Doc Savage: The Secret of Satan's Spine (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 15) (12 page)

“Drugged?”

Monk inserted a hand behind the man’s skull, lifted his head, examining by sight and by feel for any sign of a head injury. He found none.

Letting the fellow’s head fall back, Monk said, “He hasn’t been bopped, that much is sure.”

Frowning, Ham opined, “He is large enough to be Doc Savage in disguise.”

“Well, if he’s Doc, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to peel off the stuff he put on his face.”

The hairy chemist made a motion to do exactly that, but Ham blocked him, saying, “That elaborate a make-up job took a great deal of time. If you ruin it, Doc will be upset with you.”

“But we gotta find out if this is Doc Savage!” pointed out Monk.

While the two were poised to argue the point, there was a knock at the door, followed by a rapid rattle of departing footsteps.

Both men stared at the door as if not certain what to do.

“That’s not Doc knocking,” stated Ham suspiciously.

“Should we answer it?” wondered Monk.

The answer to that conundrum was not immediately obvious, and the two stared at each other, uncertain what to recommend, as much puzzled by the knocking as they were afraid to make a wrong guess, which would no doubt result in one ribbing the other mercilessly over the upcoming hours.

Finally, Monk went to the door, threw it open, and found a sack sitting outside. He hardly had to stoop to pick it up, so long were his arms, and when Monk brought it into the room, kicking the door behind him, he deposited the thing on the table.

It was an oilskin sack of the waterproof variety sailors use to carry small personal items. Normally such a container would be closed by a drawstring, but this appeared to be sealed by several turns of soft wire, making for a very tight seal.

Monk easily undid the wire and, opening the sack, reached in and withdrew a singular object.

It had the semblance of a human hand, clenched into a tight fist. However, the first and last fingers jutted upward, curled thumb holding down the center digits. The object appeared to be composed of some black substance that might have been obsidian or some similar mineral.

The thing had been fashioned so that the severed wrist served as a base. Monk examined this fist from several angles, as did Ham, but it appeared to be nothing more than an artifact hewn from mineral rock in a way that made it seem weathered and natural.

Its surface texture was very rough, and the more they studied the ebony thing, the less it seemed life-like and more like some freak rock formation that had managed to look like a human hand.

It seemed to have no other significance, so Monk set it down on the table and they returned to the problem of the sleeping Negro who might or might not be Doc Savage.

Having nothing better to do, they resumed their argument.

Frustrated because he had been twice rendered senseless and was now stranded on a Bahama-bound vessel against his will, Monk Mayfair started taking it out on Ham Brooks.

“If you hadn’t poked your sharp nose into my personal business,” growled Monk, “I would be on on my way to Louisiana right now.”

For his part, Ham was more worried about the insensate Negro than he was Monk’s mental state, which was entirely of his own doing.

“None of this would have happened had you not fallen for that blonde vixen!” reminded Ham.

The matter of the missing Davey Lee having been raised, Monk changed the argument.

“Well, that was my dang business, and your opinion don’t count!” raged Monk.

“Now see here,” countered Ham. “The only reason we are on this boat steaming into who-knows-what peril is because certain persons did not want you sailing on the
Northern Star
.”

That undeniable fact was brought forcefully back to Monk’s consciousness. It stopped the argument cold. The sheer mystery of it caused the chemist’s homely features to go rubbery.

“What is this all about?” he wondered.

“Let us hope that Doc Savage is even now discovering some clue that will point us toward sensible answers,” said Ham.

The force of their argument having been spent, they returned their attention to the sleeping Negro whose identity they did not yet know.

Ham began studying the man’s shirt, which bore his last name, which was Grant. He tried to remember if he had noticed that name on the shirt before, but he had not.

The name meant nothing to him, one way or the other. It might very well be an alias for Doc Savage.

While they were pondering the matter, Monk abruptly sat down on a wooden chair, which immediately collapsed under his sudden weight, leaving him sitting stupidly in a pile of kindling.

“What have you done now?” demanded Ham.

“I don’t know,” admitted Monk. “But suddenly I felt like sittin’ down.”

