Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (3 page)

“But why say
Doc Savage?”

“Because of what I heard about him. He seems to follow the strange profession of helping
other people out of jams.”

The girl bit her lips. “I still don’t see why you mentioned his name.”

“Didn’t you ask me about Doc Savage?”

“Oh, that!” Fiana Drost shook her head. “That had nothing to do with this. I was just
curious, having read an article about him.”

“Stranger and stranger,” Simon Page declared grimly.

The young woman threw up her chin and seemed about to fling something biting. But
she whirled, instead, and ran toward the inn.

“Fiana!” Simon shouted. He ran after her. She proved to be fleet and uncannily sure-footed
in the dark.

He caught her at the entrance to the inn, took hold of her arm.

“Listen, I do not understand. You’ve changed. You’ve become positively cold-blooded.”

The words had tumbled out, and Simon Page soon had cause to regret uttering them.

Fiana Drost faced him indignantly. “You’re insulting! I don’t want to see you again!”

“But—”

She flounced inside, slamming the door behind her.

Simon Page, wearing an expression as much puzzled as hurt, started to follow, then
reconsidered. He decided against bothering her.

Simon paused outside the great stone church, and smoked his way through two cigarettes
furiously.

Then he went to his room and paced for a time. There were telephones installed in
the converted inn rooms, and Simon considered asking the front desk to connect him
with Fiana’s room. He decided against this course of action. He had come all the way
from Boston, Massachusetts to report on the war everyone expected. Without a war,
there was nothing to wire back to his editor. If no war came, he would be recalled
or sent elsewhere, and that would mean never seeing Fiana Drost again.

It was that last unappealing realization that decided him.

Simon was going to find the black thing. “Already wasted too much time!” he muttered.
“Should have done it earlier!” He seemed tempted to go to Fiana Drost at once, and
demand a closer look at the tiny black bat ornament. “I’ll do it later!” he said aloud.
Despite the fact that it might be none of his business, Simon Page had plainly decided
to take an active part in the mystery.

Simon loaded a revolver he extracted from his travel bag. There was no telling into
what peril a story might lead him. He went out into the night with the gun in his
pocket, and his flashlight in one hand.

Overhead in the night sky, flapping bats were returning to the hollows of dead trees
to rest.

MINUTES later, Page had returned to the scorched spot where the dead man lay. Zoltan
was still there. Now he no longer resembled a human being, but the discarded victim
of some parasitic creature—a dried shell that had once been a man, now tossed aside
after all the vital juices had been drawn off like sap from a healthy tree.

Gun in one fist, flash in the other, Simon Page crept on.

He walked some distance. Only his feet treading the burnt earth made noise. It was
a monotonous, macabre sound. Simon might have been the only living thing for miles
around.

Simon began to feel vaguely that something was wrong. He did not immediately place
what it was. Then suddenly he knew. The bats! Instead of roosting peacefully, the
bats were fluttering around as if they had recently been disturbed.

Then he heard the wings.

The moon was, by this hour, very high in the night sky. Simon Page looked upward,
and saw the lunar orb. Around it floated a sea of stars.

From somewhere among those silvery lights, the whirring of wings seemed to come. Craning
his head back, Simon attempted to make out the source of the growing sound. He could
not.

Pressure of wind stirred his hair. The ashy ground cover under his feet lifted, disturbed
by unseen beating pinions.

The sound was coming closer. Simon Page thumbed the safety on his pistol. He waved
it skyward, as if in warning.

Cinders rose in a noisome cloud about his legs. Far over his head, a field of stars
was blotted out. Simon fired toward that anthracite patch. His revolver barked twice.

Abruptly, the whirring sound seemed to plummet. Simon had presence of mind enough
to run for his life. He imagined a great dark creature dropping to the earth, mortally
wounded, and had no desire to be crushed under its bulk.

So he ran. Oddly, the whirring, beating sound pursued him. He used his flashlight
to pick his way around the shattered trees that dotted the landscape. The pressure
of beaten air rolled across his back. The thing was gaining!

