"051 (B034) - Mad Eyes (1937-05) - Laurence Donovan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

MAD EYES
A Doc Savage Adventure By Kenneth Robeson

Chapter I. NIGHTMARE OF MONSTERS
"THEY'RE after me!" screamed the gaunt, loose-jointed man. "Take them away!" His voice cracked out with a nasal twang.
The man's arms were long. His big hands flapped. He was beating at the empty air about him. One set of fingers clutched suddenly at his colorless hair. The hand came away with strands the man had torn loose.
The long man was clad in brown overalls. Lights slanting across the railroad yards showed him to be beyond middle age. His wild, terror-filled screams were loud enough to be heard above the grinding and the clanking of switch engines.
A cut of freight cars was being shunted onto a siding. The running man evaded these by only a few feet. He was headed back toward the building from which he had dashed.
A thin rain slashed down on the railroad yards. The mist of it almost obscured the building from which the man had darted.
"They'll tear me to pieces!" screamed the man.
He pitched to his hands and knees in the middle of a track. Two brakemen were riding the bumper step of a switch engine. One man shouted hoarsely.
"Hey! Look out! You gone nuts? You'll be pulverized!"
The brakie's lantern swung. The switch engine stopped with a squealing of brakes. The two railroad men scrambled off. But the tall man had leaped to his feet.
"Grab 'em!" he shrieked. "That one's got ten heads!"
The two brakemen tried to seize and restrain the fellow. The man was too quick for them. His hands apparently were batting at nothing.
"They're everywhere!" the tall man continued to scream.
Having escaped the switch engine, he leaped across the tracks. He tried to reыnter the building from which he had come. But there appeared to be no doors.
"That's the watchmanЧan' he's gone nuts!" growled one brakeman. "Anybody'd go off his bean, locked up in that crazy place every night!"
"Yup!" barked the other railroad brakie. "This big guy, Doc Savage, fixed them doors. Even the yardmaster can't open 'em!"
THE doors of the long, low, concrete building were as described by the railroad men. The structure, unlike other industrial plants along the metropolitan railroad yards, bore no sign.
In the thin rain, the building looked much like a tomb. No windows appeared anywhere. The wildly screaming watchman had emerged from a small door. This door was of chromium steel.
One end of the long building appeared the same as the other. But at intervalsЧperhaps twice a weekЧone end would slide open. When this took place, the yardmaster would be notified.
All of the incoming and outgoing shipments were handled in special sealed cars. None of the regular yard crews were ever permitted inside. It was not surprising that the railroad men viewed the plant with suspicion.
Especially ominous were those doors. On a few occasions, the railroad men had seen persons connected with the plant enter the place. It seemed to the railroad men that these persons merely stopped and looked at that small, low door of chromium steel.
The yardmen were not aware the small door and the house track slide were locked by an electroscopic device. Those opening the doors were equipped with radio short-wave control of these electroscopes.
The screaming watchman had now returned to the small door.
For a few seconds he beat his fists against the steel. His voice still rose above the pounding of wheels in the yards. When he was not hitting the door, the man was whirling and striking at something invisible to the near-by brakemen.
"Guess we'd better sit on 'im an' get one of the yard bulls to take 'im out," suggested one of the brakemen. "He'll bump into something around here!"
Though the engineer and fireman of the switch engine climbed down and joined the chase, the screaming man evaded them.
His long arms writhed above his head, as if he were being tortured. Though he might have been, as the railroad men imagined, in an advanced stage of delirium tremens, John Corbin, the trusted watchman, never would describe the frightful monsters he may have seen.
Leaving the concrete building, the man started running across the maze of yard tracks. He leaped and screamed, tearing off some of his clothing. The four men of the switch-engine crew were close behind him.
"If he runs into one of them third railsЧ"
One of the brakemen yelled this. His cry was lost in the roar of a local train coming out of Manhattan. The crazed watchman apparently just missed being struck by this train.
He had fallen and rolled over when the local flashed past. Now he again staggered to his feet. The blinding headlight of a limited express came across the yard and bore down on the watchman.
The crew of the switch engine stood frozen to the spot. They could do nothing more. Against the brilliant headlight of the express, the leaping watchman showed for a few seconds. His long body with the flapping arms was like that of some black human bug about to be impaled.
"Goshamighty!" gritted the engineer of the switch engine. "It got 'im!"
THE roaring express had hit John Corbin, the watchman.
For an instant it was a fearful human projectile. Then the watchman was only a bag of crushed bones, lying more than a hundred feet from the spot where he had been struck.
The four men from the switch engine were the first to reach the crushed body. The watchman's face had escaped disfigurement. But the railroad men were sick.
John Corbin's eyes were still wide open. Though his hands no longer batted at invisible monsters, all his features were twisted, as if the man still saw something horrible.
"By criminy!" grunted the engineer. "If that's what hooch does, I'm never takin' another drink!"
The whole tragedy thus far had the brand of being an overdose of intoxicants.
"Couldn't blame a guy for takin' on a few snifters in that doggoned graveyard buildin'!" said one of the brakemen.
One of the railroad men had summoned a yard bull. This representative of the law had in turn put in a call for a regular State police detail, an ambulance and the nearest deputy coroner. Waiting for the arrival of proper authority, the yard bull went over to the long, concrete building.
Like the other railroad men, the bull suspected the business of this windowless, lockless structure might not be on the up and up. But the name of Clark Savage, Jr., was a power with the railroad officials.
Among his countless other interests, the noted Doc Savage had a considerable financial finger in the affairs of this transportation line. The railroad officials knew only this building was under the control of Doc Savage. They also knew the plant was operated by a rather queer old codger, a Professor Lanidus Spargrove.
"That's funny," muttered the yard bull, walking around the end of the building where two lines of railroad tracks disappeared under the blank wall of the door. "Never saw it up like that before."
The yard bull bent down in the rain. This end of the concrete building was in darkness. The bull played a flashlight across the two tracks. The immense door was made to fit down evenly over the rails.
Now the big door was almost a foot above the tracks. It looked as if the door had been opened and then improperly closed. The yard bull was a bulky man. But there seemed to be space for him to crawl under the door.