Doc Savage: Skull Island (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (15 page)

“Yes,” agreed Doc. “The creature must have consumed the albatross on the fly, discarding the wing as inedible.”

“It is a good sign. It means whatever carried off the bird traveled this way. We are on course for landfall.”

Doc said nothing.

“Something troubles you, Mister Savage?”

Doc Savage stared past the sails grouped ahead of him. “It is a bad sign that we are sailing toward the rookery of an unknown bird that cannot be found in the taxonomy.”

Captain Savage did not disagree with that. His mouth became grim. The sun-weathered lines of his face began showing his age.

As they sailed on through what increasingly struck them as a primordial mist such as was said to exist before the dawn of time, their attention continually went to the shrouded sky as much as the befogged sea. Unseen things with wings could be heard from time to time. Pulsings and thrashings stirred the swirling atmosphere high above.

Or was it a trick of their imaginations?

Chapter XVIII

THE SWIRLING FOG grew more yellow as the evening wore on.

Time passed. One bell. Two bells. Three bells. Nothing changed but the color of their shrouded surroundings.

Deep in the night, with the quarter moon ghosting in and out of view—a hazy lunar lantern never quite showing itself—Doc Savage began detecting a change in the oppressively heavy surrounding atmosphere.

First, a smell touched his sensitive nostrils. It smacked of something strange.

Doc inhaled deeply, allowing the odor to be fully absorbed.

After several draughts, he realized that he did not smell a single unusual scent, but a conglomeration of them. Foliage mixed with fetid animal smells. He attempted to distinguish them, but it was no use. It was as if the
Orion
was sailing into a ball of odors that belonged to some awful other realm.

Doc went below, roused his father.

“Captain, I smell land.”

Captain Savage climbed back to the deck. He strode to the bow, sniffed several times and nodded his head in silent agreement.

“I will have Chicahua take soundings,” he decided.

Chicahua fell to with a plumb line. Positioning himself at the bow, he dropped the lead weight time and again; after a while, he called out a burst of words.

“Bottom,” translated Captain Savage. “Twenty fathoms. Land ho for certain. Steady as she goes, Mister Savage.”

Doc nodded. The smells grew more alive, or alarming. He had never encountered such a packed knot of indescribable odors. His mind struggled to separate and categorize them. But the task proved too daunting. There was no making sense of it.

Chicahua continued his strenuous work with the heavy rope and lead plumb.

A few nautical miles along, he gave out a howl.

Captain Savage hurried to his side. He began feeling of the line.

Locking the helm, Doc rushed forward.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Take this in hand, Mister Savage and discover for yourself.”

Doc grasped the line, tried hauling it up. It could not be raised.

“Snagged,” he decided.

Captain Savage shook his pewter-haired head. “Feel the vibration.”

Doc steadied his bronze hands. After a moment, he realized that he could feel a dull thumping moving up the stubborn line that could not be budged.

Doc looked his question.

“Octopus walking up the line,” explained the captain.

Doc looked doubtful.

“There are devilfish in deep waters larger than Science has yet catalogued,” said Captain Savage. “I suspect we have encountered a curious specimen. If he gets a tentacle around our rail and is able to anchor his suckers to the bottom for traction, he may be able to capsize us at will.”

“An octopus that size would have to weigh in excess of three hundred pounds—”

Captain Savage had his knife out and began sawing the line, saying, “If we act fast, we may be able to salvage the situation.”

The keen blade dug, bit hard. Strands began parting.

All the while the rope jounced as the unseen climber made its ponderous way up the heavy cable.

A tentacle broke the surface—slickly black, as thin as a whip at the tip. It began groping blindly, seeking the rail.

Doc did not wait for more of it to surface. Unshipping his automatic, he took aim, and snapped the top off with one sure shot.

An explosion of frustrated bubbles broke the surface as the maimed tendril whipped around, then sank from sight.

The cable no longer vibrated.

“Heave to,” cried the captain.

They began hauling up the line. It came up easily now, and they soon had the lead blob on deck.

The cable appeared undamaged.

