Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (4 page)

Simon Page washed his face in the sink and considered taking a hot bath. His exposed
skin felt dry and scratchy and he was chilled to the bone.

Looking up from the sink, he stared into the mirror. His eyes looked back at him,
red-rimmed and tired. Then his green irises widened, pupils dilating in shock.

For the orbs floated in the mirrored surface without any mortal meat surrounding them!

THE human mind is a remarkably adaptive organ. Confront it with certain stimuli, and
it will react according to prescribed boundaries. Should a man stumble across a man-eating
tiger in Central Park, for example, he would naturally turn and flee from the danger
first, only then to consider the improbability of there being man-eating tigers in
Central Park.

Simon Page was no different. He saw the eyes in the mirror and his first impulse was
to flee. He might have done so, except that the A.P. man remembered that he was without
benefit of clothing. His natural fear instincts were momentarily overwhelmed by other
instincts just as compelling.

The thought of running out into the hotel hallway and attracting the attention of
Fiana Drost kept him from risking it.

Not that every nerve did not cry out for flight. Simon grasped the white porcelain
edge of the hotel room sink in an effort to keep himself from fleeing.

After a suitable interval in which he got control of his nerves, Simon looked up into
the mirror.

The eyes were his own. Frightening realization, but there was no denying it. They
were very wide and exactly the verdant color of his own—emerald shot with darker lines
so that they resembled peepholes into some jungled realm.

When Simon leaned closer to the mirror’s surface, the green eyes moved toward him.
And when he narrowed his eyes, the detached orbs mimicked the operation. How they
managed this was a puzzle.

Simon, by forcing himself to experiment, grew accustomed to the spectacle, nerve-chilling
as it was.

He closed one eye. And miraculously the mirror mate to the eye he shut disappeared!

He was staring at one eye now. Just one. He opened the other and there were two again.
When he closed the opposite eye, once again, a single forest-green orb stared back
at him, a few inches to the side of the one which had vanished.

Trembling, Simon Page lifted hands he could not see and felt of his face. He detected
eyelids, lashed and tangible. Yet somehow, when he closed his eyelids, his orbs winked
out of existence.

What did that mean? he wondered, heart beating high in his throat.

Simon pressed a hand to the glass. In a moment, the misty outline of his fingers and
palm took form, created by the natural warmth of his flesh.

Did that mean he was not dead?

Simon walked back into the room and sat down on the side of the made bed. The mattress
gave under his weight. He had weight! He looked down. He could see nothing of himself,
but the bed cover was a smooth hollow where he had planted the seat of his pants—had
he been wearing any such.

In the fashion of a drowning man whose mind insists upon recalling the dominant events
of his life, a great many thoughts rushed through Simon Page’s brain in those moments.
In this instance, Simon was reliving the hours leading up to the events that had brought
him to this sorry disembodied state.

Then one thought came uppermost, burst from his unseen lips like a single bubble of
oxygen breaking the surface of a pond.

“Doc Savage!” he said. “Doc Savage is the man to help me!”

He scooped up the room phone. It was a French-style phone, with the receiver and mouthpiece
molded in one unit. He clicked the switch hook until the desk clerk picked up.

“I wish to place a long distance call,” Page blurted breathlessly. “To New York City.”

“What is the number in New York you wish to reach?”

“I don’t know the number,” Simon said, ragged-voiced.

“Then I do not think the call can be completed.”

The long-distance operator was of the same opinion after Simon Page was put through
to her over the clerk’s sullen objections. She spoke good English, as her job required.

“Get me Doc Savage in New York City,” clipped Simon.

And that stilled the long-distance operator’s objections. Such was the power of the
famous name.

In less than ten minutes—the time necessary to set up the connections—the hotel room
rang and Simon Page picked it up.

He got a distant ringing—the sound of a telephone in New York as transmitted over
a great transatlantic cable, Simon knew.

There came a click. And a voice, remarkable even over the thousands of miles of seafloor-laid
cable.

“This is the headquarters of Doc Savage,” the remarkable voice said.

