Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (33 page)

His decision was not long in coming.

Stepping up to the tower, Doc drove a hand into his clothing, and removed the folding grappling hook and line. Uncoiling the line, he gave the small but strong steel grapnel an expert toss.

The pronged device sailed into the aperture that burned like the baleful orb of a cyclops, snagged something. Doc pulled the line taut.

Taking hold of the line with his great corded hands, the bronze giant began his ascent. He was helped by the fact that the rough surface of the tower created friction on the soles of his shoes, so he could use his feet as well.

In short order, Doc scrambled up, reached the aperture and pulled himself in.

The chamber in which the bronze man found himself was clearly fashioned by the hand of man, although how long ago was impossible to gauge. The meager amount of bat droppings and other detritus within showed that it had not been a rookery for very long—a few months possibly. This further suggested that the tower had been underwater until recently.

He was reminded of a watch tower or lighthouse, for at the other end of the circular space there was a small quarter-moon-shaped hole, through which was coming the intense rays of the rising sun.

Doc examined the circular room. The chamber was dark and glassy, as if faced by a substance resembling highly polished obsidian. It was not possible, he believed, for obsidian to be manipulated in such a way as to create a continuous curved surface such as this appeared to be. Yet when his sensitive fingers touched the black material, it was entirely slick and seamless.

Doc Savage’s exotic trilling seeped out, low and suffused with amazement. He stifled it at once.

Behind him came another long blast of the silent dog whistle.

Turning, the bronze giant removed his telescopic tube, and used it to search the waters. He quickly spied the sharp gray profile of the
Northern Star
in the growing light.

The submarine, lying behind it, was not so easily resolved. The bronze man had to move about, angling his telescope, until he spotted the conning tower.

No markings were discernible, nor was there sufficient light to make out anything but the vaguest of outlines. The identity of the undersea boat was impossible to establish.

This caused the bronze man some acute concern. But there was nothing he could do about the submersible at the moment. He was in the act of removing his plastic cape and attached hood, for it was no longer of immediate use. Bundling this under one arm, Doc made a circuit of the tower room, attempting to establish its purpose.

IN THE CENTER of the chamber lay a shallow stone bowl of some sort. Doc studied this carefully. It bore streaky scorch marks, and appeared to be an urn large enough to hold a human being if they curled up. Its purpose was difficult to determine.

Perhaps it had been used for ceremonial practices, and the bronze man had to shake off the ugly thought that human victims may have been sacrificed in this blackened cup in some unpleasant manner.

Studying the curved obsidian walls, Doc’s agile brain suddenly grasped the purpose of the thing. With a fire burning in the central portion of the chamber faced with black obsidian glass, the entire interior would magnify and reflect any illumination, making the cut-out quarter-moon eye at either side of the ominous tower burn brightly by night. It was a lighthouse, older than recorded history!

Even now, filled with the hot rays of the rising sun, it was becoming intolerably hot.

But there was no time to contemplate this further. Back on the
Northern Star
, Bosun Donald Worth was continuously blowing the silent whistle with increasing urgency.

Abruptly, the eerie sound broke off.

There came a report that was like uncorked thunder.

A pause followed. Then the silent dog whistle resumed its keening call. Doc listened raptly, attempting to decipher its meaning.

That Doc Savage understood what he heard soon became evident.

Returning to the grapple and line, which still trailed to the ground, the bronze man slipped down the thin cord, which was knotted every so many feet to provide better purchase. He threw the plastic garment ahead of him to save time.

When his feet slapped the hard ground, Doc Savage turned and flipped the cord several times, dislodging the hook. He gathered the entire arrangement together and, picking up his plastic cape, the bronze giant began an intent search of the immediate surroundings, seeking another way into the tower, for it had been evident that the chamber above could not be reached except by climbing through the cyclops-orb aperture.

Chapter XLII

PORTAL

DOC SAVAGE WAS seldom baffled. But he was baffled now.

