Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (32 page)

Exhaust from the batships had gotten to some of the night-prowling ogres. They had
succumbed. Even in death, all that could be made out were their staring, sightless
eyes. The still corpses remained invisible.

Returning to the road, Doc resumed his advance.

Ahead, he could spy the batplanes dancing over the near horizon. They cavorted for
a time, then flew off, heading south back to the bat caves whence they had originated.

The trail of footprints eventually came to a line of tire tracks. This, in turn, led
to a garrison town not far away. Here, Doc began to employ greater stealth, lest he
be seen.

It proved to be an unnecessary precaution.

For as Doc drifted up to the edge of the town, he discovered that nothing lived within.

Soldiers lay sprawled in death, rigid fists still clutching their useless firearms.
Their dusty green uniforms told that they were men of Tazan.

Many had attempted to flee the death exhaust, only to skid onto their faces, where
they died in the snow, or curled up in doorways, like insects sprayed by chemical
insecticides.

It was a grisly sight. A town of corpses. Here and there lay a dead animal, dogs and
cats predominately, slack tongues lolling out of gaping mouths.

Concern for his missing aides caused a flicker of emotion to whip across the bronze
man’s normally impassive features. He searched the streets and byways, seeking any
signs of their footprints. Particularly were Monk Mayfair’s feet distinct.

Doc soon found a series of footprints answering to those of Monk’s oversized feet,
accompanied by Ham’s slender footprints. And with them the unmistakable tracks of
a woman’s heels. Fiana Drost.

Doc followed these to a hovel of a barracks building and to a cellar door. It was
locked with a common padlock.

Picking it could be done, but time was of the essence.

Grasping the padlock in one mailed fist, Doc Savage twisted and gave a wrench.

What transpired next would have impressed a circus strongman.

The padlock, along with retained hasp, came off the wood like a rotted tooth. Doc
tossed it away and flung open the door. He entered.

WITHIN, the cellar was sparsely illuminated.

Doc immediately discovered the body of Baron Karl. He examined it briskly, quickly
determined that the man was deceased. All signs pointed to his having been executed
in the customary fashion—a single rifle bullet to the heart.

Moving on, Doc found signs that drew him to foot marks clustered about an elongated
box. The dusty floor told the story.

Lifting the lid, the bronze man spiked the ray of his generator flashlight, which
disclosed a ladder leading down into an earthen tunnel.

It was a close fit, but Doc climbed in successfully. He moved down the protesting
ladder, which gave near the bottom, two rungs splintering.

Doc landed on his feet, looked both ways and selected a direction that appeared promising.
Discovering a ladder, he climbed it, continued on.

He had not progressed very far when a pair of  Tazan soldiers in muted green came
trooping around a bend, and reacted with appropriate shock to the unexpected sight
of the fantastic Man of Bronze encased in mail. Eyes under helmet rims got very round.

For a moment, they looked uncertain as to whether to turn and flee, or raise rifles
and begin firing at the colossus in metal.

Doc Savage helped with their deciding. He wrenched back, ducking around a rocky bend.

Crying out, the soldiers charged after him. Rounding the turn, they skidded to a boot-heeled
halt, looking every way but up. For the metallic intruder had vanished! Only a long
tunnel, interspersed with lights, lay before their perplexed gazes.

While they were deciding what next to do, one soldier chanced to step on something
underfoot, which broke with a glassy crunching. A strange slumber swiftly overtook
them. They fell in a slack heaps of green, entirely dead to the world.

Doc Savage climbed down from the high rafters into which he had concealed himself,
reached down and emptied the rifles of ammunition. After scattering the shells, he
broke the rifles in two with his bare hands.

Stepping over the fallen, Doc moved on. The bronze man had deposited a globe of his
special anesthetic gas which he had palmed from his equipment belt onto the dirt floor.
During the confused soldiers’ moment of indecision, one had stepped on it, releasing
the odorless concoction. This had been inhaled with instantaneous results. Doc’s helmet
had protected him from the fumes.

The passageway wound and twisted, and many times Doc Savage had to bend to negotiate
a stretch where the ceiling was too low. From time to time, dirt sifted down from
the rafters, disturbed by his passing.