Just when Simon Page was about to give up all hope, his flash ray went out. It was
a shocking thing to happen. The batteries were fresh. The light had not seen much
use. They could not have died. It was impossible!

Turning, he tried to spy the thing bearing down on him—and he received another shock.
Simon could no longer see the stars! Nor the moon. The midnight sky was impenetrably
black. Was the creature that huge, after all, that it could blot out the
entire
night sky?

Seized by fear now, Simon ran. He tucked his elbows close to his ribs and put all
his churning might into escape.

Without light, he could not see an inch before his wide staring eyes. All the world
had become black. And the beating wings were following relentlessly.

Abruptly, Simon changed direction. He fled west. And suddenly, he could see again.
After a fashion. The sky was full of stars once more and the moon was there, shedding
its platinum effulgence.

Most astonishing of all, his pocket flashlight was again spraying illumination!

Heart racing, Page ran on. And the beating wings caught up again. As did the darkness.
The night sky was doused of light. The flashlight, hard in his fist, issued no discernible
light. He could see nothing. And so ran into an obstructing tree.

He bounced off, shaken. Finding himself in the dirt, Simon Page attempted to rise.

Then the hairs on the back of his neck stood up stiff and straight.

The thing was directly overhead now. He could feel its smoky breath. The darkness
was smothering. It was difficult to breathe.

As he lay there, something seized him with an irresistible grip. Simon Page struggled,
fought. The thing that had him felt like horn.
Talons!
But what sort of creature possessed talons large enough to take hold of a full-grown
man?

Then, something sharp like fangs sank into his shoulder and, in spite of himself,
Simon Page screamed.

The horrible blackness overtook his frenzied brain.

WHEN SIMON PAGE awoke, he did a strange thing.

Under the circumstances it might not have been so strange, but the speed with which
he did it was peculiar. It showed a remarkable presence of mind.

His eyes snapped up, and he beheld the night sky. He saw the spectral magnificence
of the lunar disk and surrounding stars.

Simon blinked twice. Then he brought his hands up to his chest and felt of his heart.

It was still beating. Only after receiving that steady reassurance indicating he still
walked in the world of the living, did Simon Page take stock of his surroundings.

He lay flat on his back and in his throat was the smoky air of the scorched patch
of land known as Ultra-Stygia. He tried coughing some of it out of his lungs. It came
out in visible plumes. The winter air felt cold.

Then he sat up. The act of sitting up brought to his attention the throbbing pain
in his left shoulder. Then he remembered the fearsome sensation of sharp fangs sinking
into that shoulder.

Simon Page reached up to look at the cloth over the shoulder. He could see no cloth.
No shoulder. In fact, he could not see his hands when he held them before his face.

It was a shock. He looked up, and there was the reassuring light of the stars, but
they held an inimical twinkling now.

Simon Page found his feet shakily. He was sore in a number of places and his skin
felt icy to the touch. It was only then that he realized that he was naked.

He went in search of his clothes. By wan moonlight, he could make out shapes of spidery,
leafless trees, not much else. He began to flounder for his flashlight, but that was
not to be found, either.

After some difficult minutes, Simon gave up the search, and began walking back to
the stone church faintly visible on the bluff.

He gave silent thanks for the fact that he had awoken while it was still dark. It
might be possible to slip into his room without loss of dignity.

Simon had walked an uncertain distance when he saw the eyes.

They were blue—a very sharp crystal blue. They were visible to his left, and they
floated approximately six feet above the ground, supported by nothing that he could
discern.

More unnerving, the eyes were plainly regarding him. Staring, rather. They were unnaturally
round, like billiard balls. Their lidless regard stabbed through the darkness.

Holding his hands in a modest manner, Simon Page returned the frank stare. The sight
of the disembodied eyes was so starkly unbelievable that no terror accompanied the
vision. Perhaps, Simon reflected, all terror had been squeezed out of his soul by
the evening’s terrible events.

