Doc Savage: Death's Dark Domain (12 page)

The midriff he had hit had felt like ridged stone.

“Why did you contaminate my fuel tanks?” Doc asked after the worst of the other man’s
pain had subsided.

“It—it was to save you from the Dark Devil that I did as I did,” gasped out Emile
Zirn.

“What is the Dark Devil?” Doc questioned.

Emile Zirn made a violent gesture with his undamaged hand.

“Heaven alone knows. It is something sinister. Some power. I do not even know whether
it is human. But there are rumors that it has something to do with the terrible things
transpiring in Ultra-Stygia. To be truthful, I know of only one person who might be
able to tell you something of this Dark One.”

“Who is that?” Doc asked.

“A notorious adventuress, Fiana Drost.”

Doc Savage looked his question.

Emile Zirn absently plucked at his sleeve. Something resembling fear came into the
eyes which were like black buttons on either side of his thin-bridged nose.

“Fiana Drost is nothing less than a spawn of the Netherworld,” he spat.

“What?” said Doc.

“You heard me. Hell itself birthed her. She may be one of the things that prowl Ultra-Stygia
by night. One of the Undead.”

“I see,” said Doc Savage, reserving further comment.

Emile Zirn said, “If you please, I would appreciate the return of my pistol.”

“I doubt that you will need it,” Doc told him and kept the weapon.

Taking the man by the collar, the bronze man marched him back to the anchored plane.

When they reached the big speed ship, Monk Mayfair shoved his blunt head and shoulders
out the cabin door, and called out boisterously.

“Hey, Doc! I think I fixed the gas!”

“Is this possible?” blurted Emile Zirn.

“Monk is one of the world’s leading industrial chemists,” reminded Doc.

Doc hauled Zirn on board the amphibian.

“Who is he?” asked Ham Brooks, pointing with his elegant cane.

“He says his name is Emile Zirn,” said Doc, surreptitiously motioning with a hand
not to react to the familiar name.

Monk and Ham appraised Zirn with skeptical eyes.

“What happened to the Irishman, van Shaughnessy?” asked Monk.

“Zirn was Shaughnessy,” stated Doc.

“So what do we do with him?” asked Monk, cracking furry knuckles.

“He claims to have wished to preserve us from meeting death in Ultra-Stygia.”

“Jolly decent of him,” said Ham dryly.

“Since Mr. Zirn was originally en route to Pristav before threats upon his life caused
him to change his travel plans,” said Doc, “perhaps he would enjoy safe conduct with
us.”

Monk howled, “After what he done!”

Zirn interjected, “I only wished to—”

“Stow it,” said Monk. “Doc, I mixed some counteractant stuff into the gas. Should
be safe to take off now.”

Doc nodded. “We will do that.”

“Wait!” said Zirn. He looked uneasy of eye. “I—I have never flown in an airplane before.
Is it safe?”

“Unless we lose a wing or get shot down,” said Monk blandly.

Zirn swallowed several times. “I do not think I wish to fly with you gentlemen.”

“Consider yourself our prisoner then,” advised Doc.

“In that case, I must have a parachute. If I have a parachute, I think I will feel
safer.”

A parachute pack was produced and Emile Zirn donned it. He seemed to have no trouble
figuring out how to buckle the webbing straps.

Selecting a seat near the exit door, he settled in.

Doc Savage dropped into the control bucket and snapped the two radial engines into
life. They began howling like the proverbial Irish banshees, driving the big plane
along. The sea anchor was withdrawn electrically.

The amphibian scudded over wavetops, bouncing and jarring. Soon, they were in the
air, hammering in the direction of Europe.

Endless water cascaded under their wings. Emile Zirn sat quietly and looked uneasily
out the windows. His dark eyes were sunken with a kind of unease.

Their course took them over Western Europe, and before long they were flying over
the nation of Calbia, whose military planes provided Doc Savage with an escort all
the way to the border of Tazan.

This caused Emile Zirn to stir from his long, uneasy silence. “Why do the Calbians
offer you such a courtesy?”

“Ain’t you heard?” boasted Monk. “A few years back, Doc stopped a revolution down
there. For a reward, they tried to crown him king.”