Doc was not greatly astonished when he suddenly came upon a pair of disembodied eyes
blocking the way. He had expected the one-eyed creatures to be guarding the place.

What did bring a gleam of surprise to Doc’s flake-gold orbs was the fact that these
optics were a familiar forest-green.

“Page!” Doc said sharply. “What are you doing loose?”

“It’s a long story,” came the seemingly sourceless voice. “I’ll explain later. But
I followed your men here. I know where they are. I can take you there.”

“Lead the way then,” said Doc.

Simon Page turned and trooped away.

Doc had to remind him that seen from the rear, his eyes were no longer visible, and
following him was not an easy thing. It was uncanny the manner in which his floating
orbs vanished and reappeared each time Page turned his head. Evidently, the weird
invisibility had the property of making anything behind it unseeable as well. This
explained why whenever one of the ogres closed an eye, that orb appeared to vanish
from sight.

As they worked forward, Simon Page told Doc of how he had exited the aircraft upon
landing and, after exploring for a bit, had been overpowered by something as hairy
and invisible as himself.

“I think I was chloroformed,” Page concluded. “When I woke up, the airplane was gone.”

Doc told him, “Your assailant must have laid down and played possum, hoping that he
could slip on board the plane, unsuspected. He succeeded in this, but met with misfortune.”

“What happened to him?” asked Page.

“Slain,” Doc admitted uncomfortably.

“That reminds me. I’ve been lurking around the caverns, waiting for a chance to rescue
Fiana. I overhead talk that Ham Brooks is dead.”

“Are you certain?” Doc asked with low urgency.

“That is what I heard. There was talk he and another person turned black and blew
away in a gust of smoke.”

This information seemed not to perturb the big bronze man as much as it might. His
whirling eyes visibly relaxed.

“Take me to the other prisoners,” said Doc.

They moved on. The way twisted and seemed to double back on itself. The place was
a labyrinth of hewn rock. The work had been going on for some time, Doc saw.

Far ahead, there seemed to be great commotion.

“The Egallan forces are attacking,” Page explained. “I think the Tazans are preparing
a counter-attack.”

No sooner had Page spoke than a pair a soldiers in Tazan green came around a bend,
accompanied by a single floating eyeball. The latter was a milky blue.

The startled soldiers frantically reached for sidearms.

Compared to Doc Savage, they appeared to be moving in slow motion. Doc’s hand flashed
to his gadget vest, plucked a cartridge grenade. Priming it, he pitched the device
ahead of him, then reversed course, hauling Simon Page with him.

Came a roar. Black smoke gushed, filling the corridor with eerie sullenness. The bomb
Doc had thrown did not depend on flames consuming a substance for its smoke-making
properties, but upon the combination of chemicals released and intermingled when it
was shattered. The smoke had a dense purple quality, and that made the soldiers think
of poison gas, if their excited cries were any indication.

Prudently, the Tazans went into full retreat. They neglected to do any firing. The
twisting tunnels made that effort pointless.

“I know another way,” Page told Doc as they ran. “Follow me.”

Working along the tunnels, they circled around until they got back on track. The hideous-looking
smoke had thinned appreciably by that time. There was no sign of any uniforms, nor
phantom eyes for that matter.

IT did not take long to reach their destination. The place where the prisoners were
kept was a strange room barred by iron. It was unguarded.

Doc strode up, saw Monk and Long Tom—but no one else.

“Doc!” Monk exclaimed, seizing the bars. His grin split his broad face like a suddenly-sliced
melon.

“Any of you hurt?” asked Doc, throwing back his spherical helmet.

“Not bad,” Monk replied. “They gave us the works a time or two, trying to find out
where you were. Once, they fed us some kind of truth serum, and it made us sick as
dogs. Lucky we didn’t know where you were.”

Doc Savage’s metallic features were grim. His practice of failing to disclose his
plans or his movements to his own associates, whenever the procedure did not interfere
with his own operations, had paid off upon other occasions. Monk, Ham—none of the
others—could not be easily tortured into disclosing knowledge, but of course they
had no more defense than the next man against some forms of truth serum.