Scouting the circumference of the weird horned tower, the bronze man searched its surface for hidden catches or seams or other means of ingress.

Three times he explored the cylindrical structure. It appeared to be formed out of the same igneous rock that comprised the forbidding black finger that was Satan’s Spine. Basalt. The substance out of which the weird hands of stone had been inexplicably cast.

This tower had that same dark, weathered complexion. Studying it in the bleeding morning light, the bronze giant perceived the unsettling suggestion that the tower was, much like the clutching human hands arrayed all about, an outgrowth of the reef of hardened lava, and inextricable from it. How humans could have wrought such a miracle from what had once been molten magma seemed inexplicable.

The wind picked up again, and with it came a return of the unsettling sounds produced by air moving through the cyclops-orbed cavity high overhead.

The low-key whining of the satanic tower was getting on his nerves. Self-control was one of Doc Savage’s most reliable attributes. He rarely lost his temper, and this iron composure was usually reflected in his perpetual poker face. This was a consequence of his unusual childhood, during which the bronze man had been raised to master all human knowledge. It had begun with self-mastery, the suppression of inconvenient emotions and the discipline of always being in control of oneself and one’s responses to outside factors.

But the unceasing howling seemed to penetrate his very soul, unseating his nearly perfect composure. Sometimes it was a mournful moaning, at other points an anguished wailing of wind.

After the third turn around the tower, the bronze man came to a reluctant conclusion. The only way in and out of the tower was through the high aperture which now radiated captured sunlight in a way that was nearly incandescent.

This could only mean that Diamond had taken the sailors of the
Northern
Star
not into the upper tower as Doc had assumed, but down into the earth by another opening. There was no escaping this conclusion, but it had taken three circuits of the base before it had dawned on the bronze giant that there existed no other explanation for their complete disappearance from the flat plain of solidified black lava, which in the morning light resembled a hideous tail emerging from the spit of bone-white sand called Satan Cay.

Stepping away from the tower, the bronze man fell to searching the ground. It was wet in many places, and there were no signs of wet footprints due to this moisture. Naturally no grass grew here. There were no plants to be trampled and show sign of human feet. The surface of the moon must look something like this, the bronze man reflected.

There were only some upthrust extrusions of brittle-looking rock along with the weird clutching hands that reached up from the reef. Kneeling, Doc examined one and saw to his mild astonishment that it was a continuation of the lava that had hardened unknown centuries ago. Like the obsidian lining of the tower chamber, the means by which this had been wrought escaped the bronze man.

What purpose these hands could possibly serve was also unfathomable.

Reconnoitering the immediate vicinity of the burning-eyed tower, Doc discovered a hand in which the thumb had been broken off. The fractured digit lay nearby, suggesting the break had been recent and caused by a human being or something equally solid colliding with it.

This gave Doc something to go on and he circled about, concentrating on this general area.

Flake-gold eyes searching the ground, Doc sought any disturbance in the natural formation that comprised the basalt reef. He was mentally examining the equipment in his pockets to see if he carried anything that might be of use in his search. All human activity left traces, whether fingerprint impressions or residue of the oils secreted from a man’s hands. Not long ago, the bronze man had often worn into battle a vest of many pockets, some of which would be loaded with atomizers containing chemicals that would bring out such traces. But he no longer wore that vest.

As it turned out, Doc Savage did not need any gadget to find what he sought.

HE SOON came upon a section of rock that was unnaturally square and flat on top. It was as if human hands had worked the stone, but when Doc Savage examined it, there was no sign of any such tool work. Like the clutching petrified hands, the stone appeared to have been made smooth by some unknown process that had been applied to the magma while it was still molten.

Had the bronze man not noticed this weird quality, he would still have paused in his reconnoiter. Upon the flat surface was etched a symbol, a cartoon image. That of a man whose head was peering up above the horizontal line representing a wall. The fingers of both hands and his long drooping nose hung below the line.

