Doc Savage - The Giggling Ghosts Part 19

Monk awakened with this impulse for self-preservation. Monk, who had the stamina of an oak post, was first to revive. However, he lay still, batting his small eyes and running his tongue around his lips, and deciding his mouth felt as if it had been recently inhabited by a cat. Because he saw no sense in advertising the fact that he was conscious, he made no sound. He thought of the giggling ghosts, and fell to shivering.

Where was he? How long had he been unconscious? At first, he believed he was blindfolded; then he decided he was lying in a dense darkness, and there must be a roof overhead because there were no stars. He began feeling around. Ham! What had they done to Ham? Was he here?

Ham was there, close at hand. Ham must have been bordering on regaining consciousness, must have been in the state in which sleepers find themselves when they involuntarily give big spasmodic jumps. As soon as Monk's hand touched him, Ham gave a great jump.

"Sh-h-h!"

Monk quickly admonished. "Quiet!"

Ham went, "Huh?" and "Wuh!" confusedly. To stop that, Monk took a handful of Ham's mouth and nose and held it. He kept that m.u.f.fler on the dapper lawyer until Ham had a.s.sembled his wits, then released him.

Ham snarled, "Choking a man is no way to wake him up!"

"Pipe down!" Monk said. "It's the way I'd love to wake you up!"

"Where are we?" Ham wanted to know. "Where are the ghosts?"

Monk took another look around. Getting no better idea of where they were than before, he decided to let Ham draw his own conclusions, and said nothing.

Monk arose, took two or three steps, with his hands out in front, exploring. A yank at his ankle toppled him on his face.

"What's the matter?" Ham demanded.

"Sh-h-h!"

Monk hissed.

He added some things that he had not learned in Sunday school.

"There's a chain around my ankle," he explained."Mine, too," Ham said.

They investigated the chains and found them large enough to qualify as log chains. The chains were padlocked to their ankles; the other ends of the chains seemed to be locked around thick iron bars.

"Blazes, I hope we ain't turned into ghosts ourselves," Monk croaked, "with chains an' everything!"

THE bars interested Monk and Ham. They investigated and found a bar about every six inches, each one more than an inch thick.

"Cage!" Ham gulped. His hand moved toward a pocket for his matches. A moment later, he swore. "Got a match, Monk? I've lost mine."

Monk fumbled through his clothing until he found a match, then debated whether to strike the match. He listened; when he heard no sounds, he rasped the match along the steel bars, and made a reflector for it with his palms.

"Whew!" Ham said, relieved. "We look too solid to be ghosts. So do the bars."

"It's a cage, all right," Monk said.

"We're outside it," Ham added. "Thank our stars for that!"

In the fitful, dancing glow of the match, Doc's aids saw that there was a concrete sidewalk inside the cage. A sidewalk about a dozen feet wide with another set of bars on the other side. They looked to see how long the sidewalk was and it dawned on them then that the sidewalk was a long tunnel of steel bars.

How long they could not tell.

"A sidewalk protected by steel bars!" Monk muttered. "That's a queer one."

All around where they stood was jungle! Such jungle! The growth was grotesque. Monk stared, his small eyes popping, at a leaf beside him-a leaf so large that he could hardly have spanned it with his long arms. There were fernlike plants, closely resembling the ferns in window boxes, except that these must be more than thirty feet tall; the match light revealed they extended up at least thirty feet, and they were even higher.

But all this jungle growth was not Gargantuan in size. Some of the leaves were delicate, tiny. There were vines as thick as Monk's barrel chest, but there were also creepers as fine as silk thread.

The match burned Monk's finger, and he yipped, dropped it. Darkness clenched around them, as black as a squid's juice.

"Some place!" Monk breathed.

"Strike another match," Ham ordered.

Monk went through his pockets. "I haven't got one."

They stood silent and puzzled, wondering what kind of place they were in.

"Blazes!" Monk said hollowly. "Blazes!"

"What do you make of it?" Ham asked."Never saw nothin' like it before." The homely chemist sat down and felt of the padlock which held the chain to his ankle.

"But there ain't nothing mysterious about this lock," he said. "It's ordinary."

"They didn't take our clothes," Ham said meaningly.

Monk said, "O. K. Let's get these locks off."

MONK was-this was generally admitted-a chemical wizard. Working with Doc Savage, Monk had developed innumerable chemicals useful in the strange career which the little group followed. For Doc and his men fought with such trick weapons.

Monk had worked out ingenious methods of carrying chemicals. Men's suits, for instance, had a stiffening fabric around the shoulders and collars. Monk had impregnated this fabric with a stiffening agent that was really a thermite compound-a concoction which burned with metal-melting heat.