“There was a princess included in the arrangement,” added Ham. “But Doc would have
none of that.”

Emile Zirn made no reply. He looked slightly airsick.

At the border, the Calbian warplanes broke off and Doc flew on into the middle of
Tazan. His course took him south, in the direction of the Black Sea.

THE noonday sun was climbing higher when they sighted the skyline of Pristav on the
far horizon. It was yet far away, but owing to the amazingly clear sky, the spires
of its medieval churches could be discerned.

Doc Savage slanted the plane downward.

Monk Mayfair was at the radio set, endeavoring to contact the administrative tower
of the main air field serving the city. He was having trouble finding the correct
frequency.

Out of the loudspeaker came a weird vibration. It made their eardrums sing and their
hearts want to skip a beat.

“That dang funeral music again!” Monk muttered.

“It is the death march of the Jagellon Dynasty,” Emile Zirn said thickly. “It is played
whenever a Tazan king dies.”

“How do you know that?” asked Ham sharply. “Are you a native of Tazan, or Egallah?”

“I refuse to answer,” he muttered.

Monk listened briefly to the eerie strains, then found the air-field wavelength.

“Doc-1 callin’. Requesting permission to land.”

“Permission denied,”
a voice snapped back in thick English.

“Wait a minute! What do you mean—permission denied? Don’t you know who you’re talkin’
to? This is Doc Savage’s bus.”

“That makes it a different matter, then,”
the voice said reluctantly.

Monk grinned. “See? Doc’s name opens doors better than Aladdin ever did.”

“It was unwise to announce ourselves like that,” Ham murmured.

“It worked, didn’t it?” countered Monk.

Doc was taking the plane around in order to approach into the wind. It was high noon.
A brilliant winter day. No clouds. A bright sun. Visibility was perfect.

Abruptly, a smothering supernatural darkness clamped down. The interior of the cabin
became as the inside of a lump of coal. India ink filling the cabin would have done
no better job of obscuring their vision. It was impossible to see anything.

“What happened?” howled Ham.

“Never mind what happened!” yelled Monk. “How the heck are we gonna land in this soot?”

“It is the Dark Devil!” screamed Emile Zirn. “We are doomed men!”

THE ENTIRE WORLD had turned into a smothering ball of absolute
black.

The black ball began spinning, which added to its horrible qualities.

Doc Savage rapped out, “Monk! Ham!”

Pawing at his eyes, Monk squawled, “It’s the darkness maker! They turned it on us!”

Displaying unbelievable controlled calmness, Doc said, “Find your parachutes! Hurry!”

“Find my parachute?” complained Ham. “I can’t even see my fingers!”

“Habeas!” Monk bellowed hoarsely. “Where are you?”

In the weird supernatural blackness, a piggy squeal came. It sounded wretched, tortured.
Monk lunged in that direction.

There was a mad scramble for pig and parachute packs as Doc Savage struggled to hold
the great twin-engine amphibian level.

This was not as simple as it might seem. Pilots retain their orientation in the air
by keeping one eye on the horizon and the other on the altimeter. It is very easy,
when doing extreme aerial maneuvers, for example, to lose sight of the relationship
of an aircraft to the earth. A simple thing to become disoriented.

Doc Savage’s training had included several weeks blindfolded in a school for the sightless.
This was when he was younger. He learned many tricks to use maneuvering in intense
darkness, how to sense air currents on the face, or discern slight sounds that could
enable an alert man to navigate a maze in utter darkness without visual clues.

None of these skills were useful now. His feet were not on solid ground and there
was no air coming to his face. Doc was at the wheel of a massive aerial behemoth that
any minute now might plow into the ground, plunge into the ocean or—worse still—collide
with a mountain. For this was mountainous country.

Doc Savage’s vibrant voice grew urgent. “Bail out. Now!”

Suddenly, the door opened. Slipstream came rushing in—cold, bracing and terribly frightening
in the lightless confusion of the cabin.

Ham cried, “Doc! What about you?”

“I will follow directly.”

Monk exploded, “Hey! Where’s Zirn?”

Doc called out, “Zirn was the one who opened the door. He jumped out.”

“That took nerve,” barked Ham, scrambling for the door by feel. The cold air helped
guide him.

