Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) (29 page)

Doc watched with interest as Count Runo von Elmz rolled dark eyes up in his head and collapsed into his waiting arms.

The bronze man laid the insensate aristocrat across his Atlas-like shoulders. In the act of attempting to carry the man away, the metallic giant was suddenly confronted by three frilly-finned reddish-green heads bursting above the waterline beside the ledge.

Grasping the ledge’s rough lip with their outlandish talons, the three mermen started scrambling up, emitting angry sounds.

It was the aquatic trio that Doc had earlier discouraged with his chemical repellent.

Setting the limp nobleman on the ground, Doc raced to the stony edge, and met the first of the oncoming foes.

Taking the man by the top of his head, Doc made a fist, lifted, ripping off the artificial mask.

A metallic fist collided with the exposed jaw, knocking him out.

One of the other dripping mermen rushed in to keep his comrade from sinking underwater and drowning. This occupied him while Doc went after the third of the trio, who had not emerged from the pool.

Plunging into the water, Doc began pursuing the man until he caught him by his slippery fishtail. Strong fingers clamped.

The other reacted in a natural and understandable manner. He began to panic.

Doc hauled the salmon-red tail closer to him, grabbed a flailing wrist, and soon had his hands around the merman’s rubbery neck. Wrenching off the artificial head, the bronze man found the sensitive nerves at the base of the spine, and began manipulating them.

The flopping merman immediately lost all animation.

Doc wrapped an arm around the hapless horror’s waist, and began swimming away.

Reaching the blue hole, the bronze giant made for the shimmering sunlight above, broke the surface, and held the man’s head above water, so that he could breathe.

The erstwhile merman proved to be no true amphibian. He was choking and gurgling in the manner of a man who had taken water into his lungs.

Doc performed some quick artificial respiration, until greenish fluid began streaming out of the other’s mouth and nose.

When the merman’s distress finally abated, Doc swam toward the sheer wall of the blue hole, and pulled him up onto a lava rock shelf.

Packing his captive across one shoulder, Doc scaled upwards until he reached the volcano rim. Stepping over, the bronze giant strode down to flat ground. He made excellent time, even encumbered by a full-grown man as he was.

DOC SAVAGE was still wearing his transparent helmet when he rejoined Monk, Ham and the others. There had been no opportunity to remove it; leaving it in place was the simplest way of toting the cumbersome contraption.

The hairy chemist gave out a lusty whoop. “Doc! Where did you come from?”

Doc replied calmly, “Investigating the blue hole.”

Ham Brooks rushed up to examine the merman as Doc laid the latter out on the hot ivory sand.

“The very devil!” he exclaimed. “That beggar is actually human.”

Doc nodded. “A man in a free-diving suit, designed to look like a fanciful denizen of the deep. But he is nothing more than a common sailor of a foreign navy.”

Long Tom knelt to examine the costume and pronounced it to be, in his words, “just painted rubber.”

“Good job, though,” said Monk, examining the material with the eye of an industrial chemist.

The puny electric wizard grunted, “So there are no mermen after all.”

“Nor mermaids,” replied Doc Savage.

Long Tom stood up and made a belligerent jaw. “So what did I see last night that looked like Hornetta Hale?”

Before Doc Savage could reply, the woman in question began stirring. All eyes went to her.

“What happened?” she demanded. Her eyes were very strange. Her voice had lost its tough edge.

“You experienced a misadventure,” implied Doc Savage calmly.

The green-haired girl struggled to her feet murmuring, “The last I recall I was laughing….”

“There is nothing funny about your predicament,” Doc Savage advised her.

“Don’t you mean
our
predicament?” returned the girl. “I am just as much a prisoner as you are.”

Doc Savage eyed her without emotion. “There is no further need for pretending. You are Honoria Hale.”

“Nonsense!” the girl snapped.

Doc elaborated, “Your hair is cut in a slightly different style. The fact that it is wet cannot disguise that fact. Your skin has been treated with an astringent solution to give it a reddish cast, but you are manifestly not suffering from sunburn. There is no peeling. Furthermore, your attempt to mimic your sister’s speech and manners was not entirely successful. You kept slipping back into your normal self.”