“This is Simon Page! I’m at the Cateral Inn, in Tazan. Something incredible is— ”

Unperturbed, the remarkable voice continued speaking.

“There is no one here at present, but this recording device is equipped to record
your voice if you wish to leave a message.”

It was a recording! Simon began blurting out his story when the door to his room opened.
It creaked. It was an old door. But Simon failed to hear the creaking over the sound
of his own voice.

At first, it seemed as if there was no one at the door.

Then eyes winked into being. Two pair. One very blue and the other of a sinister black
quality.

A voice, low and cold, intoned, “Simon Page. You have wandered into the land of the
living in defiance of our warning. We have come to take you back—where you belong.”

Simon turned. He shot off the bed. The phone receiver clattered to the floor. A hissing
came from the earpiece. Evidently, whatever had depressed the switch hook had failed
to sever the connection.

Simon felt hairy things like paws fumble for his bare arms. There was some confusion.
He could not see the outreaching paws, nor could the floating eyes perceive his invisible
form.The fight that followed did not even look like a fight, except that there came
the meaty slapping of hands, blows. And scuffling. A lamp upset, bulb shattering.

And Simon Page cried out, “The eyes! The disembodied eyes are in my room!”

Came a swish, a hard sound, followed by a thump. The green eyes that belonged to Simon
Page rocketed backward and seemed to land on the floor like matched dice.

They stared upward, glazed and unseeing. Then, together, they winked out of existence.

Hovering over them were the floating eyes, two blue and two black, regarding with
cold unconcern the spot where the green eyes had vanished.

A detached voice said, “We will bear him to his rightful place.”

And from the telephone, the curious voice of the long-distance operator asked, “Did
you wish to be disconnected now?”

A BITTER WIND was howling among the ice floes of the far reaches south of the North
Pole.

Laden with snow, it swirled around the crevices of a rocky islet set in the metallic
blue mural of the Arctic Sea. Driven flakes, like the fallen dust of long-dead stars,
beat against an obdurate shape that might have been a crystal ball. Except the ball
was blue and opaque, and sunk to its gleaming equator in the heaped snow of the remote
isle.

A hundred foot high blue agate standing on an Arctic isle, and as big around as a
Manhattan city block.

The ticking of hard snow particles was a constant refrain against the Strange Blue
Dome. It went on for hours, seemed to have been going on for days, and promised to
continue for weeks if not months to come. Grit, scoured off the outthrust crags of
rock ringing the isle, was picked up to be commingled with the remorseless, biting
snow.

The grit was driven with a force that would have quickly clouded exposed glass with
myriad scratches. Yet the glassy surface of the blue dome withstood the onslaught,
showing no sign of abrasion. In fact, the sandpapery wind might have been the handiwork
of Mother Nature, proudly polishing a mighty azure gem thrust up from the center of
the earth.

The Strange Blue Dome was no freak of nature surrendered by an upheaval of the earth’s
crust, however.

For a man, head bent before the wind, bundled up in a parka and sealskin boots, approached
the object. The vast dome dwarfed him. It was utterly featureless, yet the figure
stamped toward it as if it were an otherworldly sanctuary prepared to receive him.

The man walked with a stick. It was no twisted bit of wood or branch. It could scarcely
be any such thing. No trees grew for hundreds of miles in any direction. The tree
line was far to the south of this distant spot, across ice-cake choked waters. The
man did not lean on the walking stick, as would a cripple. Instead, he carried it
in one felt-gloved hand, employing it to knock apart humps of snow obstructing his
path.

As he approached the blue phantasm, a strange thing transpired.

A portal opened in the featureless shell of the Strange Blue Dome.

It was uncanny. Looking at the thing, an observer would have sworn that no such portal
existed. There were no cracks, no lines, nothing to indicate the dome was anything
but a single shimmering piece of some unfathomable substance.

Yet the portal had swung open. It smacked of magic.

The man stepped through, and after a moment, the portal swung back into place. When
its edges once again conformed to the curve of the Strange Blue Dome, the great blue
gem of a structure once more presented the appearance of utter and complete solidity.

