“You,” said Doc Savage commandingly, “must solve the crime, rescue the victims, and save the order of world civilization, Dr. Watson.”
IV
I fumbled in my lounging robe for my pipe, shoved aside the futile revolver with which I had foolishly menaced The Woman as she entered my Limehouse flat so seemingly long ago, and began to pace to and fro myself. My mind raced. My thoughts whirled about like bits of flotsam caught in a maelstrom. What would Holmes do? was all I could think at that moment. What would Holmes do, what would Holmes do?
At last I halted before Doc Savage, and asked, “Did the villain leave behind any clue—any scrap of evidence, however trivial or meaningless it might seem to you?”
Furrows of puzzlement and concentration cut deep grooves into the brow of the man of bronze. At last he said, “There may be one thing, Watson, but it seemed so inconsequential at the time that I hardly took note of it, and hesitate to mention it to you now.”
“Permit me to be the judge of that, please,” I snapped in as Holmes-like a manner as I could muster. To my gratification the man of bronze responded as ever had witnesses under the questioning of Sherlock Holmes.
“The fiend had apparently developed a superscientific device of some sort that reduced the stature of his victims to that of pygmies, and he strode away with poor Holmes under one arm and Greystoke under the other.”
“Yes,” I said encouragingly, “pray continue.”
“Well, Dr. Watson,” Savage resumed, “as the fiend left the Exposition of European Progress he seemed to be mumbling something to himself. I could barely make out what it was he was saying. But it seemed to be something like Angkor Wat, Angkor Wat. But would could that possibly mean, Watson?”
I smiled condescendingly and turned to the assemblage, who sat in awed silence at the confrontation between Savage and myself. By a tacit gesture I indicated that I would accept information from any of them.
“Is it an exotic drug?” one asked.
“The name of the fiend himself?” another attempted.
“A secret formula of some sort?” queried a third.
“Some religious talisman?”
“A Princeton lineman?”
“The greatest scientist of ancient Neptune?”
“An obsolete nautical term?”
“The seat of an obsolete monarchy?”
“That’s it,” I cried encouragingly. “I knew the knowledge lay somewhere among you. Angkor Wat is a city lost in the jungles of heathen Asia. We must seek this fiend and his victims in Angkor Wat.
“Quickly,” I exclaimed, turning toward Doc Savage, “have transportation made ready at once. We depart for Angkor Wat this night.”
“Can I come along?” the Shadow asked, twisting the girasol ring on his finger.
“No, no, take me,” the Avenger put in.
“Me,” cried Gordon of Yale.
“Me,” shouted David Innes. “I know Tarzan personally.”
Soon they were all jumping from their seats, jostling one another to approach closest to me and squabbling as to which among them should have the honor of accompanying me on my mission to rescue Sherlock Holmes and John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
“This is a task for Doc Savage and myself alone,” I told them as kindly but definitely as I could. “The remainder of you are to remain here and hold yourselves in readiness should there be a call for your services. Now, Savage,” I addressed myself to the man of bronze, “have some of those well-known flunkies of your establishment make ready a vehicle suitable for transporting us to the lost city of Angkor Wat in the jungles of the faraway Orient.”
“Yes, sir,” he acceded.
Firmness, I vowed, would be the salient feature of my modus operandi henceforward onward.
Within minutes a crew of grotesque creatures had prepared one of the strange flying machines, which Doc Savage informed me were known as autogyros, with a plentiful supply of reserve fuel, a wicked-looking advance-design Gatling gun, and belts of ammunition. Almost before there was time to shake hands heartily with each member of the League we were leaving behind, Savage and I were airborne over the arctic wastes.
Before many hours passed, our remarkable autogyro was whoop-whoop-whooping its way across the great Eurasian world-island, passing, at one moment, over the very St. Wrycyxlwv’s Square, where The God of the Naked Unicorn was to be displayed to the distress of The Woman and the disordering of the stability of European civilization, in what was now little more than twenty-four hours, should Doc Savage and I fail in our mission.