“Aw, he was just chicken,” returned Monk, finding Habeas in the unrelieved murk.

Holding the frantic shoat under one burly arm, Monk felt his way to the doorframe.
There he paused, eyes bugging sightlessly from their gristle pits.

“Hey! How do I know which way is down?”

Shoving up behind him, Ham Brooks gave the apish chemist an encouraging kick to the
seat of his pants, saying, “Gravity will guide you.”

Howling, Monk tumbled out. Ham followed. He still clutched his sword cane. No doubt
he would carry it to his grave.

They plummeted through an abyss of cold, black nothingness, knowing the helpless plight
of the blind. They
were
blind. It was terrifying. Monk clung to Habeas, and Ham to his cane. After counting
to ten, they yanked at their ripcords and hoped for the best. Only the sound of their
chutes cracking told them they had deployed successfully. Then they were two human
pendulums falling into an endless void.

Above, came the moan of the amphibian going off somewhere.

They listened hard. It was the only faculty left to them. Their optics were useless.

Ham said, “I don’t hear Doc’s chute cracking….”

“Sure hope he got out,” Monk moaned.

Then it was all they could do to prepare themselves for landing. In the weird darkness,
they had no way of knowing if they were about to land on dirt or water, or someplace
infinitely more dangerous….

IN the cockpit of the amphibian, Doc Savage struggled with the controls.

His sense of equilibrium was unsurpassed, but it was of only theoretical use now.
So much of what a man knows about his relationship to the earth comes from the visual
senses that, under these weird conditions, Doc wasn’t certain whether he was flying
level or not.

It felt as if he were, so Doc trusted that feeling. Yet it was unnerving. No light
came to his flake-gold eyes. They no longer operated as nature intended.

Doc’s immediate concern was to get the plane on the ground safely, if that were in
any way possible. For when he told Monk and Ham that he would be along, he did not
mean that he intended to parachute out. To abandon the aircraft to its fate would
risk it landing on occupied buildings with horrific results.

The bronze man was not prepared to relinquish control of his plane, lest it become
an instrument of blind death.

As best he could, Doc Savage flew in the direction where he believed open water lay.
He had experimented by trying to circle. When the air coming through the open door
smelled of salt water, that gave him an approximate heading. Unfortunately, there
was no way to be certain that he was flying true to the Black Sea.

Doc flew and flew. In his mind, he knew that if he could keep the lumbering plane
aloft and on course, he could steer it far out into the sea and completely eliminate
all risk to life and limb—excepting his own, of course—but such was the compassion
of the mighty bronze man that he placed himself last.

The amphibian droned on. The minutes whistled past. Light was a thing not present
in any form.

After a time, the distressing lack of vision ceased to make Doc’s heart pound, and
his adrenalin subsided.

Without warning, Doc flew into a zone of bright sunlight. The stabbing sudden light
came as a shock to his unprepared eyes. They squeezed shut, involuntarily.

Once again, Doc had to fight with the controls—now being blinded by natural light.

But after several seconds, the bronze man could see that he was skimming over wavetops.
His altitude was much lower than he expected to be, and this came as an unwelcome
shock.

Lifting the bawling plane by its control yoke, Doc regained altitude.

After a while, normal vision returned.

Doc Savage brought the amphibian swinging around, back in the direction of Tazan.
This time he dropped his airspeed to allow for the possibility that the zone of blackness
would be encountered on the return leg. But it was not. The device that produced absolute
darkness was no longer in operation. This was a tremendous relief.

Circling back, the bronze man flew until he came to a forested area where Monk and
Ham had bailed out of the leviathan speed plane. The black was definitely no longer
present.

He spotted the white bells of their collapsed parachutes blowing along the ground.
They were being hauled along a grassy area by playful winds. Doc’s golden eyes, sharp
as those of an eagle, searched for Monk, Ham and Emile Zirn.

The bronze man spotted Zirn first. Over a field of brown grass, he was being carried
off into a thick stand of evergreens, arms and legs waving wildly. Vainly, the man
was struggling with his captors.

But there were no captors to be seen!

Doc banked, came around. He dropped the amphibian’s altitude. Made another pass.

This time, Doc saw clearly that Emile Zirn was being held aloft by—absolutely nothing!