Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace (10 page)

Reaching the top, the homely chemist roosted there and searched for the trailing grappling hook. He transfixed it with the beam of his pocket flash.

It was dangling out of reach. As Monk watched, it moved away.

Gathering his burly body, Monk launched himself off a branch and caught the guy wire.

With a jar, the dirigible dropped several feet. Then it continued its lazy drifting, the apish chemist holding on.

Hand over hand, Monk ascended the line until he came within reach of the dangling climbing rope.

Monk began swinging side to side, building up bodily momentum. Now he brought to mind a Neanderthal man in action.

“That hairy gossoon is certain to get his neck broken!” howled Ham. For a moment, he forgot himself. Fear for his friend’s safety was written all over his patrician features.

Soon, Monk was swinging like a human pendulum. This brought him closer and closer to the trailing rope. One hairy arm reached out, seized it.

At the apex of one swing, he transferred as neatly as if he had been doing it all of his life.

Again, the airship jarred downward, then righted itself. It seemed to roll along its longitudinal axis, like a barrel in water.

When it settled down, Monk made the climb to the open hatch and took control of the airship. The engines engaged, propellers whirling. Monk sent the craft spiraling around.

Neighboring trees began roiling and tossing their crowns this way and that, as the prop wash troubled them.

Venting gaseous ballast, Monk brought it low enough to snag a tree branch and reeled the line in. That accomplished, the airship was made fast.

Dropping down the rope, the homely chemist reached the anchoring trees and worked his way back to solid ground.

“Nice work, you caveman,” Renny commented.

Monk smacked his hands dry of bark. “We ain’t solved the main puzzle yet.”

“See anything of a roof anywhere up there?” Long Tom asked, grasping at straws.

“Naw, there ain’t none.”

That left them to wander about in annoyed and worried circles, seeking any sign of the missing Victorian dwelling and their absent leader, Doc Savage.

As men are wont to do when they lose keys or wallets, they covered the same ground over and over, their confounded faces expressing fresh perplexity each time doing so failed to turn up any sign or solution to the mystery.

At last Johnny Littlejohn spoke the obvious.

“All that is left for us to do is temporize.”

“Wait for what, may I ask?” scoffed Ham.

“The house has disappeared and reappeared twice in a single evening,” Johnny pointed out in a precise tone of voice. “It may be only a matter of time before it again returns to its foundation.”

“Are you being serious?” Ham demanded.

Johnny eyed him with thin tolerance. “Have you a better course of action to suggest?”

Ham thought about that and finally admitted, “I have not.”

They sat down on the rough-textured slab to wait.

The night wore on. The moonlight made cobweb patterns among the trees. A great horned owl hooted now and again. Furtive bats flung themselves from tree to tree.

There came a small grumble of thunder to the east, but it sounded very far away.

“I wonder where Geronimo got to?” Monk asked during one protracted silence.

“That interrogative query is the opposite of my intellectual curiosity,” Johnny ruminated.

“Opposite—how?” asked Renny.

“I have been pondering whence the aborigine originated.”

Johnny produced from his clothing the rude flint knife plucked from the Indian’s fist by Doc Savage. He passed it around for inspection.

“Looks like something out of the history books,” said Monk at last.

“That is what worries me,” said Johnny. But he would not elaborate on why that should be.

They returned to their pensive waiting and worrying. They were men of action, scrappers who had first joined forces during the Great War, years ago. They did not enjoy the oppressive mental state in which the present situation had placed them. Like a mental fog, inaction weighed on them.

At length, Ham Brooks stood up, a peculiar expression twisting his handsome features.

“I just thought of something,” he said in a queer tone.

“What is it?”

“What if that house reappears on this very spot?”

“Well, that’s what we’re all hopin’ for, ain’t it?” countered Monk, scratching the long ears of his pet pig, Habeas, cradled in his arms.

“Yes. But we are sitting on its foundation. If it returns, what will happen to us?”

At that realization, they all stood up.

With an alacrity not evident in their postures before this point, they retreated to the edge of the clearing and sat upon tree stumps left over from the days when the space had been cleared.

It was well that they did so.