Below this, etched crudely, apparently by a sharp rock or tool, was the legend, “KILROY WAS HERE.”

Recalling that name had been on the door of the Brooklyn house where he and his men had discovered the note from the missing Davey Lee that had set them on the trail that had ended here, the bronze man hunkered down and felt his way all around the flat stone buttress. He was seeking a catch or spring or counterweight. But he found none.

Patches of moisture glistened on top of the flat surface, and the more Doc studied them, the more they appeared to be marks of many men leaving overlapping wet footprints, none of them distinct.

Evidently, several men had recently stood upon this flat surface.

Doc Savage stepped onto the shelf, and waited. He weighed well over two hundred pounds, and that weight seemed to be sufficient to actuate a mechanism. For the shelf sank over an inch, very slowly, with no accompanying sound of mechanism.

Doc wondered if this flat stone were some form of crude elevator, operated by weights and counterweights. But the sinking sensation was brief.

The bronze man looked around to see what he had accomplished.

He should not have been surprised but in fact was quite startled to see that a portal had opened in the front of the weird tower—a door where he had been certain no door had existed, because no seams seemed to show. Yet the open portal was now there.

Moving to the tower, Doc examined the revealed entrance. There was no sign of any door, only the opening. It appeared as if a section of the curved tower wall had sunk into the earth.

Doc entered. Once he did so, his suspicions were confirmed when the curved wall behind him began rising to fill the rectangular aperture. A grinding noise accompanied this ponderous phenomenon.

Thumbing on his pocket flashlight, Doc examined the space in which he was now trapped. The interior was smoother than the exterior wall, but that had been acted upon by unknown generations of wind and water action, eroding it somewhat.

The cylindrical chamber appeared to be empty, but the far side of the tower slipped down into the earth in a fashion resembling a hewn ramp. The workmanship showed smoothness and skill.

Striding over to the ramp, Doc carefully directed his flashlight downward and saw that it disappeared in a circular fashion rather like the circular steps of a lighthouse. It followed the circumference of the tower’s base, curving flush to the continuous outer wall so that the ramp disappeared from view into darkness no matter how he angled his flash ray.

Listening, the bronze man detected sounds, but they were far below. Too distant to make them out. It was clear that human activity produced those noises. This could only mean Diamond and his gang of bloody-handed cutthroats.

Dousing his flashlight, Doc drew over his giant form the plastic cape and hood that produced virtual invisibility. Determinedly, he went down the ramp, taking care to feel his way by running his hand along the exterior wall. The ramp appeared to be enclosed, but he could not be certain, without turning on his flashlight, that it would not at some point open up over a central well. The depth at which the sounds below rose up suggested that this corkscrew ramp led very far into the earth. It would not do to fall in.

Doc Savage began to form the theory that this well was a vertical lava tube, a natural phenomenon which had been reshaped by man into a passage into the bowels of Satan’s Spine. For what purpose was unknown, but would soon reveal itself, he imagined.

A strange thrill of anticipation began rising in his chest, like a queer hummingbird taking wing inside him.

Chapter XLIII

THE UNEASY MEN

DOWN THEY DESCENDED. Down what felt like a ramp that corkscrewed, although it was also reminiscent of the winding steel staircases found on large ships throughout the world. In this case, of course, there were no steps, and the ramp was broader and as smooth as asphalt.

Walking deeper into the innards of the earth made the blindfolded Merchant Marines increasingly uneasy. But the deeper they went, the less they were inclined to speak. Men marching to the gallows are similarly silent.

Finally, the rough voice of Diamond barked out, “Basement floor. All out.”

As an attempt at humor, it fell flat. Not even Diamond’s hardboiled cohorts chuckled.

Once they reached level ground, the sense of claustrophobia actually increased. Air down here was still and deposited a peculiar taste on their tongues. It was also chilly in a clammy way.