"coffinfortheavenger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepperman Emile C)

revealing a long, narrow passage, dimly lighted at the far end.

Larnbertini pushed the coffin along to the far end, and the opening in the basement wall
swung shut behind him. As he approached the far end another section of wall opened and he
went through with his load.

A strange new world was revealed. But it was a queer and perverted world, as if some
weird magician had rubbed Aladdin's magic lamp the wrong way.

The subterranean chamber was low-ceilinged and damp, but it was huge in expanse. At the
left there was a long row of glassed-in rooms, in which men and women sat and worked at
typewriters, radio sending and receiving sets, and teletype machines. There were other
offices in which women filed papers and operated multigraph machines.

In all there must have been fifty or sixty people working down here underneath the surface
of the city. It might have been a busy newspaper office from the speed and efficiency with
which everybody was working.

But on the left-hand side of the chamber was the truly amazing spectacle. For here a space
perhaps twenty feet wide and fifty feet long had been set apart and fenced off with a neat
white picket fence and made into a garden!

It was as weird and ghastly a garden as anyone might have dreamed of in a tortured night-
mare. It consisted of neat rows of dwarf tulips, all black, and flecked with blobs of red.

They stood in ranks, like miniature soldiers of Satan--abnormally small, yet pregnant
with a horrid sort of evil.

How those tulips could have grown at all in that underground cavern was impossible to
tell.

Lambertini trundled the coffin along a cement walk between the glassed-in offices and
the tulip bed. And a man arose from among the tulips to meet him.

The man had been stooping over one of the rows, weeding it carefully. But now, as he arose,
it became evident that he was as abnormal as the outlandish bulbs he was cultivating.

His torso was huge, his shoulders broad and powerful. His arms were longer than average.
But his legs were so short that he looked like a dwarf. His head was large and entirely bald,
and a pair of cruel, clever eyes peered out from under thin and stringy eyebrows.

"Well, Lambertini?" he asked.

Lambertini stood stiffly, as if he were at attention. "Orders executed, colonel," he said.
"Mission successful."

The tulip man nodded. "Follow me."

He turned and led the way along the cement path, along the row of glassed-in offices, never
looking to the right or the left. Lambertini followed, pushing the dolly along.