We passed over the Germanic and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the semibarbarous Slavic states to their east, fluttered dangerously through frigid snowcapped passes in the sinister Ural Mountains and into Asia. Nothing stopped us, nothing slowed us. Savage’s flunkies had equipped the autogyro with numerous auxiliary tanks of fuel and had thoughtfully provided for Savage and myself a huge wicker basket filled with delicate viands.
We passed over teeming Bombay, curved northward tossing clean-picked bones of squab onto the nomad-haunted sands of the Gobi Desert, hovered high above teeming hordes of heathen Chinese as we completed a repast of cold lobster in mayonnaise (dropping the empty carapaces of the aquatic arachnoidea into the hands of awed Orientals) and moved at last across the Gulf of Tonkin, waving greetings to tramp steamers as they plied their routes, until we came once more over land, and I saw far beneath the wheels of the autogyro the green lushness of the ancient jungle.
Shortly my companion and pilot pointed downward toward an opening in the jungle. Through the widely spaced palms I could see the pyramids and temples, colonnades and pagodas of an antique metropolis, one lost for thousands of years and only late rediscovered, to the awe and wonderment of even European scholars.
Doc Savage worked the controls of the autogyro, and we dropped, dropped, dropped through the steaming tropical air, until the rubber-clad wheels of the aerial vehicle rolled to a rest atop the tallest pyramid in Angkor Wat.
We climbed from the autogyro and stood overlooking the ancient city. It was dawn in this quarter of the globe, and somewhere a wild creature screamed its greeting to the sun while great cats padded silently homeward from their nocturnal prowls and birds with feathers like brilliant jewels soared into the air in search of tropical fruits upon which to gorge themselves.
“There’s only one place in a city like this where a maniac like our foe would make his headquarters,” Doc Savage growled. “That’s in the high temple of the sun, and that’s why I landed us where I did.”
Through the eerie stillness of the jungle metropolis we made our way down the giant granite steps of the pyramidal edifice, pausing now to gasp in awed admiration of the handicraft of some long-forgotten Asiatic artisan, now to kill a poisonous serpent, now to pot a brilliant-plumaged denizen of the airy reaches for the sheer fun and sport of it.
At last we reached the earth, and making our way to a grand colonnade that gave onto the great chamber of the temple, we found the prison chamber of the archfiend—but our prey had flown the coop. Savage and I stood at the torture device of the maniac, chilled not so much by its massiveness—for it was smaller than an ordinary kit bag—as by the malignant potentialities in its complex controls.
Clearly the fiend and his victims had been here shortly before us, and the villain had fled in haste, abandoning his infernal device as he made good his escape. And yet, the very carelessness exhibited by the malefactor suggested that he owned as bad or worse and was keeping them somewhere other, to which place he had repaired, victims in tow.
Savage and I sprinted back to the autogyro, pausing only to ferret out such clues as were required to determine the destination of the fleeing fiend and his captives.
Thus pursued we them from Angkor Wat to bustling, modern Tokio, thence to mystery-shrouded Easter Island, where we wandered among the strange monolithic sculptures in bafflement until Doc Savage summoned the talents of the Green Lama by remote communication. That luminary induced one of
the weird statues to reveal to Savage and myself that it had observed the fiend and his two captives only minutes earlier than our arrival, departing on a course dead set for the American settlement of Peoria in the province of Illinois.
We pounded our way across the Pacific, the autogyro’s rotors whoop-whoop-whooping as we fled from day back into night.
We passed above the gleaming lights of San Francisco harbor, rose to the frigid heights as we passed over the Rocky Mountains, dropped low again to wave to a cowpoke here, a sourdough there, and we saw the sun rise once again before we reached Peoria.
Less than a day left to us. My horrified mind’s eye pictured the scene at St. Wrycyxlwv’s Square and the inevitable disintegration of world order that must follow—especially in the absence of those two saviors of the sane and the normal, Holmes and Greystoke.