For just around dawn, with the dust of lack of sleep clogging their eyes, the Victorian home reappeared on its foundation. They realized this when the forest began stirring. Although there was no wind, leaves rustled and boughs creaked.

To a man they turned to face the breeze.

And there was the ornate monstrosity of a house, looking as substantial as any tree.

Their expressions varied. Monk’s eyes popped. Ham Brooks grabbed his chin and seemed to want to pull it off. Long Tom’s jaw fell open. Surprise caused Renny’s big fists to open like mouths. Johnny had been twirling his monocle in one long finger. He dropped it, seemed not to notice.

Renny was the only one who spoke.

His “Holy cow!” caused roosting bats to flee their holes.

The group stared at the house for what seemed the longest interval of their lives. They stood rooted in their shoes, unmoving. No one blinked.

Long Tom asked, “Do we barge right in?”

“Haste begets many things,” murmured Johnny. “Regret is one of them.”

They took in the structural lines of the place. Other than its ornamentation, it was unremarkable. The siding was a dismal maroon, rather suggestive of old blood. Gingerbread had been painted in somber black, now faded by sunlight and passing of time.

There was a railed porch. It swept around two sides. They happened to have taken up waiting positions facing the front of the eerie dwelling.

The front door was a shade of dried mustard. It was shut. There was no door knocker.

Soon it opened and out stepped a familiar figure. One they knew well.

Monk was the first to call out his name.

“Doc!”

Doc Savage stepped out onto the porch and looked about as if not certain where he was.

Seeing his men, an expression akin to relief crossed his metallic features.

He stepped off the porch and approached them.

Only when he began drawing near did they notice the hue of his face. The deep, healthy bronze tint that exotic climes had given his skin had faded to something like a ghost’s pallor. The bronze man wore a shocked expression upon his regular features. The golden flakes of his eyes looked stark, as if petrified.

Doc came to a stiff halt before them. His mouth parted. It was fully a minute before he uttered any word of explanation, and even then it was but a single sentence.

“I have apparently traveled through time,” Doc Savage said in a tone of voice that suggested he doubted his own pronouncement.

Chapter IX

FAT MAN AND FRIEND

THE GIANT ANCIENT had gone galloping off into the night—he stumbled in the darkness and made some noise. Instantly, Gull was after him, running with long-legged determination. He started to shout, decided it wouldn’t do any good, and put on more speed. For a drunken man, the oldster made good time.

Gull, coming up behind, tripped him. The old man staggered, fell down, saying,
“Oops!”
foolishly. Gull fell upon him. The ancient gathered Gull in a rib-cracking bear hug, revealing some astounding strength. They fought, went over and over, mashing weeds, and Gull got a scissors hold, then an armlock.

“Behave!” Gull advised.

He heard the big van motor start, looked, saw it moving out of the filling station; they must have paid Spook for the gas, and were departing.

Gull tried to yell at the van to stop, but the old man got hold of his throat, and after they had fought some more, and the intoxicated old gentleman was subdued, the truck had gone down the road.

Giving permission both vocally and with the toe of his shoe, Gull escorted the old giant back to the filling station.

He was greeted by a flash of lightning and a bumping report of thunder. The storm which had been approaching all night was now very close.

“I thought grandpa was asleep!” Spook exploded in astonishment.

Gull propelled the ancient into the station, floored him in the washroom, and called, “Get me two of those long fan belts and we’ll cut them and tie his hands and feet,” to Spook Davis.

While they did this, Spook complained that old Duzzit, the filling station owner, would make Gull pay for the ruined fan belts, but his grumbling died when he got a good look at Gull’s face.

“Hey, you look like you’d seen a ghost!”

Gull said, “A ghost would have been a treat,” grimly.

“Huh?”

“Christopher Columbus was in that van,” Gull advised shortly.

Spook Davis opened and shut his mouth, closed one eye and scrutinized Gull closely with the other, then absently scratched his chest, bent and picked up the shirt with which the old giant had been tied earlier, and untied the knots which the prisoner had loosened enough to slip free. Finally he said, “You wouldn’t be nuts, maybe?”

The old man shook his head contrarily, “Go waysh. I’m mad ash yoush fellers.”