The howling wind continued to abrade the shimmering blue half-sphere that was obviously
hollow—and inhabited.

No sound of wind penetrated the arching agate dome as the man with the cane stood
stamping caked snow off his sealskin boots. He shucked off his parka hood, revealing
a face denoted by an eagle-like handsomeness. Snow clinging to his hair was perhaps
a shade lighter than the crisp hair itself. But probably not.

His stamping done, the white-haired man proceeded to divest himself of his parka.
He did this without laying aside his stick, which, shaken free of clinging snow, proved
to be a dark cane of very good wood.

The removing of the parka became something of a production, inasmuch as the white-haired
one seemed completely loath to surrender the stick. It switched back and forth between
gripping hands until the parka had been doffed. Then, the man removed his boots and
climbed out of his soft bearskin leggings.

“Jove!” he muttered at one point.

After the entire complicated and cumbersome operation had been completed, the man
stood in immaculate morning attire, complete with pearl gray vest and striped trousers.

Given the fact that he had stepped from the howling wilderness of the North Polar
wastes, the man now presented a picture that was nothing if not comical.

Evidently, one other thought so, for no sooner had the faultlessly attired individual
finished brushing the clinging remnants of snow from his attire, than howling laughter
filled the space in which he stood.

This came from a ridiculously wide mouth belonging to an individual who more resembled
a caveman than a modern specimen of manhood. His bullet head, sloping shoulders and
bowed legs might have been donated by a gorilla. Rusty red fur coated every visible
portion of his anatomy, other than his broad, amused face.

“Haw, lookit that!” he exploded. “Ham Brooks, Eskimo Barrister. Ain’t you a sight!”
 The speaker’s voice was disconcertingly squeaking, almost childlike.

“Listen, Monk, you homely baboon,” the one addressed as Ham snapped. “I come from
the finest Pilgrim stock.”

“You’ve come a long way, then,” Monk said. “What you’re trying to tell me is that
you’re blue-blooded?”

Ham scowled at Monk malevolently. “Exactly.”

“You may be so blue-blooded you can give a transfusion to a fountain pen,” Monk said.
“But what does it prove? To me, you’re—”

Abruptly, Ham let out a screech. His dark eyes were fixed on a button that was hanging
from his coat by a single thread.

“Drat!” he complained. “I’ve pulled a button loose. And I have no spare coat!”

“Fashion plate!” Monk snorted. “You should hire yourself a tailor for a valet, and
have him follow you around with needle and thread.”

“I wish my New York tailor were here,” Ham grumbled.

“I wish he was here instead of you,” Monk assured him.

Ham Brooks, in addition to being an avid pursuer of the title of best-dressed-man
in the country, was also Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, who had a reputation
as one of the nation’s leading lawyers. Ham’s brain was as sharp as the faultless
creases in his pants.

Monk was better known as Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, an industrial
chemist of remarkable renown. His resemblance to a simian cave-dweller would have
caused a big-game hunter and an anthropologist to grab him by opposite wrists and
have a tug of war over possession of the trophy.

If Ham could get Monk locked up in jail, he would probably do it. Monk would do likewise.
Theirs was that kind of friendship.

Angling off to the left, Monk prepared to resume some task which Ham’s arrival had
interrupted. He reached a radial-type airplane motor. Beside this stood a wheeled
cradle. Apparently, Monk’s immediate problem was to get the motor on the cradle.

He bent over and grasped the engine. He heaved. Cats seemed to arch their backs under
his coat fabric as enormous muscles swelled.

The motor hardly budged. It was too heavy.

Monk gave it up, straightened, and looked around. At the far end of the hangar stood
a lifting crane.

“Guess I gotta rig the crane up to handle this motor,” Monk grumbled.

He started away. A voice halted him.

“Just a moment, Monk.”

The voice was remarkable for its qualities of tone. Neither loud, nor particularly
emphatic, the voice conveyed an impression of restrained yet unbounded power.