Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (7 page)

He lost sight of the statuesque woman only once. That was when she turned a corner.

When Long Tom caught up, rounding that same corner, there was no sign of the elegantly
tall countess.

There was only a man lounging at the rail, idly smoking a cigarette. The man looked
up as Long Tom came into view, then looked away with a disinterested expression. He
had the smooth-faced look of a man who shaved twice a day, but was otherwise unremarkable.

Ignoring him, Long Tom followed the deck to its terminus, found no trace of Countess
Olga. He went to the rail and looked overboard. He had not heard any splash, and peering
into the Atlantic rushing by saw no disturbance in the water. He returned the way
he had come, ruddy features faintly puzzled.

In the interim, the lounging cigarette smoker had vanished.

A reconnoiter of other decks produced no sign of Countess Olga, so Long Tom reluctantly
retired for the night.

OVER the next two days, Long Tom kept his eyes peeled for the mysterious countess.
But she never showed herself, nor did he manage to spy her at meals. It was very strange.
It was as if she had gone overboard.

On the third night out, with Southampton less than a day’s steady steaming, Long Tom’s
luck turned.

He was circumnavigating the decks, the mystery of Countess Olga still uppermost in
his mind, when he heard weird music.

The music sounded like nothing he had ever heard before. It was muffled, but even
so there was an unearthly quality to it that pulled and impelled, as if the melody
exerted a magnetic attraction.

Sail-like ears hunting, the slender electrical wizard made for the sounds which seemed
to be emanating from a cabin on B Deck.

Going from door to door, Long Tom laid an ear against each one until he discovered
the correct cabin.

Bunching knuckles, he knocked.

The music continued its unearthly sweep. But there was another sound discernible.
A busy clattering. It, too, was muffled. It reminded Long Tom of a typewriter, except
that the keystrokes continued seamlessly, mechanically, without pause or change in
rhythm.

Knocking hard, Long Tom raised his voice.

“Steward!”

That failed to elicit a response. The music continued and the clattering as of a busy
typewriter went on unceasingly.

Cabin doors are not of the type that can be unlocked with a lock pick, so Long Tom
didn’t bother. It was possible that the combined sounds masked his knocking. Not likely,
but possible.

Noting the cabin number—B-12—Long Tom withdrew to a safe point of vantage. Settling
into a deck chair in the shade of one of the great horn-like deck ventilators, he
pretended to read a magazine.

After a while, the cabin door opened.

Out from it stepped a rather wolfishly lean man. Long Tom took him in. It was the
smooth-faced fellow he had seen lounging on the lower deck the night he had lost Countess
Olga in the maze of passageways that was the
Transylvania.

Something about that coincidence caused him to get up and follow the lean man when
he passed by. Long Tom was no believer in coincidences.

Keeping a discreet distance, the ruddy electrical wizard stayed on the man’s heels
a fair part of the way to the dining room—the man’s evident destination.

Rounding a corner with caution, Long Tom walked into the barrel of a long-nosed automatic
of foreign make.

The smooth-faced man spoke tersely. “You are following me. No?”

“I am following you, yes,” admitted Long Tom, deciding to get the preliminaries out
of the way.

“Why?”

“To keep in practice.” He proffered a business card that said: WALTER BRUNK, PRIVATE
INVESTIGATOR. Long Tom added, “It’s how I make my living. I’m on my way to England
on a hot case. Following strangers keeps me in shape. Nothing personal. Guess I’m
not doing so hot to-day, eh?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. It was evident that he did not take to that explanation.

“You lie,” he said smoothly.

Long Tom elected to shift tactics.

“O.K., I’m following a suspect. Maybe you can help me out.”

“The name of this suspect?”

“Countess Olga. A jewel thief. I was following her the other night, lost her on B
Deck.”

The other nodded. “I remember you, Brunk. You looked puzzled that evening.”

Long Tom shrugged thin shoulders negligently. “Yeah. She gave me the slip, all right.”

The other regarded Long Tom speculatively. “What if I told you that I know what happened
to her?”

“Go ahead and tell me,” invited Long Tom.

“I warn you. You will scarcely believe my tale.”

