Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (31 page)

“Looks like a mine or a cave,” he said slowly.

“It is a cavern,” corrected Countess Olga.

They took turns climbing it. Olga motioned for Fiana Drost to go ahead, before following
last.

Standing on solid rock, Olga motioned for silence, then gestured for the others to
follow. They did so, picking their way carefully along. Here, bare light bulbs were
strung at well-spaced intervals, providing zones of light between long passages of
gloom.

Strange, pungent odors came to their noses. Ham used thumb and forefinger to close
off his aristocratic nostrils.

“Smells like chemicals,” suggested Long Tom.

Monk began sniffing vigorously. “I don’t recognize the stuff, but it sure smells like
something is brewing.”

“They are making monsters here,” intoned Countess Olga. “Come. I vill show you.”

They were led upward along a stony path until they came to a gray rock wall pierced
by a rude iron grille, evidently for ventilation purposes. Light bled through this.

Gathering close, they took turns peering through the close-packed bars.

Below, in a great shallow stone depression, three large rock vats bubbled with a greenish-yellow
chemical stew. It smoked faintly, or seemed to.

Long Tom said, “Monk had it right. Looks like a witch’s brew!”

Shoving him aside, the hairy chemist got a good look.

“Blazes!” he squeaked. “I see men jumpin’ right into them vats.”

It was fact. Men were filing in from feeder tunnels, one leading to each vat.

As they approached, the men removed every stitch of clothing until they stood as nature
made them. They closed their eyes tightly, then employed adhesive tape to seal them.
Each took great care with that part of their preparation.

Then, one by one, they leapt into one of the chemical mixes, began cavorting within
like seals, or mermen.

As they bathed, their skins gradually grew transparent. Muscles showed like squirming
red animals. Skulls were revealed. Ribs. Other bones. Organs. Pumping hearts. Then
even these gradually melted from sight, until only their frisking movements in the
waters showed that they were still swimming therein.

When the transformed men emerged, their eerie eyeballs alone showed. From this distance,
it was as if very round paired gems were going about.

Leaving shapeless wet footprints behind them, they marched off, disappearing into
gloomy tunnel mouths, like nocturnal creatures returning to their lairs ahead of the
rising sun.

“This is how Tazan creates its so-called
Kuklopsz
Corps, the spies who cannot be seen or stopped,” explained Countess Olga.
“Kuklopsz
is their vord for ‘Cyclops.’ ”

“What’s your role in all this?” snapped Ham, not liking anything of what he had thus
far witnessed.

“She is a betrayer,” reminded Fiana Drost.

Monk asked, “Then why is she showin’ us all this? This is a state secret of Tazan.”

Fiana again had nothing to say in response. So she looked away, eyebrows knitting
together.

Monk Mayfair put in, “I dunno. None of this looks good to me.”

“I have something to show you all,” Countess Olga announced. “But because of the grave
danger, I must do so one at a time. Who vill accompany me first?”

Bowing, Ham Brooks said, “Lead the way,
Contessa.”

“It is a trap,” warned Fiana.

She was ignored.

Ham followed Countess Olga to a place far from the spot where men were being turned
into the disembodied brutes that did General Consadinos’ dirty work.

“A terrible thing is about to transpire, Mr. Brooks,” she was whispering.

“Tell me,” Ham said eagerly.

“Now that he has acquired the terrible veapon belonging to Egallah, General Consadinos
is about to unleash his most fearsome terror plot. Only Doc Savage can stop it.”

“Granted,” declared Ham worriedly. “What is this scheme?”

She stopped, turned, faced him, eyes imploringly earnest. “First, vere is Doc Savage?”

Ham hesitated. “I confess that I do not know. When we last saw him, he was searching
Ultra-Stygia for—”

“For vat?”

Ham hesitated, set his lips firmly. “I am sorry. But Doc Savage does not like us to
disclose his movements. You must understand.”

“Yes,” said Countess Olga. “I understand perfectly. Now come. There is something I
vish to show you.”

She led the dapper lawyer—hardly dapper now—to a room hewn out of solid rock. She
unlocked it.

Ham entered first.

Countess Olga stepped in and closed the door behind her, softly, carefully, placing
her sinuous back to it.

