmilingly, “I always did think those big words would drive you crazy.”

Johnny pointed at the odd-looking marks scratched on the wall beside Hadim’s body.

“The man obviously inscribed these when he felt demise imminent,” he said. “He used the tip of his knife.”

Monk bent over, looked and said, “They don’t mean anything. He just dug the wall with his knife as he was flopping around.”

“Those marks,” said Johnny, “are words, or word signs, rather, of Tananese, an obscure language with an Arabic derivative, spoken in certain parts of outer Mongolia.”

“What do they say?” asked Monk.

And Johnny, who probably knew as many ancient languages, written and spoken, as any half dozen of the ordinary so-called experts on the subject, drew a paper and pencil from his pocket and reproduced thereon the characters which the wall bore, here and there correcting a stroke which Hadim, in his dying agony, had made with slight error. Then Johnny wrote the English translation under the word signs. He passed it to Monk and Ham. They read:

MANY LIVES WILL BE SPARED IF HE OF MOUNTAINS WHO CHARMS EVIL SPIRITS WILL GO TO FISH THAT SMOKES ON WATER WHERE THE KHAN SHAR AND JOAN——

“It ends there,” said Johnny. “You can see the name ‘Joan’ is scratched out in the nearest thing an Asiatic could come to English letters.”

Ham, the dapper lawyer, fumbled absently with his slim black cane, and in doing so, separated the handle slightly from the rest of the cane, revealing that there was a long, slender blade of razor-sharp steel housed in the cane body.

“That sounds silly,” he said. “What does it mean?”

Monk suddenly banged a fist on a knee, something he could do without stooping.

“Remember that radio we got a few days ago?” he demanded. “The message was signed, ‘Joan Lyndell.’ ”

The gaunt Johnny said sharply, “I have been carrying it around with me,” and withdrawing a radiogram blank from a pocket, he passed it to the others, open for perusal. They had all seen it before, but they went over it again:

DOC SAVAGE,

NEW YORK.

YOUR ASSISTANCE IMPERATIVE ON MATTER INVOLVING THOUSANDS OF LIVES AND POSSIBLY STABILITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. PLEASE RADIO ME APPOINTMENT TIME AND PLACE. MY LINER WILL REACH NEW YORK THREE DAYS.

JOAN LYNDELL,

ABOARD S.S. ATLANTIC QUEEN.

Below the message, written in pencil, was another missive, one evidently penned as an answer to the radiogram. It read:

JOAN LYNDELL,

CARE TRANSATLANTIC LINER