“Tell the tale and let me worry about the believing part,” countered Long Tom.

The man waved his cigarette. “The lady in question passed by me. I noticed her. She
appeared very beautiful in a ghastly way.”

Long Tom said, “That was her. Pale as a glacier.”

The other nodded. “She looked lonely, so I started to follow her myself. Around a
corner she went, I was not far behind her. Then I beheld the most uncanny thing.”

The man hesitated.

“Out with it,” suggested Long Tom.

“I rounded the way just in time to witness her depart from this Earth.”

The lean man allowed that to sink in.

“She didn’t jump,” Long Tom said flatly. “I would have heard the splash.”

“No, Walter Brunk. She did not jump. I reached the spot where she stood in time to
see—not the woman—but a hideous squirming mass of black vapor where she had been.
Vapor that drifted slowly away in the wind, and left nothing. The woman had died in
some incredible fashion. Right before my eyes.”

Long Tom searched the man’s face for signs of lying. He found none.

“Why didn’t you report this to a steward?”

The man made fussy gestures with his hands. “I considered this. But first I needed
a cigarette. That was when you happened along. That decided me. If you, who were not
a few yards from the very spot where a woman had perished in so inexplicable a fashion,
did not witness to the fatality, of what use would my testimony be? The authorities
might—how you say—finger me for her disappearance.”

“So you said nothing?”

The man inclined his head slightly. “I have said nothing. But neither has anyone else.”
His cigarette waved vaguely. “Look around you, do you see any search parties? Any
commotion or alarm?”

“No,” Long Tom admitted.

“Neither do I. But I made discreet inquiries. And do you know what I discovered?”
He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “There is no such passenger registered as Countess
Olga.”

“Olga wouldn’t be her last name,” retorted Long Tom.

“No Olgas. No
contesas.
No missing woman passengers. What do you think of that, Mr. Brunk?”

“It’s ridiculous!” snapped Long Tom.

“No more ridiculous than a woman turning into a sable black ghost and drifting away
with the ocean breeze.”

Long Tom had nothing to say to that. He made a jaw, rubbed it thoughtfully.

“I’ll check out your story,” he decided at last.

“Which I will deny,” smiled the man. And pocketing his pistol, he took his departure.

Long Tom grabbed the first steward he chanced upon.

“The other night I talked to a tall woman. She called herself Countess Olga. Where
can I find her?”

“Never heard of her,” said the steward. “What last name?”

“Don’t know.” Long Tom flashed another business card. “She’s on the lam. Jewelry heist.
I’d like a look at the passenger manifest.”

Long Tom was taken to the ship’s captain, who heard his story out. A passenger list
was produced. His identification stood up to the scrutiny of a transatlantic telephone
call. The private investigation organization was run by Doc Savage, and was legitimate.
It had a worldwide reputation. Long Tom studied the list and found no one by the name
of Olga.

“Any passengers not accounted for?” Long Tom inquired.

The captain advised, “There have been no reports of persons overboard, if that is
what you mean.”

“I guess that’s what I mean,” muttered Long Tom, frowning thoughtfully.

Taking his departure, Long Tom made his way to the cabin from which the strange music
had been emanating.

When he reached B Deck, he piled into a commotion. There was a quantity of gray smoke
coming out of the cabin. Quite a bit of it. Persons hung back as if terrified by what
might be burning in the cabin.

“What’s going on?” Long Tom asked a flustered steward he yanked out of the knot of
milling crew and passengers.

“A passenger walking along heard frightful screams emanating from that smoking cabin,”
he was told. “Black smoke was pouring from the edges of the door, which was shut.
Suddenly, the electric lights dimmed. Horrifying sounds came from within. Rushing
here, the passenger saw a fantastic thing—a man, lying rigid and apparently afloat
in midair, with a horrible expression on his face. A fixed grimace. And there was
nothing visible to support him in the air. Then the body of the man became a squirming,
intensely black mass of vapor, which slowly vanished before his eyes, until there
was nothing remaining.”

Long Tom absorbed this in shocked silence. He shook it off, rushed into the cabin,
batting away the pungent gray smoke. There was nothing unusual within. No radio. No
musical instrument. Not even a typewriter.

