The Dolls of Death Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  His husky, uncertain voice carried a note of hesitant conviction that made the hair on Solo’s neck prickle. Sabrina, not understanding completely, still caught the mood of eeriness as the hack driver told his story while the cab rolled north in the misty dark.

  Four

  On the particular evening in question, Jackie Woznusky had picked up a fare in the theatre district just after the plays and musicals let out. The person was an elderly lady who wanted to be cabbed up into Westchester. She was going to stay overnight with her niece. The niece lived near the commuter town of Dobbs Ferry.

  Jackie took the fare. He deposited the old lady at a secluded farmhouse, headed back for Manhattan and discovered after he was ten minutes on the road that he’d made a wrong turn

  “Finally I seen a road marker. I stopped to check the map and find out where I was. While I was parked on the shoulder readin’ the map, all of a sudden I noticed this weird light from a field. I got out. I dunno why, except I figured maybe it was a fire on a farm and somebody might need help. Well, it was darker than my Uncle Melvin’s penny-pinching heart, I’ll tell you that. All except where this glow come from behind a hill. I went runnin’ up the hill and when I got to the top I nearly had the heart failure.

  Jackie Woznusky half-turned, as though to convince them by the earnestness of his expression that he was serious. The lenses of his spectacles shone eerily in the reflected glow of the dash lights.

  “There it was, this metal--- thing. I knew right away it was a flyin’ saucer because I seen drawings of ones like it. You know, in magazines. I always figured the people who saw such were wiggy, flippo, you know? But there it was, down in this little valley. The light kind of shone out from it, all golden-pink. I nearly fainted four or five times.”

  Solo said, “Jackie, approximately how big was the UFO?”

  “UFO? Oh, unidentified flying object, right? It wasn’t flying, but it was huge.”

  “Fantastic,” Solo said. “Mr. Waverly will think I’ve gone round the bend too.”

  Suddenly Napoleon Solo’s common sense took over. He realized he was groping blindly, seizing the first explanation, however irrational, to the mystery of a new THRUSH aircraft. UFOs in all sizes and configurations had been reported regularly for the last couple of decades. Sometimes the people who saw them were less than reliable mentally. Why was there any reason to believe Jackie Woznusky was well-balanced, or that he had actually seen what he reported?

  Cautiously Solo asked, “Were there any people around this saucer, Jackie?”

  “Yeah,” Jackie said. “This is the part that made the FBI men look at me like I was loony. Maybe I am. Around the bottom of the saucer, see, kind of near a sort of ladder going up the thing, there were five or six---“

  Jackie leaned on the horn, passed an expensive limousine crawling along the dim road.

  “---five or six little green men.”

  Sabrina giggled.

  “I knew it! I knew you’d laugh!” Jackie wailed in piteous tones. “But I really seen them. Little green men with pop eyes and funny feelers sticking out of their heads. They were marching around and around in a circle.”

  Solo’s right eyebrow crooked up.”The ---uh---space creatures were marching?”

  “Yeah. Honest. I knew that if I didn’t get out of there, I’d have a heart attack on the spot. I ran back to my hack, jumped in and went twenty miles over the speed limit all the way back to the city. I had six bourbons and hit the sack. In the morning, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. That’s why I went to the Federal Building first.”

  Jackie’s tiny eyes shone behind his glasses as he finished. “Maybe we’ll see it tonight again. I swear I didn’t make it up. It was real. I swear!”

  “Well, Jackie,” said Solo in his most soothing tone, “we’ll certainly check it out. You didn’t want to go dancing anyway, did you Sabrina?”

  “I’d much prefer dancing,” she replied tartly, “since I don’t know why you’re so interested in all of this.”

  He patted her gloved hand as Jackie swung the hack through the outskirts of Dobbs Ferry. “Why, Sabrina, I want to visit the spot as a favor to our friend Mr. Woznusky.”

  Dolorously Jackie announced, “I can tell.”

  “You can tell what?” asked Solo.

  “That you think I’m a funny farm candidate too. I was nuts to think anybody would listen, even U.N.C.L.E. I shouldn’t of jumped you. I’m sorry. We’ll go back to town.” He braked the cab.