Long Tom put in, “They made a big show of hauling us to an execution chamber in order
to scare us into talking, but we didn’t scare worth mentioning.”

Monk called out, “Say, Doc, something’s been worryin’ me. What became of Habeas?”

“Hiding in the amphibian,” Doc advised. “He is all right.”

Something resembling a pair of matched cue balls materialized in the gloom beside
Doc Savage.

“Where is Fiana?” blurted the voice of Simon Page, his steadily staring eyes switching
from face to face in the ghastly manner of a mechanical puppet.

“She slipped away before we were captured,” said Monk, suddenly startled. “How did
you get here?”

Doc Savage interjected, “What became of Ham?”

Long Tom answered that. “We were lured down here by that Countess Olga. Ham went off
with her, the fool.”

Monk interposed, “Not long after, the shyster let out a yell like he had happened
upon Old Nick himself. Next thing we hear, that slippery Emile Zirn is tearin’ around,
claimin’ they’d both turned black and the oily smoke boilin’ about the tunnels was
them.”

“But I figured out what really happened,” added Long Tom. “It was—”

“Time for talk later,” admonished Doc.

Doc reached into his equipment vest and removed a thing like a flare candle. He smeared
some of the gooey end onto the lock and hinges of the strange gate.

Next he applied another substance, this one powdery in form. This came from a glass
tube.

“Cover your eyes,” he warned, turning away and restoring his helmet.

Everyone clapped hands over optics. The looming orbs belonging to Simon Page retreated,
then winked out.

The three points Doc had daubed began a violent sparking and hissing. The patches
of metal turned molten and after a few moments of pyrotechnics, the gate simply fell
forward with a clang, there being nothing substantial to hold it in place.

Monk and Long Tom stepped out over the grate, taking care to avoid the molten portions.

Doc handed them superfirers and extra ammunition drums from his packsack, saying,
“Follow me.”

Monk examined his weapon eagerly, seemed vaguely disappointed when he discovered the
drum was charged with mercy bullets. “Where to?”

“To locate Fiana and Ham.”

“I can do without finding that female ghoul,” Long Tom muttered.

“Watch what you say about Fiana,” Simon Page warned.

“For two cents,” Long Tom retorted hotly, “I’d blacken both your glims, but no one
would know the difference.”

They failed to find any trace of Fiana Drost, however.

Instead, they came upon the great stone vats where more soldiers of Tazan were shedding
their uniforms and diving into the chemical soup. They watched the men turn transparent
by stages and vanish altogether—all but the weirdly staring disembodied orbs.

“This must have been what they did to me when I was out cold,” Simon Page said dully.
“Do you think I can be cured?”

Doc pointed to one individual—a rather hairy fellow—who was preparing to jump in.
“Observe how some of his limbs are semi-transparent. He has been invisible before,
and is going in for a second treatment.”

A gleam jumped into Page’s looming orbs. “So this wears off!”

“Apparently,” said Doc.

Long Tom suddenly exploded, “There’s that slippery Emile Zirn!”

All eyes followed his skinny pointing finger.

“High time we shake some unvarnished truth out of that guy,” Monk muttered.

Long Tom said, “That’s good enough for me.”

Rolling up his shirt sleeves, he waded in.

It was an article of faith among Doc Savage’s band of adventurers that each man had
his specialties. Monk was a great chemist. Long Tom, a first-class electrician. But
apart from their professions, each possessed other special qualities.

While Monk might be conceded the most ferocious in a fight, this was a result of his
brutish strength, which was more simian than human. Ham was the most nimble in action,
especially with his sword cane.

On the other hand, while Long Tom Roberts would be classed a bantam weight fighter,
pugilistically speaking, he more than made up for his lack of bulk in fighting ferocity.

By his fierce temper, a trait that caused even Monk Mayfair—who outweighed him by
over a hundred pounds—to avoid tangling with him, Long Tom had the edge over all.
Rarely did he meet his match.

Emile Zirn had no such luck.

Long Tom strode up to him, grabbed him by the collar and began applying knuckles to
nose, jaw and other suitable spots in a drumming barrage. His fists became trip-hammer
blurs. None missed their mark.