“We had luck,” breathed Captain Savage. “Best you return to your station.”

Doc rushed back to the wheel as Chicahua resumed taking soundings. The Mayan looked uneasy in the extreme.

ANOTHER hour passed without eventuality. Doc was mentally calculating the probable size and weight of the discouraged octopus and decided that it might rival the Kraken said to slumber at the bottom of the ocean, patiently awaiting the end of the world, upon which it would awaken.

Out here in the vast Indian Ocean, nothing seemed fanciful, or far-fetched. It was a strange feeling.

The smells grew worse. The metallic stink of blood was mixed in with them. Doc had thought he might have caught a whiff of blood before, but now he was certain of it.

Night still reigned when, through the yellow-white pall, something sprang to life beyond the heaving jib spreader.

High in the air ahead of them, it appeared to be a bonfire, dimly perceived through the spectral swirl.

After a minute, a second bonfire started up, to one side of the first.

The blazing apparitions stood off to port, burning holes in the mist.

Captain Savage was attempting to make them out with his spyglass when he called back. “Steer toward this phantasm, Mister Savage.”

“Aye, sir.”

Doc spun the wheel. He pointed the bow directly at the fiery phenomenon.

Moonlight was not much help. It had been all but smothered by the ghostly white murk.

They crawled toward the apparition, Chicahua taking soundings every few minutes. Doc stood ready to throw the wheel hard over to avoid land or reefs.

Through the fog something reared up the closer they got to it. Something vast and eerily titanic. Twin fires burning on a huge promontory. That was all they could make out through the hazy atmosphere.

Then, the vision began to resolve itself.

Two fires, yes. Two blazing eyes, they had seemed. But now the truth became clearer.

Two fiery holes, they were. Twin burning eye sockets on a great weathered skull floating in the fog.

“Death’s Head!” sang out Captain Savage. “We have found it. Hard alee!”

Eyes fixed on the uncanny headland, Doc Savage responded smartly. He was thinking of the rough drawing below deck, and the size of the unidentified birds that had circled it. Now he was dead certain that they were not ordinary seagulls….

Book Two: Skull Mountain Island

Chapter XIX

IT WAS A fearful, disturbing thing as they beheld it now.

The map discovered on the
Courser
had been crude, but the resemblance to a great, weathered human skull in real life was remarkable. Cloud shadows cast by the moon paraded across its cold countenance, animating it in an uncanny way, as if dark thoughts were being projected onto its troubled brow.

“Death’s Head,” repeated Captain Savage in a voice bordering on awe.

“You mean Death’s Peak,” corrected Doc. “A mountaintop, after all.”

“Aye, if a small one.”

“I am reminded of the hill on which Christ was crucified,” mused Doc. “Golgotha.”

“‘The Place of the Skull,’” commented his father. “It, too, was reputed to resemble a great skull. It fills me with dread just to gaze upon its grim countenance.”

Captain Savage had taken the wheel. They were near land. No question about it.

Doc could make out a soft chuckling of lapping water against stone, not very far away. Surf sounds came and went.

“Mister Savage, go forward with a light. Look for shoals. Snags. Breakers. Anything that might rip out our bottom.”

Doc found a flashlight and surged toward the stem.

He speared his light ahead. The beam made a swirling cone in the thickening yellow miasma.

“Sheer to starboard,” Doc called back.

Somewhere on the island, something screamed in response to the carry of the bronze man’s voice. It climbed like a wild thing, and was nothing human.

Captain Savage manipulated the wheel. The rudder responded. The
Orion
heeled smartly.

“Another!” warned Doc. “Hard aport!”

Soon, it became clear the waters all around were jagged with reefs. Doc pulled cartridges from the loops in his gun belt. He began tossing them ahead, listening for splashes or metallic clinks. He heard more clinks than splashes.

Doc’s ears, sharpened by intensive training—much of it while blindfolded—enabled him to place the dangerous spots by hearing alone.

Between the light and Doc’s ingenious soundings, they found a break in the shoals and passed through safely, into what appeared to be unobstructed waters. A lagoon. A wavering slice of moon was mirrored in it.