  “No Jackie. Keep going,” said Solo. “We won’t find a thing, I’ll wager. That may be all to the good. I don’t believe your story. But I don’t think you’re lying, either. I think you saw something and you convinced yourself you saw something else. What’s happened to you has happened to plenty of other perfectly normal people. It’s no crime. Let’s go look at the field.”

  Jackie pondered in silence. “It’s a deal. At least you folks are bein’ decent about it. I appreciate that.”

  Napoleon Solo was irritated with himself. Poor Woznusky actually believed the wild tale. And for an instant Solo has swallowed it. He’d thought that perhaps, by accident, he had stumbled onto an answer to the Swiss Alps riddle which was plaguing U.N.C.L.E. In the aftermath of false hope, he felt foolish.

  Shortly the hack turned off onto a side road. Mist-dampened fence posts ghosted by in the wash of the headlights. The interior of the cab had grown cold. Few lights showed anywhere. A white road marker rose up, dropped behind. Jackie slowed down, began counting to himself:

  “---eight posts. Six. Yeah, there’s the tobacco sign hanging on that fence. The field is right up ahead, on the left. It all comes back to me now.”

  He cut across the road, pulled up on the shoulder and jerked the emergency brake.

  Sheepishly he said, “We don’t have to get out.”

  “Of course we’re going to get out.” Solo levered the door open.

  Sabrina sighed, less enthusiastically. “Of course we are.”

  Dampness clutched at their faces. Perhaps a mile away, a dim yellow blur indicated another vehicle passing on another road. After a moment Napoleon Solo could make out the silhouette of a fairly large hill on their left.

  Sabrina gripped his arm, whispering, “You’re a lunatic. But a very kind and understanding one.” She moved ahead a foot or so into the high, damp weeds. Jackie was out in front of them by three yards.

  “I sure don’t see any lights back there now.” His voice sounded eerily distant. “Listen, if you folks really want to go back---“

  “Let’s climb the hill and have a look.” Solo was trying to make a lark of it because the whole excursion was obviously so useless. Why did he have to be so soft-hearted sometimes? Just because an overweight cabbie had hallucinations---

  “Is that you, Napoleon?” It was Sabrina’s voice, from several feet away. “Your hand is cold as an ice cube.”

  Solo called: “That isn’t my hand Sabrina. Jackie---“

  “It ain’t mine either.” Jackie sounded even more distant. “It must---hey! Who is it?”

  Hearing a strange, sibilant rustling in the weeds, Solo knew they were not alone. Automatically his hands dropped to his jacket. Then he remembered. His attire for the evening of pleasure didn’t include a weapon.

  Sabrina called out. “Napoleon, I---“

  Suddenly her voice was cut off as though someone had seized her around the mouth.

  “Hang on, Sabrina!” Solo shouted, charging straight into the dark. A very large, powerful fist met his face with murderous force.

  Solo let out a shout, swung automatically. His own fist connected with a leather-jacketed midsection. Solo thought he’d struck Jackie by accident until the unseen adversary gave him a cruel kneelift in the middle.

  Solo tumbled backwards into the weeds, thrashed, came up on all fours. A foot bashed the side of his head. Over he went again, frantically grabbing for the foot and twisting.

  The attacker let out a hoarse shout of pain. Solo lurched to hi
s feet and punched hard into the dark where he thought he heard sibilant breathing. He struck empty air.

  He hit again. This time he connected with a head. His knuckles brushed something solid, glass-like, where the eyes should be. He realized that his attackers---there were at least three---were wearing some sort of bulbous night-goggles which enabled them to see him.

  “Jackie? Sabrina?” he shouted. “Stick together. Don’t get separated---oof!”

  A heavy fist belted him twice in the belly. Solo fought back. His knuckles broke a lens of the man’s special goggles. Another man leaped on him from behind. Solo elbowed him expertly and hard, shucked him off, and with his head lowered, began to run back toward the roadway.

  He needed light, light to see the field, the faceless phantoms he was fighting. With the breath tearing in and out of his lungs, he made it to the hack in seconds. Thank god Jackie had left his keys! Solo started the engine, yanked the light switch, went into reverse and backed around so that the headlights speared into the field. He kicked on the brights. Whiteness leaped ahead---

  Shining on emptiness.

