"Doc Savage Adventure 1938-12 The Devil Genghis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doc Savage Collection)

One night Park arrived, carrying a club, unable to speak a word, and wearing an expression of indescribable terror.

Park was using the club to fight the empty air about his head. Toni Lash, with presence of mind, tried to quiet him, calling her servants to help, and later she summoned the best doctors. They tried holding Park Crater in a bathtub full of warm water for hours, a treatment which will usually calm the most violent cases of insanity.

But it was of no appreciable benefit in this instance. Park Crater went to the best Riviera hospital, with six strong men holding his arms and legs.

Toni Lash went into seclusion in her villa. After she had grieved two days, she had a visitor.

"Oh," she said. "I saw you last week. I thought you had gone away."


AS the young woman looked at her visitor, there was awe and dislike on her grieved face, but fascination, too, almost as though the visitor were a serpent and she a weakened bird.

The visitor did not have a snaky look. There was something about him that was a great deal worse. But it was hard to define. At first glance, the man just seemed to be a long sack of bones with a thin, poetic face and a pair of smoldering, compelling eyes.

Toni Lash said, "I checked up on the newspaper stories after I saw you last week. You are supposed to be dead."

Something strange and hideous appeared, as a brief flicker of emotion, on the man's long poetic face. It was as though his face had turned fiercely animal for a moment.

"Perhaps I am dead, and come back to haunt people," he said. Then he laughed grimly.

He wore solid gray. Every article of clothing on him was gray - shoes, socks, suit, tie, shirt, hat - all exactly the same shade of gray.

"You were wearing all the same shade of blue the last time I saw you," Toni Lash said. "You seem to - "

"Let us not talk of small things," the long, sinis ter man said quietly. "I have heard of your grief."

Toni Lash bit her lips.

"You loved Park Crater, did you not?" the man asked.

Toni Lash nodded quickly, and tears came. "You should forget," the man said. The awful expression flickered on his face again. "will you do a job for me?"

"Is it dangerous?" the girl asked.

"Very," the man said frankly.

"I'll do it," Toni Lash said with a kind of desperation.

One day soon, the sun worshipers of the Riviera noticed that the windows of Toni Lash's villa were boarded up tight. Toni Lash had gone away.

The impression got around that Park Crater had gone mad - over beauteous Toni Lash.

The idea was as screwy as those about the dog, about Kummik the Eskimo, and about Fogarty-Smith the inventor.

The mystery had only moved southward.

Like something that had taken three great strides, the mystery had come south as far as the Riviera. Starting in the vicinity of the North Pole, it had left a grisly footprint at the Eskimo village, another footprint at the English weather station on the ice pack, and a third track on the Riviera.

It was gathering itself now, getting ready to spring all the way across the Atlantic and stamp with both feet on a man in New York City.