Spook said, “I’ll bet that tire iron would sober him up. Holy Houdini, I never saw such an unpredictable stew.”

An automobile, a large sedan with two yellow spotlights, rolled into the filling station and stopped beside the gasoline pumps. Gull thought at first that the State Highway Patrolmen had arrived, then realized they didn’t drive four-thousand-dollar limousines, and directed Spook Davis to go and take care of the customers.

Spook came back at once. “Two guys, and they want to talk to you.”

“Me?”

“Sure. Remember I told you earlier that two fellows were inquiring around La Plata about you? Well, I think this is the same two. One of them is a trifle overweight, and the other one looks as if you could crack rocks with him.”

THE DOME light of the sedan was glowing.

Gull came to the front of the car and looked in at an individual who was an ambulatory pile of balloons. His head was a balloon. His jaw was mostly chins—rolls of them. His paunch was another balloon. When he moved, the balloons seemed to want to fall over, but they didn’t. The skunk-colored hair atop his round head might have been a wig slapped carelessly on his dome. Even his ears looked fatty.

He said, all in one bombastic rumble, “I am Harvell Braggs, and I take it for granted you are Gulliver Greene, and you are also known as The Great Gulliver, and may I introduce my companion here, Ivan Cass.”

Ivan Cass was a lean man with piercing black eyes, a mouth so lipless that it became practically invisible when he closed it, and his face, as Spook Davis had intimated generally, looked hard enough to crack rocks with.

“Delighted, I’m sure,” Ivan Cass said, who didn’t sound as if he was. He had an ugly way of driving words through his clenched teeth.

Gull asked, “You wanted to see me?”

Harvell Braggs said, “I won’t beat around the bush, as the fellow says, and will start out by telling you I happen to be a collector of Christopher Columbus antiques, and since I have financial means, my collection is, or was, excellent, containing a genuine Columbus sword, a blunderbuss that looks as if it were constructed only last year, some of his clothing, and other pieces of the equipment carried when the great navigator discovered America.”

He got another breath.

“But Christopher Columbus came and stole most of my collection, and now—”

“What?”
Gull yelled.

“Well, it is an idiotic statement to make, but the thief did look very much like Christopher Columbus. You see, I’m a Columbus authority, and familiar with his picture, and I got a fair look at the thief, and he also spoke to me in the strange stilted language of that day—he spoke English, by the way—and he assured me he was Columbus, likewise assuring me he would kill me with an ancient blunderbuss he was carrying if I interfered with him, so I naturally did not interfere.”

Gull shouted suddenly, violently. “What kind of a run-around is this? Talk sense to me! I’ve got enough of this damned foolishness!”

Harvell Braggs said earnestly, “I am telling you the facts, and I wish to add that later I received an anonymous note telling me a young man named Gulliver Greene, also known as The Great Gulliver, a magician, could recover my stolen Columbus relics for me, and—”

“You got a nerve accusing me!” Gull shouted.

“Not accusing, no, but nevertheless the anonymous note—anonymous means unsigned, you know—told me you knew a great deal about the Columbus relics.”

The intimation that he didn’t know what the word anonymous meant did not help Gull’s temper, and he opened his mouth to express himself on that point, and probably on several others.

But Spook Davis came galloping out of the filling station.

“We’ve got it!” Spook exploded. “We’ve got it!”

GULL said angrily, “We’ve sure got something!” and scowled at the two men in the car; then at Spook Davis. “What ails you?”

“I was right!” Spook howled.

“All right,” Gull groaned. “Don’t mix me up any more. Talk sense.”

“Your relative!”

“Eh?”

“The big moose with the hair in his ears is your Uncle Box Daniels!” barked Spook. “He told me so! He’s willing to talk now! He says he was coming to you for help and advice. He says he wants to tell you the whole story.”

The hard-faced Ivan Cass got out of the limousine.

“Here’s where I come in,” Cass said. “I don’t know what this is about, but old Box Daniels notified me to come here and serve as his bodyguard. He said he was coming to see Gulliver Greene, his nephew, and that somebody might try to stop him, might even kill him if they could. Well, I’m here to protect him.”