Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

On the contrary, Monk wore a not-too-white pair of duck pants. They wrinkled across the thighs and bagged at the knees. An enormous green-and-white-striped undershirt fitted around his barrel chest like a circus tent slipped on over an elephant. Rusty hair stuck out on his bullet-like head like mashed bristles on a wire brush. The hair grew low down on his forehead, half burying his ears, almost meeting his scrubby eyebrows. His homely face was mostly mouth and flat nose. His body was nearly as wide as it was long and his fists hung down almost to his knees. In fact, he did not look like a man. He resembled an amiable ape.

It was a mistake to judge either of these two by appearances. Ham was no fop. He was one of the most astute lawyers that Harvard had ever turned out. And Monk — as Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Biodgett Mayfair — was recognized as one of the greatest living industrial chemists.

The greatest claim to distinction of these 2 men, however, was that they were members of Doc Savage's group of 5 remarkable aides. That alone made them unusual, for each of the bronze man's assistants was a master of some particular profession.

Pat went over now and disconnected the robot control which had been steering the ship.

"Shall I hold to the channel lights?" she asked, swinging the wheel slightly over.

"I don't like this," Ham said, uneasily. "There should be no harbor at all near us, least of all a lighted harbor. Even a lighted channel. But there is nothing else to do."

"Why not?" Monk demanded. "We don't have to go in that channel, do we? If there is a channel …"

Ham snapped, "It's worth investigating. That is what I mean!"

It looked as if their perpetual quarrel were going to break out again.

Pat solved the problem by turning the Seven Seas toward the channel markers.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

The yacht was caught in a choppy cross-current now. The wind was rising. It no longer sighed like men at Death's door. It wailed and howled .

Ham went to the end of the bridge and clung to the railing to keep from being pitched off the violently tilting craft into the boil of black water around them. In spite of the wind, the night was oppressive and muggy with a faint sulfurous smell. Suddenly a flickering glow — as of sheet lightning — sprang into life, tinging the low-hanging clouds.

Ham made a mistake. He dismissed it at first as ordinary lightning. Then he saw that there was something different about these luminous flashes. They were weird , unearthy. They stained the low-hanging clouds a bloody red.

Ham heard a rasped breath behind him and was startled into whirling. It was Monk.

" Red lightnin'!" Monk uttered, hanging on against the fetid, sulfurous wind at the deck tip. "That's funny-lookin', ain't it?"

Again the gory light mushroomed out under the clouds. It was more sustained — brighter this time — and it showed them things. Off to one side bulked a shoreline. But this did not strike them with terror. Pat called attention to the thing that did.

"Look!" she screamed. "Look! All around us!"

"Hard alee!" Monk squalled. "Engines reversed!"

The fantastic red lightwent out.

"Did you see?" Ham gasped in the silence that followed. "There must be 2 dozen ships — big and little — wrecked all around us!"

"And the Devil only knows where we are," Monk gulped. "I'm gonna back this boat, turn around, get outta here, an' wait for daylight."

"A whole graveyard of wrecked ships,"Pat gasped. "And red lightning that smells of sulfur!"

Pat's voice sounded,it seemed, rather cheerful.

"You always did like trouble, didn't you?" Monk grunted at her.

"And mystery ," Pat added. "I eat it up."

There must have been a tide that carried the Seven Seas to one side. Or some thing. They were in reverse — exactly retracing the course they had been sailing — when it happened.

A curling wave lifted the bow of the Seven Seas high in the water and hurled it down. The yacht shuddered with a wrenching shock that knocked Monk and Ham sprawling on the wet deck. There was a nightmare of grinding and scrapings as steel plates were wrenched from the hull by jagged coral.

Caught fast on the submerged reef, the craft did not rise with the next wave. She heeled half over instead with a groaning of tortured steel. And the wave washed in an avalanche of water over the deck.

Ham and Monk were battered against the anchor winch. They staggered up half-drowned to claw their way toward the bridge.

"Aid Pat, if she needs it," Monk bellowed. "Me, I'm goin' for Habeas Corpus!"

'Habeas Corpus' was Monk's cherished pet pig. He never went anywhere without the animal, much to Ham's disgust and frequent infuriation.

A streak of light — blue-white — darted from the SevenSea's bridge and knifed across the rock-fanged water.

"Turn that searchlight off!" Ham shouted to Pat as he went down again under a drenching cross-wave.

"It'll help us see to swim ashore," Pat protested.

"It'll draw sharks," Ham snapped as he caught the life preserver Pat threw him.

"So you're afraid of sharks?" Pat said.

But she switched off the searchlight and joined Ham at the submerged rail. Monk appeared on deck an instant later with the squealing, kicking armful of razorback hog that was Habeas Corpus.

Habeas Corpus had a snout like a wood-rasp, flopping coal-scuttle ears, and long ungainly legs. The special life preserver which Monk had previously fashioned for Habeas did not improve his appearance. It added to his buoyancy, however. Monk jumped into the water with the wet pig.

"That hog'll draw sharks!" Ham yelled.

"Habeas — he fights sharks!" Monk roared back. "Come on!"

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

Pat and Ham went overboard with Ham still holding tightly to his slim black cane which was almost as much a part of him as his shirt. The cane was in reality a formidable weapon — a sword cane. Its innocent-appearing exterior sheathed a length of gleaming steel, the point of which had been impregnated with a chemical capable of producing almost instant unconsciousness.

Under the red lightning glare, surf on all sides broke against hidden reefs, churning the water to a bloody froth. But Pat and Ham came through the barrage of wave-dashed rocks and reeled — half drowned and gasping — onto a mangrove-studded beach. Monk swashed ashore close behind them, holding the squirming Habeas Corpus under an arm with difficulty.

"That hog'll kick a rib out for you someday," Ham warned, breathing hard.

"Lay off Habeas Corpus," Monk gasped, "or I'll be kickin' out some ribs on my own account."

The red luminance bloomed again against the clouds. It crawled and writhed, disappeared, and blanketed out again like a bloody mist floating in air.

"What is it?" Pat demanded, shivering in spite of the sultry night.

"Nothing supernatural ," Ham explained. "You notice the color on the clouds does not seep through from above. The light is reflected from underneath … "

"There's an active volcanosomewhere on the island," Monk summed up.

Pat pressed water out of her drenched hair. "Do you suppose here's where Johnny is?"

"We'll have to find out," Ham said, grimly.

"One thing I'd like to clear myself on," Pat said earnestly. "The shipwreck. I was holding dead in the middle of the channel when it happened."

"Yeah," Monk agreed. "It wasn't your fault."

"This shipwreck was arranged," Ham said ominously.