The dapper lawyer noticed that Monk’s features showed a trace of paleness.

“Let me get you a glass of water,” he suggested, ducking into the washroom.

“Good idea,” said Monk thickly. He passed a hairy hand over his head and commenced looking befuddled in a dull way.

But once Ham began filling the glass, the disguised attorney suddenly felt lightheaded and drank the water himself.

Without finishing the glass, he filled a second one for Monk and brought them both out.

“What took you so long?” demanded Monk belligerently.

“I suddenly felt rather lightheaded,” said Ham.

“I kinda feel that way myself.”

Ham noticed that Monk had not bothered to pick himself up off the floor.

In order to hand the hairy chemist the full glass of water, the pale lawyer had to bend over deeply.

While he was doing that, he suddenly decided to sit down himself.

Monk accepted the glass with both hairy hands, and both men drank greedily, emptying their drinking vessels.

Ham looked toward Monk and asked, “Do you feel better now?”

Monk shook his head woodenly, saying, “No, I don’t.”

“Well, neither do I,” declared Ham.

Both men regarded one another with slightly dulling expressions, whereupon they seemed to melt, losing their grips on their glasses, their heads wavering and wobbling on their shoulders, until they had essentially collapsed into two human piles.

Now three men lay in the cabin, unmoving.

The strange black rock in the shape of a human fist continued to squat on a table, reflecting light, gleaming wickedly in the silence of the cabin where only the regular breathing of three insensate men disturbed the atmosphere.

Chapter XI

MYSTERY IN IRON

DOC SAVAGE WENT to Ham Brooks’ cabin, knocked twice, then once, but received no response.

Employing an extra key, the bronze man let himself into the cabin, and switched on the light. The stateroom proved to be untenanted.

Exiting quietly, Doc made his way to Monk’s cabin and discovered the hairy chemist was also absent. For a brief second a piece of sound escaped his lips.

This was the nature of a trilling, a sound the bronze giant made reflexively whenever he was perturbed in some way, great or small. It was an unconscious habit he had picked up in his wandering youth, somewhere in the Orient, and in recent months he had endeavored to shake the quirk for good. Doc Savage had not quite succeeded, hence the soft trilling—just a few fragments of unbroken melody that soon trailed off.

Reasoning that Monk and Ham may have gone off in search for him, Doc went next to his own cabin. The staterooms were all situated sufficiently far apart to minimize the chances that the three men might be spotted coming and going, or moving around the ship as a group. It was an excellent precaution for those reasons, and a damned inconvenience for keeping tabs on one another.

Doc went to his own cabin, and let himself in.

The light was on, and the bronze man’s dark disguised eyes took in the situation at a glance.

Monk and Ham were distributed about the floor; the Negro sailor named Jury Goines still lay supine in Doc Savage’s bunk.

Doc’s appraising glance noted only one other oddity. On a table next to an open sack reposed a fragment of black rock that resembled a human fist with two upraised digits, the outer ones. The dark thumb curled over the folded middle fingers, holding them down in a strange salute.

The bronze man had never seen the article before.

First, he knelt and examined Monk, followed by Ham, and found them more groggy than unconscious.

“Monk! Ham!” he said, shaking them.

The two men produced sounds that were combinations of a moan and a groan. The noises they emitted were extremely weak, almost kittenish.

The only other thing the bronze man noted was that the pores of their faces stood out rather coarsely, as if they had somehow dilated.

This did not make any sense, for this was not a condition that the bronze man recognized, and he was versed in all things medical, having been educated as a physician in the finest teaching hospitals. Hence his nickname.

Doc went next to the fist sitting on the table, and picked it up.

Almost as soon as he did so, the bronze giant felt slightly strange. The sensation was curious, almost inexplicable. The clenched hand appeared to be made out of some form of volcanic rock, possibly basalt. It was difficult to say because it was extremely weathered.

Doc examined the thing. Turning it in his hand, he noted with slightly widening eyes the fact that the pores on his fine-textured skin, normally invisible, were becoming apparent.

