Читать книгу The Mystic Mullah: A Doc Savage Adventure - Lester Bernard Dent - Страница 6

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It was very silent beside the warehouse, for Monk and Ham were too surprised for further speech. Somewhere near, waves lapped with sounds like women sobbing, and farther away, there was a hissing, as of steam escaping from the boilers of a tugboat. Out in the harbor, whistles and foghorns still made occasional clamor in the thick fog.

The face hung suspended, like something disembodied, for the darkness was too thick to permit Monk and Ham to see the nature of the body to which it was attached. The effect was ghostly.

When the unearthly green lips writhed and words came from the verdant face, both Monk and Ham jumped. They could not help it.

“Try to control your surprise,” the voice said.

Monk growled, “What the heck kind of hocus pocus is this, anyhow?”

“Do not jump at conclusions, my friends,” said the voice. “You of the Western civilization are too prone to try to make science explain all that you see. You like to call all exhibitions of the occult by the plain terms of magic, meaning mechanical fakery. You make the mistake of not believing in the occult, the supernatural. Your minds are too practical.”

“Jove!” Ham said vaguely. “I do not get this.”

Monk grunted, “Why the lecture?”

The voice—it was hollow and unreal—went on.

“You are looking at something now that you do not understand,” it said. “You think you see a face. Perhaps you think you see my body. You are wrong. You see neither face nor body.”

“Nuts!” Monk felt under an arm where nestled a padded holster holding a machine pistol scarcely larger than an ordinary automatic.

“In a material sense,” said the fantastic voice, “you are looking at a nonentity, at nothing. You think you see a face; but actually, there is nothing.”

Monk got his machine pistol out, and directed sourly, “All right, I guess half a pound or so of lead won’t hurt you, Mr. Nonentity.”

“Listen to me,” said the voice. “I am the green soul of the Mystic Mullah. I am the master of all souls, the power infinite. I have touched many men, so that they have died and their souls come to me.”

Ham unsheathed his sword cane. He preferred the weapon, because the tip was coated with a drug concoction which produced a quick, temporary unconsciousness.

The voice of the Mystic Mullah droned on, and there was no perceptible lip motion on the uncanny green face.

“Go back,” it said. “Forget what has happened to-night. Forget it so thoroughly that you will not remember to tell this bronze man, Doc Savage.”

Monk laughed; he laughed loudly, for somehow it made him feel better to hear the crash of his own false mirth.

Ham said dryly, “Very dramatic, Mr. Green Soul. Our lives are in danger, too, I suppose?”

“Only your physical bodies,” said the voice. “Your souls will live on, green, serpentine, ghostly worms that travel in the night and do my bidding.”

Monk thought of the green things which Johnny had seen. He began to perspire.

“I died a million years ago, before time began,” said the Mystic Mullah. “I do not live, even now. I tell you to forget. It would be well for you to heed.”

“And if we don’t?” Monk asked curiously.

“My slaves, the green souls that are like flying serpents, will come to you,” said the Mystic Mullah. “Then you will join me.”

Out of the side of his mouth, Monk breathed, “Let’s take this nut, whoever he is!”

“Righto!” Ham breathed back.

A string of powder blazes came from Monk’s machine pistol. They came so swiftly that they resembled a short, solid red rod, and the noise of the remarkable gun was a tremendous bawl of sound.

The greenish lips writhed and the voice said calmly, “I am not a being who can be killed.”

Monk snorted and waited. He was surprised, but still hopeful. His machine pistol fired mercy bullets, hollow shells filled with a drug which caused unconsciousness without doing permanent damage. That was why he had shot. The slugs would not harm the green-faced one to any extent, and they would teach the fellow a lesson.

But nothing happened. The green face remained suspended where it was.

“Dang it!” Monk ripped, and lunged forward.

The green countenance vanished then—simply vanished. It turned slightly as it disappeared, and afterward there was no trace.

Monk fired again. The red blaze from the machine pistol muzzle furnished some light, by which Monk fully expected to see his foe.

His mouth fell open and astonishment came out of his throat in a hacking grunt. There was no one, nothing visible but the brick wall against which the greenish face had been stationed, and on the wall little splashes, wetly glistening, where the mercy bullets had burst.

Ham, lunging in a circle, switched his sword cane. He waved the weapon lightly, so that, if it struck a body, it could cut in only far enough to introduce the stupefying drug. But the blade encountered only the chilly fog and the night.

“Strike a match!” Monk rapped.

Ham did not carry matches, but he produced a jeweled lighter and rasped its tiny flame into being. He cupped it in a palm and turned slowly, throwing the luminance it made.