  Weeds stirred in the faint mist. Nothing else moved.

  Panting, Napoleon Solo ran back into the field. He reached the top of the large hill and pelted down the other side. Shouting, calling their names, he moved back and forth across the area for the better part of twenty minutes.

  Then he stopped. Tie askew, face beaded with perspiration in spite of the night’s chill, he walked slowly back down into the field near the road.

  He’d made a gamble when he dashed to turn on the hack lights. He’d lost.

  Alone in the field, Solo walked toward the silent, accusing white circles of the headlights.

  He was alone. The attackers, Sabrina Slayton and Jackie Woznusky had vanished as though none of them had ever existed.

  ACT II

  “TAKE ME TO YOUR LETHAL LEADER”

  Napoleon Solo whispered, “I think we are about to see our flying saucer.”

  In reply Illya Kuryakin said, “I will believe in UFOs, Napoleon, if and when I see one.”

  Solo pointed with a black-gloved hand. “What do you call that?”

  In a voice as tense as Solo’s, Illya said, “Offhand, it rather resembles the opening of the doors of Hades as visualized by the poet Dante.”

  “Except that this time, the doors of Hades happen to be horizontal. That’s the ground of good old New York State opening up.”

  And so it was, down there at the bottom of the little valley behind the large hill. Moments ago there had been only darkness and the high, chilly shine of stars over the lonely countryside.

  It was almost four in the morning, approximately twenty-eight hours after Napoleon Solo had left this very same field and driven back to Manhattan.

  A moment ago the bottom of the little valley which Solo and Illya were watching from the hilltop concealment of some shrubbery had begun to glow with an eerie thread of light. This golden-pink line of brilliance bisected the valley at an angle. The line of light was perhaps a hundred yards long from end to end. A faint grind and whine, as of immense machinery moving, disturbed the nighttime silence.

  A pair of huge horizontal doors were camouflaged with dirt and living soil and plants. The doors were sliding back. The bright line widened, widened still further. Up from the subterranean opening thus revealed, the strange and brilliant golden-pink glow shone.

  Solo’s eyes strained to capture every detail. But he could see little of what filled the immense opening in the ground. The light was too blinding.

  Suddenly Solo dug his gloved fingers into his companion’s arm. “There, Illya. Something is coming up from underground.”

  “Forgive me, my friend,” Illya breathed. “You aren’t crazy after all. Mr. Waverly and I thought so last night, you know, when you rousted us from our beds and made us come down and listen to that fantastic story of how Sabrina and the cab driver disappeared. But now---now I believe you.”

  Illya Kuryakin hunched forward on his elbows, pushing aside a low branch of the scraggy shrub behind which they’d been stretched out on their bellies since sunset.

  Both agents wore tight-fitting night guerrilla outfits with snug hoods, plus special shoes whose crepe soles had small compartments in them. The faces of the U.N.C.L.E. agents were partially hidden by the fat lenses of infra-red goggles. Solo had decided that if the enemy found goggles a good idea, they could use the same gambit. The remaining exposed portions of their faces were smeared with blacking.

  They were as invisible as men could be at night, lying there with long-muzzled pistols at their elbows, watching the incredible scene below.

  The still air groaned with the sound of another huge piece of machinery being switched on. From the huge, glowing hole in the earth, a metallic object of some size rose steadily, as though on a powered lift. The upper surface of the object was curved. And as more and more the monstrous thing appeared, it assumed an all too familiar shape.

  Bathed in the pink-yellow glow of lights shining from below, a circular metal craft about seventy yards in diameter came up into sight. On top the metallic disc bulged to form a dome. Shadows denoted view ports or windows in the dome. Beneath the craft, a dozen rod-like legs supported it on the motorized platform on which it was riding upward.

  As soon as the huge steel platform reached ground level, the false doors in the earth began to slide shut. The tips of the craft’s legs seemed to be equipped with rollers which rode up onto the shutting doors.

  When the outside legs were on the doors, the central legs drew up off the platform. The platform dropped away. The camouflaged doors shut with a loud clang.