The turning as of a key in a lock came to Ham Brooks’ ears as a short squeal of a
sound, like a rat being stepped on.

He whirled. Ham’s hands fluttered aimlessly. The absence of his sword cane flustered
the dapper lawyer.

Countess Olga was looking at him with a definite intensity. Ham swallowed. Something
in that look struck him as weird, almost wolfish.

Countess Olga smiled sinisterly, eyes narrowed like a cat spying a mouse.

“Velcome to my sticky veb,” she said.

Ugly rage gleamed in her eyes. A moment before, she had seemed a mild woman. Now she
was glowering, ferocious.

“Have you ever heard the legend of the Medusa?” she asked. “She of the serpent locks?”

Unexpectedly, the countess removed her elegant green turban, revealing her hitherto-hidden
hair—and Ham Brooks let out a scream of sheer horror.

THAT piercing shriek—no other descriptive fit—echoed down smoky tunnels and impacted
upon the battle-battered ears of Monk Mayfair.

“Ham!” he squawled. “He’s in trouble!”

They raced in the direction of the sound. The stony course twisted wildly, maddeningly,
and Monk might not have found the source of the dapper lawyer’s outcry but for the
singular fact that billowing gray smoke rolling out of one side tunnel drew his attention.
Instinctively, he veered in that direction.

The apish chemist blundered through the pale, ghostly stuff, coughing, until he discovered
its source.

It was vomiting out of an oaken door that was ajar.

Out of this stumbled a man, also coughing.

Long Tom, pulling up behind Monk, identified him.

“Emile Zirn!”

Monk grabbed Zirn, flung him into Long Tom’s arms, then pushed through the coiling
stuff to the chamber beyond.

Beating at the pall with his hairy arms, Monk encountered nothing at all.

“Ham! Ham!” he yelled. No response was heard.

Finally, Monk tumbled out into the corridor, and sat down to cough his lungs clear.
His barrel chest worked like a bellows.

Long Tom was interrogating Emile Zirn, who wore a shocked expression on his smooth
face.

“Where’s Ham?”

Zirn gulped out, “He—he was in that chamber. I heard a scream. When I arrived, I threw
open the door. Just in time to see…
it.
”

“It?”

Emile Zirn seemed to have trouble with his words, as if a fishbone was caught crosswise
in his throat. Long Tom shook him vigorously.

“Spill!”

“The—the one called Ham and Countess Olga stood inside. They had turned dark as coal.
Like statues they were. Frozen immobile. Their expressions were fearsome to behold.
As I watched, they turned… into smoke.”

Emile Zirn waved his hands wildly.

“This foulness that you see about you here… is all that remains of them!”

Hearing this, Monk Mayfair gave forth a howl of rage and jumped up on bandy legs.
He reached out and seized Emile Zirn, pulled him out of Long Tom’s tight grip.

Monk growled fiercely, “Are you sayin’ we’re breathin’ all that’s left of him!”

“This I saw with my very eyes,” said Emile Zirn, pointing at his smarting orbs. The
evil, oppressive smoke was bothering him, too.

Long Tom grated, “This yarn is starting to sound familiar.”

“Ain’t this what happened back on that liner?” Monk questioned.

Long Tom nodded. “Exactly. Countess Olga disappeared, and I found this bird was hanging
around. Then he vanished, and all that was left was smoke—just like now.”

Monk looked around, tiny eyes narrowing.

“Before, when people were killed by the death-dealin’ machine, they turned black and
the smoke that they turned into was black as well.”

“That’s what I was just thinking,” Long Tom said skeptically. “But this smoke is gray.
Now that I think of it, so was the stuff on the liner—that I saw anyway.”

It was also beginning to thin. Monk raced back to the chamber and fished around in
the thick stuff, which resembled soiled cotton.

He came back bearing a fired-clay crock that still smoked faintly.

Long Tom gawked at it. “What’s that?”

“Miniature stove filled with coal oil. They probably use them for clearing the air
of pesky insects and vermin.”

“Suspicious,” decided Long Tom.

Monk demanded of Emile Zirn, “If Ham and that Olga turned to smoke, what’s this doin’
here?”

“You will have to ask them, if you can find them.” Abruptly, Emile Zirn straightened
his thin shoulders, eying them with a growing animosity.

