"033 (B015) - Murder Melody (1935-11) - Laurence Donovan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

MURDER MELODY
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson

Chapter 1. DEAD MAN'S MESSAGE
THE earth shook. Tall fir trees swayed. Brittle branches snapped. Loosened stones clattered from a lighted tower. These bounded and plummeted several hundred feet. They splashed in a turmoil of white-slashed blue water.
The tower was a government lookout station. It was concreted at the peak of a rocky wall. Lights of red and white knifed alternately into the misted darkness. Their timed luminance guided shipping into and out of Burrard Inlet, the canyon-deep harbor of Vancouver. Their radiance could be picked up far out over the Bay of Georgia.
On a trail hewn through the firs back of the lookout tower a tall man staggered, holding his balance. His compactly knitted figure seemed to have been poured into his garments. Small bulbs of incandescence were haloed by the fog. These were spaced at intervals of perhaps a hundred yards along the woodland trail.
This dim illumination revealed the passage of some inner pain across the man's regularly molded features. His face was of the smoothest texture. He might have been an actor grease-painted with a silvery mixture. Even in this misted gloom it glowed strangely.
Under the man's feet the ground trembled. The earth jerked spasmodically. The motion was both lateral and forward. The man stumbled as he walked toward an iron bench placed in a secluded niche.
Dried cones from a lone pine tree pelted about the bench. The quivering earth rumbled as if some monster of tremendous size and weight were stalking past. Though he was apparently the only person in the many square miles of Vancouver's wilderness park, the man on the bench began talking. He spoke rapidly, but not loudly.
As the terse, clear words tumbled from his twitching lips, the man fumbled with the buttons set in a double row along a tuniclike garment. Except for unusual looseness and length, the garment might have been a vest.
One hand found a button. The fingers lingered upon it. They pressed inward and turned the button slightly. Immediately there was another voice. This was faint, but its enunciation was clear.
"Three Zoromen have departed. Andro, Namos and Lamo. Beware! Write quickly the message as instructed."
The word Zoromen was spoken as if this was the name of a clan. The speech had that perfection which a well-educated foreigner gives to a new language. The man on the bench spoke only three words in reply to the mysterious voice.
"Lanta is understood."
Through the rumbling of the apparent earthquake a weird melody had been permeating the misty night. This was low but shrill, as if played upon a flute. Its cadence became higher. The mystic music was drifting nearer.
WITH the three final words, the man quickly pulled a roll of dull yellow substance from under his coat. He next produced what might have been a stylographic pencil. This gleamed in the misty light. A section of the yellowish roll was removed.
The man already was sagging forward. But the parchment-like scrap was on his knee. He wrote rapidly with the stylographic instrument. The yellowish roll fell among the rotting leaves at his feet.
The shrill, piercing melody increased in volume. Shadowy figures flitted among the still-shaking bushes in the vicinity of the bench in the isolated niche. The man upon it was no longer sitting erect. He was doubled over in a silent contortion of agony. The stylographic instrument dropped to the ground. The man's feet shuffled it into the loose gravel.
Under a repetition of the earth shock of a minute before, one towering tree snapped near its base and came crashing down. The tree was an ancient spruce. The supporting ground had betrayed it after two centuries of growth.
The man of the shining face clapped both hands to his ears as if to exclude the weird melody. His body crumpled on the bench. He writhed as if he were being tortured. One hand came slowly downward.
He thrust a small yellow roll into his mouth.
"It is done, Lanta," he gasped.
As if the little roll of yellow parchment had cut off his breath, the man stiffened and died. The eerie melody ceased abruptly. The bushes behind the bench, rustling as the ground trembled, closed like a green wall upon the shadows that had been near.
THE mysterious earthquake, which apparently had made Stanley Park, on the Bay of Georgia front of Vancouver, one of its damaging centers, was recorded on the seismograph at the University of British Columbia. The first awakened savant to reach the observatory of the provincial university saw the recording stylograph had fixed the time of the first shock at four and a half seconds after two a. m.