Each outpost of the fiend, as we uncovered it, revealed him to have abandoned a similar but more hideously advanced model of his infernal torture device, its case glistening, its control panel studded with keys and levers, each marked with some arcane abbreviation of alphabetical or cabalistic significance known only to the torturer and—I inferred with a shudder—to Sherlock Holmes and John Clayton.
From Illinois the trail led to an abandoned warehouse located on New York City’s lower Seventh Avenue. There Savage and I found more and different devices of the fiend’s trade, and heard a distant door slam at the far end of the building even as our boots pounded angrily after the fleeing maniac.
We pursued him down a long tunnel that seemed to dip and curve away beneath the very bedrock of the island of Manhattan, then there was a rumble—a flash—an uncanny sensation of twisting and wrenching, and Savage and I found ourselves standing side by side outside the very London kiosk where The Woman had brought me at the outset of my weird odyssey.
“Where now?” Savage gasped frantically, consulting a chronometer that he wore conveniently strapped to the wrist of one mighty bronze limb.
I thought for a moment, wondering where in the great metropolis the maniac would go. Suddenly I was seized by a stroke of inspiration. I grasped the bronzed giant by one elbow and with him raced to the nearest hack stand, where we engaged the second carriage in line. I stammered my instructions to the cabby and he set off at a rapid clip, the hooves of the horses clop-copping over the London cobblestones to my great comfort and relief until we drew up before a familiar old building where I had spent many happy years in the past.
I tossed a coin to the cabby, and Savage and I raced up the stairs, hammered frantically at the doorway of the ground-story flat, and urged its occupant, the owner and resident manager of the establishment, to join us in our mission above and to bring her pass key with her as she did so.
As that good woman turned her key in the lock to the upper flat Savage burst open the door with a single thrust of his mighty bronze shoulder and I stepped past him, revolver in hand, and surveyed the scene within.
There I beheld the fiend seated at his infernal machine, operating its keys and levers with maniacal rapidity while upon the table beside him I saw the pitifully shrunken figures of Sherlock Holmes and John Clayton, dancing and twirling with each strike of the keys of the maniac’s machine. To one side of the machine stood a huge stack of pages covered with typed writings. To the other stood an even taller stack of blank pages waiting to be covered with words.
A single sheet was in the fiend’s machine, and each time he struck a key a new letter appeared upon the page, and with each word I could see the pain upon the faces of the two heroes growing greater as their stature grew less.
“Halt, fiend!” I shouted.
The maniac turned in his seat and leered maniacally up at Savage and myself. His hair was white, his face satanically handsome, yet marked with the signs of long debauchery and limitless self-indulgence.
“So, Savage”—he lipped grimly—“and Watson. You have found me, have you. Well, small good that will do you. No man can stand in the way of Albert Payson Agricola. You have played into my hand. You see—there are your two compatriots. All of the rest in your moronic League will follow. And I alone shall possess The God of the Naked Unicorn.” And with that he gestured grandly toward a table on the opposite side of the room.
There, on the very mahogany where my gasogene had stood for so many years between Holmes’s violin case and his hypodermic apparatus, there now reposed the silvery and begemmed majesty of Mendez-Rubirosa’s masterpiece, The God of the Naked Unicorn.
“And now,” Agricola hissed triumphantly, “I shall add two more trophies to my collection of puppets and husks.”
He bent to the keyboard of his infernal device and struck this lever, then that. With each strike I either felt a jolt of galvanic dynamism scream through my own organism or saw poor Savage writhe in bronzed agony.
“Stop it,” I managed to howl at the fiend. “Stop it or—”
He struck still another key. SUDDENLY I FELT HUGELY MAGNIFIED AND EMPOWERED. I JERKED THE TRIGGER OF MY REVOLVER AND ALBERT PAYSON AGRICOLA FLUNG HIS ARMS OUTWARD. HIS ELBOW STRuck a lever on the machine, and I returned to normal. I saw Doc Savage at my side massaging his painfully twisted limbs. I saw Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan of the Apes beginning with infinite slowness and yet by perceptible degrees to regain their proper form and stature.