Simon decided to hail the owner of the eyes.

“Who are you?” he called. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The eyes continued to stare.

A voice directly behind him was startling in its cold frankness.

“Forgive him his staring, for he is newly dead.”

Simon gasped, “Dead?”

“He has been condemned to walk this terrible desolation for his sins, as have you.”

Simon turned. “My—sins?”

“You know their names,” said the chilly voice. And in the direction from which the
sepulchral tones were emanating, floated a pair of eyes. Only the whites could be
seen. The center of the white orbs were identical in hue to the surrounding blackness,
so it looked as if the optics had been cored, apple-fashion.

The effect was uncanny in the extreme.

Simon Page was not a superstitious sort. He did not avoid black cats, especially,
felt no qualms about walking under ladders, and when the thirteenth day of the month
coincided with Friday on his calendar, he hardly took notice.

But standing out in the utter darkness of Ultra-Stygia, being scrutinized by accusing
eyes attached to no mortal shells who had pronounced him dead, Simon Page felt his
strong heart quail.

“What—what makes you say I’m dead?” he demanded.

“It is plain to see that you have shed your earthly cloak of flesh,” said the cold
voice. “You exist only as a soul, condemned to look upon the world with eyes that
only the damned can see.”

“You mean—you mean I’m just like you?”

“Just as we are—dead.”

“It’s not true!” Simon shrieked.

“Your body,” said a third voice, “lies back to the north, where you left it.”

Simon whirled. And beheld another set of eyes in the darkness. These optics were gray.

“I’m not like—
that!”
he gulped. “I can’t be.”

The discarnate voice intoned, “You were seized by a great vampire bat, which discarded
you when it had drank its fill.”

“No—no!” Simon screamed, thinking of the clutching black thing.

“Do not return to the land of the living. There is no place for you there.”

The three sets of accusatory eyes began converging upon him. Simon began backing away,
walking on his bare feet. His shoulder ached. His eyes burned in his head—if he still
possessed a head, which he had begun to doubt.

The floating orbs bored at him in round-eyed silence.

Then one spoke his name.

“Do not leave this domain, Simon Page.”

The sound of his own name coming from the uncanny soul beings was scary enough to
send Simon Page running out of Ultra-Stygia as fast as his legs—or whatever provided
him with locomotion now—could carry him.

He ran without looking back. He ran without heeding the terrible cold fear deep in
the pit of his stomach.

WHEN the stone church on the bluff came within sight, Simon Page slowed down. He cast
his gaze about for something to cover his nakedness. Finding nothing, he crept cautiously
to the side entrance.

The lobby was well lit, but there was only one person at the front desk, the desk
clerk who was busy reading a newspaper whose headlines screamed of war.

Simon Page saw that he could not cross the spacious lobby without being seen. And
since he had no clothes, he hadn’t pockets to carry his room key. He would need a
key.

The electrified lighting system, although new, was of the type in which the current-carrying
cords were exposed. It had proved impossible to bury ordinary wiring into the clammy
stone blocks that made up the former church. It was simple enough to trace the exposed
cord to the single switch that controlled the electrical lights.

Simon did so, creeping low. One eye on the front desk, he suppressed the lobby lights
by turning a switch.

A startled exclamation came from the desk clerk. Putting his paper aside, he came
stamping toward the switch. In the dark, he could not see Simon Page pass by, utterly
naked.

Simon found the cubbyhole with the hook containing the spare room key. As it happened,
it was the third from the left on the topmost row. He discovered the cubby by feel
and, as a precaution, grabbed the keys on either side of the one he was certain belonged
to his room.

Creeping to the elevator, Simon slipped into the tiny cage. He had a piece of luck.
The cage stood empty. He ran the doors closed and sent the cage toiling upward.

When he emerged on the attic floor, it was likewise quiet. He slipped to his door,
tried the keys until the lock turned, then stepped in.

“Whew!” Simon breathed. Turning on the light, he stepped into the washroom.