They cleared the last snags, began to make a circuit of the island—which is what it must be. An unknown isle in the vast Indian Ocean.

Little could be seen of it. Only the skull peak with his baleful burning orbs. Even these subsided to a vague yellow-red glow as they put the face of the skull behind them.

More rock fangs showed, jutting black as basalt in the darkling waters. The sloppy chuckling sounds made by the tide sounded ghoulish to their ears.

“I am reminded of the submerged reef that bedevils the Caribbean, called by mariners the Devil’s Backbone,” muttered Captain Savage.

Doc nodded. “I recall it. Many ships lost their keels to its rocks.”

Captain Savage studied the disturbing patterns in the water, his mustache bristling with worry.

“Drop anchor!” he ordered sharply. “Strike sails!”

Doc fell to the task, releasing the chain from its windlass drum so that the anchor entered the water with minimal commotion. He joined Chicahua in bringing down the sails.

Soon the
Orion
lay placidly at anchor, her sails furled.

“We will wait for morning,” said the captain. “The mists should burn off by then.”

Doc was sniffing the air carefully.

“What do you smell, Mister Savage?”

“I do not quite know.”

“Sea Dyaks?”

Doc shook his head slowly. “If they are here, I do not detect them amid the overpowering odors coming from land.”

Something cut in front of the irregular knob in the shape of a skull. Something sharp-winged and bat-like. There was the suggestion of a whipping devil’s tail. It made a fleeting pass, vanished from view.

Spying this, Chicahua muttered,
“Camazotz.”

Although they kept their eyes sharp, the winged thing did not return.

THEY waited for the dawn. It came soon enough. The mist began burning off.

When the outlines of the island became clear, they could discern its approximate shape. It was a great jungled plateau, the high point feathered with palm crowns.

Before the steep main portion, jutted a long finger of land. The sere countenance of Death’s Peak brooded over this finger like the face of judgment.

Between the highland part and the peninsula stood a tall barrier that had not been visible by night.

“A wall,” breathed Doc. “Of incredible size.”

There was no gainsaying it. A great structure had been erected the entire breadth of the peninsula’s inner neck, covered with decorative carvings that could not be made out clearly. It stretched from one side of the island to the other. In the center was a double gate and running atop the entire length a walkway of some type. In the center of which, directly over the gate, a great brass gong reflected the rising sun.

Captain Savage unlocked his spyglass and trained it upon the structure. He appraised this with the practiced eye of a civil engineer.

“No native islanders built that,” he decided after a careful study. “Have a look for yourself.”

Doc accepted the glass and used it. He studied the workmanship of the wall, with an eye for age as well as construction.

“Over forty feet high,” he pronounced. “Perhaps two thousand feet across.”

“How old would you judge it to be, Mister Savage?”

“Ancient. But kept up to this very day. There are no signs of neglect or decay.”

Savage Senior nodded. “I would tend to concur. We have passed through uncharted waters to an utterly unknown location.”

Doc surrendered the spyglass. “This place bears investigation, I agree. Do you think grandfather could be marooned here?”

But Captain Savage failed to reply. He had the spyglass up again and was seeking some other sign.

“Raise anchor,” he said at last. “We will circumnavigate this place.”

Chicahua, apparently understanding simple nautical commands couched in English, went forward and worked the pump brake of the Armstrong mechanism that hauled up the anchor chain in stages. It came rattling up the hawsehole.

Once it was on deck, Doc got the anchor squared away. He did this bare-handed, a remarkable feat that caused Chicahua’s eyes to widen.

All sails were raised and the
Orion
began its slow circumnavigation of the incredible island. They chose not to engage the auxiliary engine for fear of attracting unwanted attention from the isle’s unknown inhabitants—if any. This called for deft sailing, but the greater risks called for such a precaution.

Captain Savage continued raking the shoreline with his ever-present spyglass. Beyond the jutting lowland digit, the bulk of the island reared high, its sides tall and scored, rather like the White Cliffs of Dover, but darker and more rugged and difficult to scale.

“Plutonic rock, I should say,” he appraised.