Doc's aids got to work on the locks. They tore the fabric out of their collars, wrapped it around the locks, and lighted it by grinding a vest b.u.t.ton against it. The b.u.t.ton was a firing agent for the thermite.

There was a fizzling, a bright glare that blinded them completely. But they managed, in the middle of it, to kick their chains off.

After the thermite burned out, it was several moments before they got over being blinded.

"What do we do next?" Ham asked.

"Let's just strike out," Monk growled. "We dunno where we are, anyway."

They crept away from the spot where they had been chained, feeling ahead in the intense darkness with their hands. The jungle growth felt amazingly coa.r.s.e. Leaves were as thick as planks, and as hard. They skinned themselves on bark; they got into thickets of thorns that were like needles.

Monk got involved with a vine, a thin spider web of a thing, and it was strong as wire and he came near not escaping from the tangle.

"Blazes!" the homely chemist muttered.

They came to what felt like a cliff of stone. They had no way of telling how high this was. They had no light. They could not reach the top of the cliff and it was too slick to climb.

"Let's follow along the base of the thing," Ham said.

Monk gulped suddenly; he had something on his mind that he wanted to get off, something he had to say.

"Ham," Monk said, "I-well, that girl must have been working with-er-the giggling ghosts, from the first."

"Why did you wait this long to say so?" Ham demanded.

"Er-she fooled me."

"Hah!""And why didn't you mention it earlier, either?" Monk demanded.

"Er-she fooled me, too," Ham confessed.

"I feel like a sucker."

"Here, too," Ham said.

It was a rare occasion when these two admitted accord about anything; it was practically a record.

"I WONDER where Doc is?" Monk mumbled.

"And Hart, Lawn, and Christophe," Ham added. "Not to mention Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny."

They stood and worried about that, temporarily forgetting their own predicament.

"The ghosts didn't catch Doc when they got us, did they?" Monk asked.

"I don't think so."

"Maybe they caught him after they got us."

They were worried about Doc. They were embarra.s.sed over the way the girl had fooled them. Ham always went through an unconscious gesture when he was embarra.s.sed: he hooked a thumb in his waistcoat pocket. He did this now. And immediately he was aware that one thumb had touched something. He dug the object out of the pocket.

"Matches!" he exclaimed.

"Matches!" Monk muttered. "I thought you looked in your pockets before."

"Er-I always carry my matches in a certain pocket. When they weren't there, I thought I had none."

"You nickelwits!" Monk gritted.

Discovery of the matches took their minds off the fate of Doc and the perfidy of the girl. They continued their efforts to escape by creeping along the stone wall or cliff, or whatever it was.

"Ugh!" Monk said suddenly. He stopped.

Ham breathed. "What-"

"Sh-h-h!"

Monk said. "Come over here! Feel this!"

Ham moved to Monk's side, pa.s.sed his hands over the shape that had aroused Monk's startled wonder.

"What d'you think it is?" Monk wanted to know.

"Like nothing I could describe!" Ham said. "I'm going to strike one of my matches."

Ham's matches were in a little book and he tore one out, closed the cover, and rasped the match head on the striker composition. Light jumped over the object about which they were so curious.The item was about fifteen feet tall, and thirty or forty feet long-they could not tell how wide. It had the hide of an elephant, but it had warts, also. Warts as big as knots in a pine board. It had four legs. The two front legs short and small, small in proportion, that was, for they only had claws a foot long. The monster was half sitting up, and looking down between its paws at them.

The monster's mouth had four rows of sharp teeth, the size and shape of dirty candles, and the mouth was large enough to take a bite of approximately half a horse.

"Yeo-o-ow!" Monk squalled.

WITHOUT any thought of why, wherefore, or anything else, Monk took off from that spot. He crashed into Ham. They went down. They got up. They ran. They tripped, smashed into things, all but beheaded themselves on tough vines.

Because they ran blindly, they fell into the fissure.

Monk and Ham fell headlong into the crack, sprawling. For one horrible flash, they thought they were going to their deaths, but the fissure wasn't that deep. Only a dozen feet or so deep. They hit the hard bottom.

Monk had started yelling, a hair-splitting squall, and when he hit, the yell ended in a sound like a bad note out of a trumpet.

Almost instantly a weird greenish light appeared and suffused the crevice in which they lay. The light increased, and they began to see their surroundings.

Ham stared upward. His eyes got round with horror.

"Monk!" he croaked hoa.r.s.ely. "It's-look-"

The monster-if not the one they had seen, but one very like it-was looking down into the crevice, and it appeared that the thing could easily reach them with its jaws.

Chapter XIX. THE BLOW-BACK.

ONE of mankind's strong traits is also his impulse to show off; be an exhibitionist.

All through history men have shown off. The Romans had triumphal parades; kings have always had pomp and pageantry, and the circus is popular the world over; and so are the exhibitions commonly called world's fairs.