Лестер Дент - The Fantastic Island

50 yards ahead, Doc halted abruptly.

"Stand back," he said. "Look!"

He stood well to the side of the trail. His bronzed hand drifted out and plucked at something invisible to the eyes of the others. There was a swish of tree branches slicing through air … a glint of metal … a sharp thud .

Doc bent and pulled out of the ground a knife buried to the hilt. His hands moved, unfastening the knife from the branch to which it was deftly attached by means of leather stringing.

"An old Malay trick," he announced. "An animal-hair trigger is strung across the trail. Even in good light, it is practically invisible. A sapling is bent back with the knife attached. When the hair is broken by a man walking on the trail, the sapling springs upright, sinking the knife into the stomach of the trail walker."

Monk rubbed apprehensively at his midriff and said nothing.

"These trails are possibly guarded by other traps, also," Doc stated. "By daylight and looking sharply, they might be traversed safely. But at night, they had best be left alone."

Doc banded the knife to Ham. "Perhaps you had better carry it till we locate your sword cane."

"That reminds me of something else we lost, Doc," Monk burst in. "Habeas Corpus."

"That porker getting lost is the only good thing that's happened to anybody on this blasted island," Ham snapped.

"Come," Doc said, forestalling another resumption of the quarrel.

He plunged back into the tangled jungle growth. The others followed. They forged on, working interminably through darkness slashed occasionally by the lurid volcanic light.

- — — — — — — — — — — — —

It was nearing morning when — through the interstices of jungle vegetation — the grim walls of Count Ramadanoff's palace loomed ahead. On the side toward the sea, the walls were glistening wetly black from high-flung spray. On the jungle side, the towers and turrets of igneous stone were bathed in a bloody mist as the redvolcanic light blanketed through miasmatic swamp vapor.

Monk hunched his massive shoulders. "Spooky-lookin' joint, ain't it?"

"A habitation singularly minacious," Johnny murmured.

Monk — as Johnny's self-appointed interpreter — said: "He means 'full of threats'."

"Everything is threatening on this island," Ham said. "Doc, those pits where we were digging — what's it all about?"

Doc's hand waved out toward the bastioned walls of 20-feet-thick volcanic rock surrounding the palace.

"The secret of the pits lies behind those walls," he stated.

"You mean that whiskered devil, the Count?" Ham queried.

"With the Count Ramadanoff, yes."

Doc stepped a few paces aside, bent over, and straightened up holding a fallen palm trunk thicker than his body.

"Help with this fallen log," he instructed. "If we are to climb that wall, we will have to get it propped over the water in the moat by the wall."

All labored strenuously getting the log solidly against the wall. Doc tested it with his weight. Then standing with legs grimly planted and back braced against the wall, he tersely said, "Monk! Up on my shoulders."

Monk stepped from Doc's cupped hands to the bronze man's shoulders with a balanced ease surprising for a man so heavily built. With his feet on Doc's shoulders, he braced his back against the wall.

"Next, Ham," Doc said.

Ham mounted swiftly from Doc's hands to the top of his head, from Monk's hands to Monk's shoulders. Standing there, back to the wall, his own upreached hand missed the top of the wall by only a few feet.

"All right, Johnny," Doc called.

"Veritably, an elevating proceeding," Johnny murmured. "Herculean in concept. But destined irrevocably for fructiferous termination."

"Save that until Ham gets off my neck," Monk grumbled.

The professorial Johnny stepped closer and then — monocle, loin cloth, and all — shinned up the 3-man "rope" with the agility of an acrobat. Gaining the top of the wall, he lay flat to hook his feet over the rear edge, then reached over and grasped Ham's upreaching hands.

Supported by Johnny's grasp Ham swung free from Monk's shoulders. Monk, in turn, grasped Ham's legs. Doc climbed over the dangling human chain and got his hands atop the wall. The wiry Johnny, for a moment, had been sustaining the weight of all of them. Johnny might be an ex-professor and he might wear a monocle. But he was about as toughly muscled an individual as could be found.

When all were on the wall, Doc eased over and hung by his hands from the other side. Then one after the other, his aides climbed over his body, hung from his feet, and dropped into the palace courtyard below. Finally Doc dropped lightly to join them.

"Lateral peregrinations eminently successful," Johnny whispered.

Doc led the way through inky shadows to a small stone structure which evidently had been intended as quarters for servants. He forced the door and led his aids inside.

"Wait here," he said.

"Where'll you be, Doc?" Monk asked, mystified.

"Going to climb the tower and enter the palace from above. Will open the door from the inside when you hear my whistle."

Johnny asked, "Does it percolate to this secretive assemblage that the sinister genius of the Galapagos may be simulating nescience of our ensconcement behind his bastioned ramparts?"

"You mean does the Count might know we're here and he's set a trap for us?" Monk translated.

"Exactly," Johnny agreed.

"Possible," Doc admitted. "This Count is diabolically clever."

"And there's that beast — that thing — that monster !" Monk muttered. "There ain't rightly no name for it, Doc."

"It is as large as a house," Ham corroborated.

"Assuredly, yes," Johnny said, "with an infinitesimal exaggeration."

"How close were you to the thing?" Doc questioned.

"Too close!" Monk gulped. "We saw it from the slitted window of the tower."

"Let us hope you hear my whistle," Doc said.

The bronze man took silent steps and was swallowed by crawling shadows. His aides stared tensely in the direction where the palace loomed in the darkness. And when next the red lightning flashed its lurid menace, they saw Doc — flattened like a human fly on the sheer surface of the black tower — climbing by the sheer fabulous strength of fingers and toes the almost non-existent cracks between the stone blocks.

Then the lightning died and blackness swooped down. And when again the red lightningflickered, Doc had disappeared.

Doc had little difficulty effecting an entrance through one of the high tower windows. For it had no fastening. In the darkness, he felt his way down unbanistered, serpentine steps. In the halfway room containing the long window slit overlooking the courtyard dungeon, he paused and peered out.

Below in the flagstoned enclosure, the rippling volcanic light revealed to him the same incredible monster that the others had seen. The fearful beast on its shapeless multi-clawed legs was propelling its gross body around, its sawtoothed tail lashing and armored head wagging. Foam dripped from its grisly jaws as it braced itself against a barred cell, its claws scraping out.

In a frenzy of impotence at its failure to break through the bars, the monster swelled its scabrous body to what appeared to be half again its original size.

Watching, Doc Savage made no sound. His finger drifted out and felt briefly over the glass of the slitted window … then drummed softly.

As though the drumming on the window glass had been a signal, there was a sound in the darkness behind Doc. A breath unwillingly expelled. Doc crouched … jerked out of line of the window … and listened.