Albert Payson Agricola fell to the carpet, a hole neatly drilled between his eyes.
From the wound there seemed to flow neither blood nor spattered brains but shred after shred of dry, yellow, smearily imprinted wood pulp paper.
Also by Michael Kurland
Sherlock Holmes Anthologies
My Sherlock Holmes
The Professor Moriarty novels
The Infernal Device
Death by Gaslight
The Great Game
The Empress of India
The Alexander Brass Novels
Too Soon Dead
The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes
About the Authors
Michael Mallory (“The Beast of Guangming Peak”) A freelance entertainment journalist working out of Los Angeles, Michael Mallory has published more than 250 magazine and newspaper articles. He is also the author of some seventy short stories, including “Curiosity Kills,” which won the Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society for Best “Flash” Mystery Story of 1997, and has had short fiction in publications ranging from Discovery Magazine, the inflight publication of Hong Kong Airlines, to Fox Kids Magazine. His Amelia Watson stories have appeared in various publications, and twelve of them are collected in the book, The Adventures of the Second Mrs. Watson. The first Amelia Watson novel, Murder in the Bath, is in bookstores now.
Carolyn Wheat (“Water from the Moon”) Students at the University of California at San Diego are fortunate to have Carolyn Wheat as a writing instructor, as anyone who has taken any of her writing workshops around the country can testify. She is a winner of the Agatha, Macavity, Anthony, and Shamus awards for her short stories, and her book How to Write Killer Fiction has been described by Booklist as an indispensable guide for writers of mystery and suspense.
Peter Beagle (“Mr. Sigerson”) Peter Beagle has a way with words. And imagery. And characterization. As can be seen in over a dozen novels and short story collections, including A Fine and Private Place, The Last Unicorn, and I See by My Outfit. He also writes short stories, screenplays, teleplays, and the occasional libretto, and conducts writing workshops, along with giving readings, lectures, and concerts. The concerts? Beagle is a folk singer of some note and four languages—English, French, German, and Yiddish—who has played at various venues around California and a few other states. As he has said, “Singing and dishwashing are the only other things I’ve done for money.”
Linda Robertson (“The Mystery of Dr. Thorvald Sigerson”) Linda Robertson practices criminal law with a San Francisco-based nonprofit law firm. She has published nonfiction in the San Francisco Chronicle, the online magazine Salon, and the CACJ (Californi
a Attorneys for Criminal Justice) Forum, and is the coauthor of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, which covers topics ranging from UFOs and Bigfoot to who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
This is Robertson’s second foray into the world of Sherlock Holmes, the first, “Mrs. Hudson Reminisces,” appeared in My Sherlock Holmes.
Rhys Bowen (“The Case of the Lugubrious Manservant”) The author of the extremely readable Constable Evans novels, set in her maternal homeland of Wales, Rhys Bowen grew up in Bath, England, and went to school in England, Austria, and Germany. After having her first play, Dandelion Hours, produced by the BBC in London, Rhys fled to Sydney, Australia, and went to work for Australian broadcasting. In 1966 she and her husband settled in San Francisco, where she has been ever since, entertaining the English-speaking world with award-winning children’s books, young adult books, historical romances, and mysteries. Her latest series, the Molly Murphy mysteries, traces the adventures of a young Irish immigrant girl in the New York City of a century ago. Molly is brash, bright, liberated, and, as they said in New York a century ago, has plenty of moxie.
Bill Pronzini (“The Bughouse Caper”) Versatile, prolific, imaginative, and one of the finest prose stylists in the known universe, Bill Pronzini is the author of sixty novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and twenty-nine in his popular “Nameless Detective” series. He has written four nonfiction books, ten collections of short stories, and scores of uncollected stories, articles, essays, book reviews, and napkin doodles, and he has edited or coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries. He has received three Shamus awards, two for Best Novel, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, as well as six nominations for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar award.
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years Page 46