Honoria Hale turned very pale. She sealed her lips in a determined mouth.

“Where is your sister, and my cousin Pat?” demanded the bronze man. There were golden sparks igniting in the depths of his eyes.

Honoria made an abrupt move for the water’s edge.

Doc Savage rushed in and overhauled her. Taking Honoria by one arm, he arrested the woman’s headlong flight. She attempted to struggle, but the obdurate strength of the bronze giant’s metallic digits convinced her escape was all but impossible.

“Where is the submarine?” demanded Doc.

Honoria’s mouth flew open.

“How did you—?”

“Common sense. You were anxious to hire our submarine. This strongly suggested that you were hunting another underseas craft. Something had to tow our cruiser to this spot, and that blue hole and its tunnel passageway form a natural and very sheltered cove for secret anchorage. A phantom lagoon, if you wish to call it that.”

“For the love of little fishes!” exploded Monk. “You mean we’ve been sittin’ next to the mystery lagoon all along?”

Doc nodded grimly.

“What is this all about?”

“The Great Objective,” said Doc steadily, looking at Honoria Hale.

Honoria Hale’s hand flew to her open mouth. “You know more than we dreamed,” she gasped.

Doc Savage regarded the green-haired girl without expression. The compelling power of his flake-gold eyes bored into her. She seemed to wilt.

“Let me ask you again,” he said firmly. “Where are Hornetta Hale and Patricia Savage?”

Before the woman could form a response, a new sound came to their ears.

It was a familiar drone. They had heard it before—always out on the open Atlantic.

Long Tom snapped, “Sounds like that foreign warplane!”

“Yeah,” muttered Monk. “Comin’ back for another crack at us.”

Honoria Hale became extremely alarmed. She tried to pull away from Doc Savage, but the bronze man’s grip was unbreakable.

He pulled her into the scant shelter of a sprinkling of silver-sided royal palm trees.

Handing her off to Monk Mayfair, Doc said, “Hold on to her.” And the bronze man shinnied up the palm tree, poking his head out of its leafy crown.

He spied the bent-winged warplane, coming out of the east. It was flying low, and approaching fast like a gray daylight bat. Obviously, its wing fuel tanks had been patched.

Doc Savage slid down to the ground so fast he lost some skin.

“Get down!” he rapped. “Stay down. Do not move a muscle!”

The unmarked warplane overshot the tiny island, and circled back around. It dropped lower.

Banking, the pilot seemed to be attempting to seek them out amid the overgrowth.

He made two more passes, and then threw back the greenhouse-style canopy of his cockpit. A gloved fist was raised.

Something glinted in that hand.

Doc Savage saw it and warned, “Bomb!”

Monk, Ham and Long Tom immediately stuck fingers in their ears. Doc Savage tightened his helmet. They had experience being dive-bombed in the past, and were protecting their ears from concussion.

Seeing this action, Honoria Hale copied it.

When the bomb came, it landed not with an explosion, but a glassy crash.

They heard it only faintly, but when no blast disturbed the tropical atmosphere, they unplugged their ears.

Off about one hundred yards, where the glassy crash had sounded, a whitish cloud arose like a creeping ghost.

Monk bellowed, ‘‘It’s that laughin’ hoodoo!”

Everyone pinched their nostrils shut and sealed mouths, knowing that the measure could be a temporary protection at best.

“Wonder where we’ll end up this time?” moaned Long Tom.

“I do not wish to contemplate the prospect,” wailed Ham.

But the prospect appeared to be inescapable. Inexorably, the spreading monster of white rolled toward them with its questing tendril-like ghost fingers.

Chapter XXVIII

PHANTASMAGORIA

DOC SAVAGE DISTRIBUTED oxygen tablets to everyone, saying, “Do not inhale or exhale after taking these.”

Honoria Hale refused hers, not understanding what they were, and perhaps fearing some trick.

As a result, she was the first one to be affected by the creeping exhalation.

Rolling closer, the whitish spume assumed a more sinister hue, becoming rather purplish at the edges.

They had naturally retreated to higher ground, but there was a vast cloud of the crawling miasma spreading in all directions, and not many places in which to hide.

The stuff got into Honoria’s nostrils. The green-haired woman immediately began screaming, not laughing as they expected.