  Even with light from below-ground gone, the metal skin of the craft radiated a faint golden-pink glow. A kind of telescoping ladder unfolded from the upper dome. Its lower edge nudged the ground. A door slid up in the side of the curved dome. Out flew something small, thrown hard. It landed on the earth, glowing eerily green.

  Illya Kuryakin gasped. Napoleon Solo said nothing. A strange tight knot of tension had suddenly loosened inside of him. He felt relaxed as he had not felt relaxed since facing Mr. Waverly and Illya at headquarters in the small hours last night. At that time Solo told the incredible story of Jackie Woznusky, the fight in the field, and the disappearance of Solo’s companions.

  TWO

  “It’s a lunatic’s tale Mr. Solo,” Waverly said. He looked sleepy.

  “But that’s why Woznusky came to us in his own crude, frightened way,” Solo said. “He knew that U.N.C.L.E. was unconventional enough to give him a hearing.”

  “Very well,” Mr. Waverly answered. “I am conventional enough to believe that the affair has some other logical explanation. THRUSH may be at the heart of it, yes. But flying saucers? No, Mr. Solo, I’m afraid not. On the other hand, I realize your concern for Miss Slayton and the cab driver. I also appreciate that THRUSH has, in the past, moved in bizarre avenues of research.

  “Therefore I will assign you and Mr. Kuryakin to survey that field very carefully tomorrow night. Mr. Kuryakin, please don’t roll your eyes. Let’s humor Mr. Solo in this, shall we?”

  “Of course,” Illya replied. “We’ll have a delightful time hunting for gnomes, elves, and other hallucinations in Westchester County. Napoleon, I’m afraid I can’t really believe---“

  “Don’t pre-judge it, Illya,” Solo said in a tight voice. “Not until we check for sure.”

  At dark earlier this same night, Solo and Illya had driven up into the county. They parked on a dirt road a full mile away. They walked cross-country to approach the hill-shielded valley from a different direction. They bellied carefully up to the hilltop and sank into place behind the scraggly shrubs and settled down to a long, probably fruitless wait in the chill silence.

  The hours dragged on. The night crept away. And just when Solo was beginning to give up, beginning to think that maybe he too needed the kind of psychiatric help people recommended to those who saw UFOs in the sky or on
the ground, the earth began to open slowly.

  There it was before them now, burning golden-pink. The very same kind of gigantic, saucer-shaped metal craft which had been dismissed as hoax, mirage or otherwise explainable phenomenon by hundreds of so-called experts over the past two decades.

  Another of those small, green-glowing shapes was hurled from the open upper door of the craft. Solo ripped off his infra-red goggles to see better. “Good Lord!”

  “I am seeing things,” Illya breathed. “Specifically, little green men.”

  Out shot another. Another. Soon half a dozen were lying inert near the base of the craft. Each one had a humanoid shape. Each gave off a phosphorescent greenish glow. From bulbous little heads greenish feelers protruded. The tiny creatures were no more than two feet long.

  From the shadow-black doorway of the saucer-shaped craft a voice could be heard:

  “That’s the last of the little beggars. More trouble than they’re worth. Give ‘em a double blast of juice. Let’s put on a real show in case any of the farmers around here are up early.”

  A high-pitched warbling tone split the darkness. Solo’s jaw dropped another inch as the half dozen little creatures jerked upright and, with awkward movements, began to form a line.

  Their antennae quivered. Their round greenish eyes shone brightly as they began to walk, one behind another, in a circle.

  Dimly understanding, Solo growled, “I want one of those.”

  On his feet, Napoleon Solo crashed out past the scraggly shrubbery and bolted down the hill. He watched the shadowy doorway of the craft as he ran, angling over toward where the little greenish men were moving round and round in monotonous, jerk-legged rhythm.

  Illya Kuryakin came scrambling right behind. The muzzles of their pistols glittered in the glow of the saucer craft’s metallic skin. Wild and fantastic as it was, Solo thought he saw a pattern. THRUSH had developed a highly specialized, infinitely advanced aircraft during the decade or so. The research program accounted for the myriad of UFO sightings made world-wide, and for the large percentage that government agencies had never explained.