Hastily, the bronze man set down the weird fist and backed away. Again, his eerie trilling piped up, but was quickly stifled. It possessed a peculiar timbre, as if puzzlement and worry were mingled in its melodious musical bars.

Doc noted the oilskin pouch with its loose wire fastener and reasoned that the rock fist had originally reposed within it. Advancing, the bronze man swept up the artifact, dropped it inside the sack and rewound the wire as tightly closed as possible.

After he had finished, Doc Savage took stock of himself.

A vague fatigue had stolen over his mighty frame, and Doc went into the bathroom to a draw a glass of water, which he quickly imbibed. He had not felt thirsty, only fatigued. A lifetime of daily exercise, not to mention a strenuous existence, had all but banished ordinary fatigue from the bronze man’s magnificent physique. Yet weakness had stolen into his system somehow.

Putting down the empty glass, Doc returned to the cabin, and began performing manipulations on Monk and Ham in an effort to revive them. Nothing seemed to work. They continued to make utterances that were dull and slow and virtually worthless, so far as comprehension went.

Doc went next to Seaman Goines and found that his pores, which were coarser than those of the others, were also unnaturally dilated. Thinking that perhaps this was an indication of some strange dehydration, Doc pried open Goines’ jaw, and examined his mouth.

The man’s tongue and teeth and gums did not appear to be dry. That left out dehydration, and brought a flicker of bafflement to the bronze man’s normally stoic metal features.

A check of Monk and Ham’s mouths showed also that they were not dehydrated. Doc pinched flesh at the back of their hands, and released them. The skin snapped back with natural elasticity, further disproving the bronze man’s dehydration hypothesis.

While Doc Savage was puzzling over the matter, there came a peremptory rap on the door.

Doc hesitated. He did not know if he had been spotted entering the cabin in the guise of Seaman Goines. Had he, Doc could not very well decline to answer the door, lest he raise an alarm. Neither could he open it to crew inspection, given the awkwardness of the two men lying on the floor, not to mention the extra seaman sprawled on the bunk.

While he was considering what to do, the knock returned, more strongly this time, and a voice barked, “Open up! I saw you go in there!”

That left Doc Savage no alternative but to answer the door.

Moving to it, he crowded up against the steel panel, and opened the panel only a crack.

“What is it?” he asked in a voice that was neither his own nor that of Jury Goines.

A serious-faced seaman whose uniform displayed the crossed anchors of a Merchant Marine boatswain’s mate met the frank challenge of his gaze and demanded, “What are you doing in that cabin?”

Doc’s dark eyes went to the name stenciled over the man’s blue shirt pocket and he flung open the door, looked both ways to see if the sailor was alone, then hauled him in by main strength, kicking the door shut.

“HEY! WHAT’S the idea?” demanded the astonished Merchant Marine.

He struggled in Doc’s two-handed grip. For a youth, he appeared sturdily strong. But his knotted muscles were no match for the metallic might of the Man of Bronze.

Doc Savage made his voice low, and said, “If you will settle down, I will be happy to explain everything, Seaman Worth.”

The words were in the distinctive tone that could belong to only one man, Doc Savage.

Seaman Worth evidently recognized those tones, for he subsided and looked up at the bronze man’s dark face with wondering gaze.

“You—you—what I mean is—you don’t sound like Oiler Goines!”

“Goines is laying on that bunk, if you will turn your gaze in that direction,” suggested Doc.

Seaman Worth obliged, and his intelligent eyes went extremely wide. He looked up at Doc Savage towering over him, and then back at Jury Goines. For a short eternity of seconds, his mouth worked without producing any words.

Removing one of his tinted eye shells to reveal the striking flake-gold of his iris, Doc said quietly, “I am Doc Savage, Donald.”

Seaman Donald Worth stabbed slightly-bugging eyes all around the cabin, and his gaze fell upon Monk and Ham sprawled on the floor.

“That’s Monk and Ham!” he said wondering. “What happened to them?”

“That is exactly what I’ve been attempting to learn,” replied Doc, replacing the glass shell. “I have just discovered them in that condition.”

Seaman Donald Worth seemed to have lost all energy to struggle, so Doc released him.