Long Tom stuck his head out of the cabin.

“This smoke is gray. You said black.”

“The witness said it was black. Evidently it is thinning.”

“Where is this witness?” demanded Long Tom.

The steward looked around wildly.

“I—I do not see him at present,” the steward stammered.

“Well, describe him to me then.”

The steward did. Long Tom listened to the description in its entirety, then rushed
off in search of the man.

But he found no sign of anyone fitting that exact description. And when the smoke
finally cleared, the occupant of Cabin B-12 was nowhere to be found.

Rummaging about the cabin, Long Tom failed to discover any source for the weird music
that combined qualities of a wailing wind and a moaning specter. Neither did he find
anything that could have produced the machine-like clacking.

Nor was the missing passenger discovered for the remainder of the passage to Southampton.

It was something to chill the blood.

AT SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND, Long Tom Roberts disembarked with his luggage, which he refused
to allow a porter to carry. This was not purely penurious, but practical. The equipment
contained within was too valuable to risk loss or damage.

Seeking out a waiting room, Long Tom entered the washroom, and locked the door. There,
he swiftly changed clothes, tore the labels off his luggage, and emerged wearing a
porkpie hat and thick-lensed glasses. Changing shoes, he reverted to his normal height.
But he added several inches to his waist by tying a bladder around his belt, which
he inflated by blowing into a tube. Soap had removed the uncharacteristic ruddiness
from his face.

When he emerged, the pale electrical wizard looked no more like Walter Brunk than
he did Long Tom Roberts.

Using the name Ned Foy, he purchased a fresh ticket, grumbling at the loss the unused
portion of his original ticket represented, and re-boarded the liner via a pier shed.

Long Tom was unpacking in his new cabin when the
Transylvania
was warped out of its berth, to the tooting of tugboat horns. His face wore a look
of perpetual puzzlement. It was an expression he had worn since the disappearance
of the mystery man who had occupied Cabin B-12.

The vanished man’s name, as it turned out, was Emile Zirn. Not much was known about
him. A world traveler, if the labels pasted on his steamer trunks were any indication.
No one questioned had much to volunteer about him. Socially, he had been friendly
enough, but reserved.

As for the individual who had discovered Zirn’s smoking cabin and reported the grisly
manner in which the missing man had perished, no trace of him was uncovered, either.
He could not be identified by description. The crew had gone to great lengths to count
all passengers. This they did twice.

The results were reported to Long Tom Roberts by the ship’s purser.

“We are short only one passenger.”

“Emile Zirn?” Long Tom had hazarded.

“Precisely.”

“Three missing passengers, but only one can’t be accounted for?”

“Correction. Three reported missing, but only one actually so.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Long Tom, scratching his head.

The purser spread his hands helplessly. “But there you have it.”

And so Long Tom had gotten off to shed his Walter Brunk disguise. He hoped that by
doing so he might flush out his quarry.

As the
Transylvania
plowed from the Atlantic Ocean into the Aegean Sea on its way to the Black Sea, Long
Tom prowled the decks and found exactly nothing.

In his frustration, he managed to slip into the cargo hold. There, with the titan
throb of the ship’s brawny engines ringing in his ears, he prowled among items ranging
from mountainous sacks of mail to a flashy red roadster being shipped abroad. The
slender electrical wizard found the latter unlocked, methodically examined its interior
and trunk, all of which proved to be untenanted.

Long Tom summed up the results of his painstaking searching with a low growl of disappointment.
“Ahr-r-r!”

On the last night before landfall, he heard the haunting strains again. It was coming
from a distance. It was almost as if it were drifting out from the midnight waves.
But he tracked it to A Deck just in time to hear the eerie chords trail away like
the keening of a dying banshee.

Long Tom stood watch for over two hours, hoping that the music would repeat. Reluctantly,
he returned to his cabin disappointed in that respect.

MORNING found the liner pulling into Pristav, Tazan. From a distance, the city showed
qualities of the medieval and the modern. As the rising sun burned off a morning mist,
more and more it seemed solidly twentieth century in its skyline.