Fog streamers, crawling past, lent a spookish aspect to the place, but there was no wraith solid enough to be a human body. Out of the harbor, the foghorns still moaned, but the hissing of steam escaping from the near-by tugboat had stopped.

Ham turned his light upward. The warehouse wall reared sheer, unbroken by windows or other openings, for fully thirty feet above them. It was smooth, too smooth for any man to climb.

“He ducked out,” Ham said.

Monk started forward, stopped, stared, and made a gesture at his eyes, as if doubting them. He turned, and Ham, who knew the homely chemist as well as any living man, could not remember when he had seen Monk look so awe-stricken.

“Look!” Monk pointed at the ground.

There was pavement underfoot and along the warehouse wall, but winds, strong down here by the river, had swept dust in and banked it shallowly over the bricks. The fog, the occasional drizzles of rain, had wet this dust, turning it into mud which bore their own footprints distinctly.

But below, where the green face had been, there were no footprints; indeed, there was no mark other than the tiny indentations made by fragments of brick which the mercy bullets had chipped off the warehouse wall.

“Blast it!” Monk said. “Nobody was standing here!”

Monk’s voice was hollow.

They stood there, two very startled men, and the chill wind blew out Ham’s lighter and he ignited it again, as if not liking the sudden rush of darkness.

Monk wet his lips repeatedly. Their enmity was forgotten; this showed how deeply they were moved, for these two had been known to carry on their perpetual quarrel in the thick of a fight for their lives.

“Blazes!” Monk muttered. “Blazes!”

Ham cleared his throat as if wanting to say something, then did not speak, but raised his lighter again and illuminated their surroundings.

“It was preposterous!” he said.

“Sure,” Monk told him slowly. “But explain it. Do that.”

“Well——” Ham began, but got no further, hesitated, and finished: “Jove! A confounded mystery if there ever was one!”

“The Mystic Mullah,” Monk murmured. “The man who is not a man and who lived a thousand thousand years ago. What a goofy yarn that was.”

“The face!” Ham shuddered, dropped his sword cane, then retrieved it. “What an unearthly thing it was.”

Monk grasped his arm deliberately and pinched it.

“Snap out of it!” he snorted. “Such things don’t happen. There was a trick to it. Let’s go on and have a look at that tug, the Whale of Gotham.”

Ham asked, “What about the warning?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Monk growled.

“I suspect it would take quite a bit to make you laugh right now,” Ham said grimly.

Monk scowled. “Listen, shyster, you look as if you had just come from a spook interview yourself.”

“You hairy ape,” Ham said cordially. “How’d you like for me to leave you here—cut in assorted pieces?”

And thus, with their quarrel faintly resumed, and feeling a bit more normal, they moved along the blank side of the warehouse toward the little-used wharf where the tug, Whale of Gotham, was moored.

Near by, the waves sobbed, and a flurry of rain arrived with a wet shotting noise, splattering clammily on their hands, their faces.

“Come on!” Monk snapped. “We’ll get wet!”

They began to run, but not swiftly, for it was intensely dark and they were without light.

Ham, the more agile on his feet, was in the lead, his hands out before him, seining the darkness. Unexpectedly, he felt a pain across his knuckles. It was a burning sensation as if a red-hot iron had been laid there. The agony stabbed. He exploded in a grunt and recoiled.

“What’s wrong?” Monk demanded.

Ham started to answer—but instead, thumbed on his lighter, holding it high. What he saw caused him to howl at the top of his voice.

“Run!” he bellowed.

Monk stood rooted in gape-jawed surprise. He had seen the same thing as Ham—vague, nebulous green things floating in the night. They seemed alive, squirming through the murk like winged serpents. One of the fantastic bodies was afloat near Ham’s knuckles.

Monk felt sudden pain, yelled, and knew he had touched one of the green mysteries. He launched a blow, hit nothing, then felt horrible agony scorch his neck.

There was nothing visible, no sound. Monk made snarlings and tried to get his machine pistol out. Again, agony scorched him. It was like an iron at red heat.

Ham was fighting near by. All of his blows fanned air, but often his fists were burned. He lashed with his sword cane. That did no good. He went down. He felt ill, nauseated.

Ham could feel the streaks of agony elsewhere on his lithe body now. There were stabs at his ankles, across his back where his shirt was wet from the rain and from his own perspiration. They were horrible. They brought mad screeches to his lips. Red curtains of agony fluttered before his eyes. It was as if he were being beaten.

Monk tried to get up. He could still hear Ham’s mouthings, but they were weaker. It came to the chemist that his own voice was fading. It seemed to go away, to become a thing in the infinite distance.

His last sensation was that his own voice had gone entirely away, leaving him in a silence that was profound, a darkness that was complete.