From the sharply defined inclination of the lines, the center of the tremor seemed to have been under the barrier mountains to the northward. This serrated range of peaks and canyons extended from back of North Vancouver, across Burrard Inlet, past The Narrows for several miles to the lighthouse promontory in the Bay of Georgia.
Other members of the university faculty were awakening to find telephone inquiries and reports pouring in.
Chimneys had been shaken down in North Vancouver.
Rocks were still rolling from the heights and blocking the highway along the northern shore through the suburban section of West Bay.
White Cliff reported windows broken, dishes rattled and the summer residents fleeing to boats.
After the second mysterious temblor, which followed at an interval of one and three-quarter minutes, Nanaimo and Victoria on Vancouver Island, reported lesser effects from the quake. Port Angeles on the American side, and much of the Olympic Peninsula, had experienced slight tremors.
Much slighter recording on the seismograph at Washington University in Seattle brought the quick deduction that the earthquake was unusually localized.
"This is a strange coincidence," remarked one of the professors at the University of British Columbia. "The two American coasts have had similar tremors within forty-eight hours."
His fellow savants recalled the newspaper accounts of only the previous day. These had been, briefly:
Fishing villages and towns in the vicinity of Province-town, Mass., at an early hour today, were visited by slight but distinct earthquake shocks. The seismograph at the University of Harvard recorded the center of the disturbance 77╜ miles from HarvardЧat Provincetown. Audiences fled from motion picture theaters and apartment buildings, but none has been reported injured. A Coast Guard station reported the shock was such as might have been caused by some ship being blown up at sea.
SELDOM is an earthquake so accurately anticipated as to have a recording close to its point of origin. Such was the case with this mysterious double tremor in the British Columbia mountains.
A tall, bony man was standing with two others near the cement reservoir topping the main trait above the zoological gardens in Vancouver's Stanley Park. At the moment the trembling earth and the weird wailing melody sent the man staggering to die on the bench below the lookout station, the skeletonish figure placed a leather, boxlike case on the ground.
The lid of the case was opened. There was a low whirring sound from the leather-covered box. A stylographic needle moved so sharply it jumped from the recording roll. The only light was a finger as thin as a pencil playing upon the portable seismograph.
"This prearranged phenomenon might well be merely some combustible manifestation," spoke the dry voice of the bony man. "We are at considerable distance from the identified geological fault from which a major temblor might be promulgated."
"It don't seem possible," piped up a thin voice, all the more remarkable because the childish tone was emitted from a barrel chest set between shoulders a jungle gorilla might have envied. "You think, Johnny, that's what's doin' it?"
The first speaker, "Johnny," or world-noted as William Harper Littlejohn, eminent geologist and archeologist, never employed words of only one or two syllables when multi-syllables would serve.
The second speaker was Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, a quite impressive and dignified name for his quite undignified person. For his long, dangling arms, his sloping forehead and general anthropoidal contour had given him the name of "Monk." Though Johnny's high flights in the English language often went far over his head, Monk was one of the world's greatest industrial chemists.
The seismograph needle continued its abrupt gyrations. Johnny steadied the case by holding it in his long, thin hands.
The third man, the one holding the flashlight with its steady pencil ray, swayed easily to the movement of the jumping ground. He was in darkness like the others, but the slight reflection from the pencil ray showed a face of smooth, golden bronze. His eyes, too, were of a flaky golden hue.
Just now, as he watched the demonstration being given by Johnny, the bronze man's eyes were stirred by whirlwinds of motion, as if they were pools suddenly rippled. His voice seemed low when he spoke, but it was possessed of a carrying, penetrating quality that made each calm, unhurried word distinct.
"Perhaps our friend will arrive with the demonstration," he stated. "It was exactly two o'clock."
As if his words had signaled it, an eerie, flutelike melody quivered through the grumble of the complaining ground.
"Whatcha hear, Doc?" questioned Monk instantly.
Johnny shifted the recording seismograph and peered intently into the gloomy tunnel of the main trail under the canopy of firs.