“As for you all,” he sneered, “I denounce you as spies who have somehow managed to
escape. For this, you will be shot dead.”

Monk jutted his brutish jaw belligerently. “I don’t see anyone steppin’ up to do the
job,” he growled.

Zirn snapped two fingers sharply. At that, rifle barrels came charging around the
corner, borne by soldiers wearing Tazan green. One was promptly trained upon each
of them.

“Stand as you are,” a Tazan officer ordered.

Emile Zirn plucked Monk Mayfair’s hairy fingers off his coat lapel and displayed an
unctuous smile.

“As I was saying,” he purred, “your fate is very clear.” Turning to the soldiers,
he barked, “Take them to the execution chamber!”

“Here we go again,” said Long Tom glumly.

THE FALLING SNOW made tracking Monk, Ham and the others a comparatively simple matter.

Doc Savage kept his attention on his surroundings, knowing that the one-eyed were-men
called
Ciclopi
were abroad in the night. Their footprints, larger than an ordinary man’s due to
the fringe of coarse hair surrounding the bottoms of their bare feet, made them relatively
easy to discern.

The bronze man made a strange apparition moving through the Ultra-Stygian night. Moonlight
painted a spectral sheen on his helmet, picking out star points on the alloy mesh
that protected his Herculean form.

Despite the weight he was carrying, Doc’s passing was ghostly. He might have been
one of the legendary creatures that are said to haunt Ultra-Stygia, a monster of mailed
metal rather than flesh and blood. His flake-gold orbs moved ceaselessly, ever restless
in their eerie animation.

The trek through the falling snow was uneventful for a time.

Before long, bats began wheeling in the night sky.

Doc looked up. At first, he spotted the ordinary variety of bats, out hunting for
moisture. It was too cold for insects. These made rat-like squeakings.

Then a flight of the eerie bat-gyroplanes passed overhead, all but silent.

One spotted him and peeled off from the rest, making a run for the solitary mailed
figure moving through the swirling whiteness.

The macabre aircraft passed low overhead, and from its furred tail issued a long plume
of exhaust.

Doc Savage knew this was not ordinary exhaust.

Sure enough, a few moments later, he came upon a spot in the snow where bats flailed
and writhed in their death agonies. Their squeakings came unpleasantly to the ear,
even muffled as it was by the glassy globe protecting Doc’s head.

As the grim bronze man moved through them, they began expiring, leather wings wilting,
curling inward.

The batship came around again, attempting to spray the indomitable figure moving through
the zone of death. A long serpent of gray vapor settled dismally.

When this pass also failed, the ship did something remarkable.

It lined up in front of the armored giant, hanging there like an ornament on a string.
The pilot—his goggled-eyed head gave the impression of a baby bat peering over the
devil-eared head of its mother—lined up a spike-snouted pistol and this began snapping
and sparking.

Bullets skimmed past Doc Savage, making sounds in the clear night like glass rods
breaking. This is the distinct cracking noise a passing bullet makes.

One slug caught Doc in the shoulder, throwing him half about.

Undeterred, the bronze giant straightened, resumed walking.

Another bullet struck him in the chest and Doc staggered back. The weapon must have
been of small caliber, because even with the mailed suit, the bronze man should have
been hurled off his feet by the impact of powder-driven lead.

Yet, Doc Savage continued striding forward, face resolute.

The pistol snapped a few more times to no avail. Every shot missed. The hand that
held the gun was trembling now.

The pilot evidently decided that he was facing a foe who could not be struck down.
Taking hold of the controls with both hands, he sent his weird craft shooting straight
upward. It was a maneuver no autogyro had ever achieved.

The bronze giant watched this with interest. The batships had been perfected to a
degree that impressed even him. And Doc Savage was considered a living genius in the
field of aeronautics.

The bat craft reached a safe altitude, then hurled off to the north, flying normally.

Striding ahead, Doc next encountered a place where the snow was depressed in several
spots. He gave these some attention.

It was as if someone had scoured out hollows with a great broom. The snow was feathered
strangely about the edges of these depressions.

Moving toward one of them, Doc discovered the reason why.

Staring up from one hollow were a pair of brown eyes. They were open and glassy, fixed
in a way that suggested death.