"Doc Savage Adventure 1935-01 The Mystic Mullah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

"You will leave at once, Hadim," said the girl "You know what you are to do, the message you are to deliver. And you know how much depends upon our finding this man."

"Yes, Miss Joan," said Hadim. "My four brothers, my father and mother and my sisters have died when touched by the green soul of the Mystic Mullah, Need I more to remind me?"

"You will die if you make a mistake," said the girl. "And if we do not reach this man we have come to see, many more may follow you. Just how many, there is no telling." she extended her automatic. "Better take this."

Hadim tapped his sleeve. "I know better how to use this."

Joan directed, "Have the man get in touch with us."

Hadim murmured, "Aye, and this man's name - "

"Doc Savage," said Joan. "Hurry. We must find him, or learn where he is."


THERE was rawness in the fog, a damp chill, and the vapor had long since washed the moon and stars out of the sky and had put the dank water-front streets in the grip of the clammy mist from the sea.

Hadim embraced the soupy fog as one at home in his element, and he took to the shabby, narrow water-front thoroughfares without hesitation. He did, however, walk in the middle of the street until almost run down by a prowling taxicab. Hadim looked the hack over carefully, after the driver stopped to see if he had done any damage. The driver had an honest face, so Hadim used his cab to go uptown.

Hadim, let out at his destination, stared up at the building which he was to enter, and stark amazement sat upon his scarred, brown face. This building was the pride of native New Yorkers. To Hadim, it was an architectural wonder such as he had not dreamed existed. It was a modernistic structure, somewhere near a hundred stories in height, and was a blinding exhibition of white stone and shining metal.

"What a lot of camels would be needed to haul the stones for this house," Hadim murmured.

Then he went inside, asked questions, made a few mistakes, but eventually got in an elevator which let him out, after a frightsome ride upward, on the eighty-sixth floor. The corridor was as impressive as the building exterior.

"Even the palace of the Khan does not excel this," Hadim told himself.

Then he jerked to a stop. He could feel a slight breeze through the corridor. And he had heard a hissing sound. This last was very faint.

Hadim turned slowly - and his voice went out in a sudden, wild shriek of terror. It was ear-splitting, that shriek. In it was all of the agony of a man who knows he has met death.

Down the corridor, floating in the air, strange, fantastic things were approaching. They were like fat snakes, their color an unholy green, their diameter perhaps that of a human wrist, their length the span of an arm from hand to elbow. They whirled, contorted with a sort of dervish dance. They seemed to grow fatter, then thinner.

Most hideous of all was the fact that these flying serpentine things seemed unreal. They were ghostly, nebulous, without any real body or shape.

Hadim, screaming again, had his long knife out of his left sleeve. He retreated. The green things overhauled him. He began to run backward. They still gained.

Hadim came to the end of the corridor, to a window. He beat it, knocking the glass out, but the metal crosspieces defied him, thwarting him in his mad desire to jump through.

The green horrors reached him and Hadim struck with his knife, only to shriek out in fresh horror as the blade passed completely through the green atrocity and nothing happened. He struck again; then the serpentine things were upon him.

They brushed against his arms, his chest. One rolled like a hideous green tongue, caressing his face, lingering about his mouth, his nostrils, then rolling up over his eyes. Hadim fought them with his hands, shrieking again and again; he writhed down to get away from them, and squirmed on the floor.

Then the green things arose and drifted out through the holes which Hadim had beaten in the skyscraper window with his fists. They went slowly, as if satisfied with the work they had done. They had changed shape materially by now; one had been knocked to pieces and had resolved itself into half a dozen thin, green strings, so pale that the eye could easily see through them, distinguishing the frames of the window behind them.



Chapter 2