Suddenly, her screams turned to ripping words.

“I’m on fire!” she wailed, slapping at her bare arms and legs.

“Mustard gas!” Ham yelled.

Doc Savage seized her by the wrists. Honoria struggled. Golden eyes stark, the bronze man searched her forearms for signs of blistering.

But there was nothing, only goose bumps.

“What is happening to you?” Doc demanded, shaking her.

Her face twisted. “My arms are on fire! Can’t you see that?”

But they could not. There was no sign of any chemical reaction on her skin.

Neither Doc nor the others experienced any such horrific sensation. They were holding up their arms, seeking signs of the kind of hideous blistering produced by mustard gas or Lewisite, but finding none.

While they were puzzling over this, Habeas Corpus suddenly began chasing Ham Brooks.

The scrawny porker commenced by baring his tusks, and narrowing beady eyes in the dapper lawyer’s direction. A strange snuffling sound began issuing from his long, inquisitive snout.

Abruptly, fangs gleaming, the shoat charged for Ham’s ankles.

With a cry of shock, Ham attempted to fend off the snarling pig with his cane. But Habeas had become enraged, snapped at Ham’s shoes like a dog, forcing the bewildered lawyer into ignominious retreat.

This would normally cause Monk Mayfair to double over with laughter, but instead Monk was pointing a finger in the direction of the merman Doc had captured and laid out on the beach.

“Ye-o-w!”
the hairy chemist called out. “Watch out! He’s comin’ out of it.”

Doc Savage looked toward the beach, and then eyed the apish chemist.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” howled Monk. “He’s gettin’ away!”

Doc Savage watched the recumbent half-human form, and saw that the erstwhile merman simply lay there, unmoving.

“Monk,” Doc said calmly. “He is doing nothing of the sort.”

But the hairy chemist would not hear of it. He was jumping up and down like a frustrated bull gorilla.

“Lookit! Now he’s growin’ a new head to replace the old fishy one. It’s kinda like a seahorse, but with a mane of yellow hair….”

At that point, Doc released Honoria Hale, who went charging down to the beach, and threw herself in the water, splashing madly about in a desperate attempt to put out the imaginary flames that tormented her.

Doc Savage’s trilling began to issue from the helmet reproducer. It had an ethereal quality of wonder in it.

The bronze man looked around for Long Tom, and received a shock.

Long Tom was in the act of climbing a mist-shrouded coconut palm and, upon reaching the leafy crown, began throwing coconuts down upon something at the base which could not be seen.

Doc Savage called up, “Long Tom. What is the matter?”

“Sea serpent! Don’t you see it? It’s winding its way around the trunk!”

There was no sea serpent winding its way around the coconut trunk.

“Now it’s breathing fire at me!” howled Long Tom, ducking and dropping another drupe on his imaginary foe.

After Long Tom had exhausted his cache of coconut husks, the puny electrician scooted up to the very top of the crown, and began wildly yanking loose big fronds, waving them and flinging down fragments in a desperate attempt to ward off the creeping sea serpent that only he could see. The expression on his pale features was distraught.

ALONE among them all, Doc Savage was unaffected by the outbreak of bizarre hallucinations. He looked into the sky, and saw that the gray warplane was scooting away, making a moaning noise that diminished with each passing moment. It appeared to have lost interest in them.

The bronze man shifted his attention to the top of the volcanic crater, and decided that there was nothing he could do for his men, who were unlikely to injure themselves while under the spell of the weird gas. So he moved in that direction.

It might have been a kind of prescience that impelled the bronze man to do so. Or perhaps the sudden departure of the mysterious warplane gave him the idea.

Doc moved up to high ground, and found the craggy lip of the crater.

First, he looked downward, but saw nothing of interest.

Then his uncanny eyes began searching the surrounding seas.

They came to rest on something far to the southeast. From one belt pocket, Doc removed an optical tube that could be converted from a pocket microscope to a serviceable telescope and other devices.

He employed the thing as a telescope. It was not very large, but had a good deal of range in a narrow focus.

Against the blue horizon, Doc saw what he soon realized was a pair of Coast Guard cutters, moving in the general direction of this lonely isle. This alone was unusual, for they were not in American waters.