The Volcano Ogre

by Lin Carter

  “Well, I saw the hoodoo’s been doin’ all these-here murders,” admitted the little fighter in a small voice.

  “You did?” cried Nick, pop-eyed with amazement. “Where? What was he doing? What did he look like?”

  “Yes, and, more to the point,” interjected Señor Valdez keenly, “where did he go?”

  Scorchy waved vaguely off to one side.

  “Dunno about that, but he wuz comin’ down the side o’ th’ volcano, begorra,” he mumbled shame-facedly. “Scared th’ living daylights outa me, too. I ripped off a few shots, but nuttin’ happened — dang these here mercy-bullets, anyway! ’F’ya don’t get ’em in th’ right spot, they don’t do no gosh-darned good at all!” He gulped, and added feebly, “Not that you could do much t’ th’ critter I seen, even with real bullets....”

  “What does that mean?” growled Nick exasperatedly.

  Scorchy windmilled his arms.

  “He wuz big as a house, he wuz, an’ wide as a barn! Din’t have any face on ’im, or any neck at all! I couldn’t see much because he was so hot he was steamin’ ... but I saw enough t’ know one thing fer sure,” he added grimly.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s all made outa stone,” said Scorchy in a thin voice. “Like a living idol o’ th’ heathen. A thing of red-hot stone, what walks like a man!”

  Nick licked his thin lips with a pointed tongue, tightened his grip on the pistol, and darted an apprehensive glance about the side of the mountain, as if half-expecting to see the lumbering stone monster come to life at any moment.

  A chill breeze was blowing up his spine.

  Despite their continual feuding, the lanky magician knew Scorchy through and through, from his peppery temper to the staunch, manly soul in him. Scorchy was not given to panic; neither did he prevaricate.

  If he said he saw a walking stone monster, then that was what he saw.

  There was a moment of speechless silence there on the slope of the monster-haunted island. Scorchy and Nick exchanged a long glance, then looked at Señor Valdez.

  The silver-haired old Spaniard crossed himself and seemed to be praying.

  CHAPTER 8 — Now You See It —

  While Prince Zarkon’s rapid and apparently effortless ascent of the steep slope of the mountain had seemed miraculous to Mr. Braxton T. Crawley, the only miraculous thing about it from Zarkon’s point of view was that this was the route taken by the young woman, seemingly by her own choice.

  For the first thirty feet or so the rockface rose almost as smooth and sheer as a cliff. Then it broke into a series of ledges that were considerably easier to climb. Zarkon, who had learned the art of mountain-climbing from skilled and veteran Sherpa guides in Tibet, found the ascent easy enough. But it said something for Miss Phoenicia Mulligan’s character that she had chosen this difficult place for her ascent of Mount Rangatoa.

  Obviously, the young lady liked danger, enjoyed meeting a challenge, and was “just too dang-fool stubborn” (as her Uncle would probably have phrased it) to turn aside in favor of in easier route.

  There was no doubt in Zarkon’s mind that Fooey Mulligan had in fact come by this way. The signs of her ascent were clearly visible for those with eyes keen enough to notice them and to understand what they implied. Here a pebble, long in place, had recently been dislodged by fumbling, groping hands, for the raw stone beneath where it had lain so long was not as worn and discolored as the stone around the place. And over here a smear of fresh boot-polish showed plainly against the rock where the girl had scraped her boot in struggling for a foot-hold.

  Indeed, pinched in a crack of stone, Zarkon even found a long, silky strand of bright gold hair. It was still supple and fragrant with the odor of a popular shampoo used by young women of fashion.

  Zarkon climbed the side of the volcano until he was near the top. He could tell that he was getting close to the crater from the increasing warmth of the stone under his hands and the growing stench of sulfur on the air. The warmth of the stone was not a surface warmth from sunlight, but came from beneath: volcanic heat, obviously. Doc Jenkins had told them that Mount Rangatoa was an active volcano, although it had not had a major eruption for generations. But you could have known that without prior information, for a plume of white smoke drifted from the crest, tossed and torn on the fresh morning breeze.

  As he climbed, Zarkon’s eyes were busy. They roamed hither and thither, noting every sign of the girl’s passage. They missed nothing, those sharp black eyes.

  Near the crest the slope flattened out. He no longer had to crouch to climb, but could stand erect and walk the gentle slope that led up to the mouth of the volcano. It was of no great height, Mount Rangatoa; you could climb it easily in ten or fifteen minutes, even without the veteran experience that was Zarkon’s.

  Obviously, from the way the slope suddenly flattened out near the top, the peak of the volcano had fallen in, collapsing into the crater many times during the past. This had caused a broad and fairly level zone, around the mouth of the volcano, greatly reducing its height.

  Zarkon walked further up the mountain, studying the ground. No grass grew here, or, rather, such few patches of scruffy turf as did were withered by the heat. The stone was hot under foot and the patches of grass were crisped.

  Here Phoenicia Mulligan had stopped suddenly. Zarkon’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he read her actions in the scuff of a boot, a pebble dislodged from its niche — marks which would hardly have been noticeable to anything other than his own carefully-trained eyes.

  Here she had started to run.

  Here she had been — attacked?

  A brassy glint caught his eye. He bent and picked up a fresh cartridge from beneath a rocky shelf. He held it to his nostrils. It had been ejected quite recently.

  Searching the ground for further clues, he strolled nearly to the top.

  Then he stopped quite suddenly and froze, motionless.

  For a voice spoke from behind him.

  “Put your hands up or I’ll put a slug through you,” the voice said. It sounded quite hard and determined, that voice. Zarkon slowly elevated his hands.

  “Now turn around so I can see you. Slowly!” the voice gave further directions. Zarkon did as he was told.

  A gasp sounded. A voice, clearly feminine, said, faintly, “You? But what are you doing here?”

  Zarkon relaxed imperceptibly. He even allowed a slight smile to play around the corners of his mouth.

  “Looking for you, I imagine,” he said lightly. “Miss Phoenicia Mulligan, I presume”

  A figure came into view from behind a large rock. It was that of a devastatingly attractive young woman in riding-boots and breeches and a khaki safari shirt that did nothing to conceal the curves of a lithe and supple girlish figure. They were all in exactly the right places, those curves. Even Zarkon, no ladies’ man by any stretch of the imagination, could not help noticing the fact.

  The girl peered at him blankly. Her thick length of bright blond hair was tangled and windblown. There was a raw scrape on one cheek and a smudge of dirt on her small, tip-tilted smidgen of a nose. Her eyes were large and lakewater-blue, framed in thick black lashes that owed nothing, or very little, to the use of mascara.

  “How do you know me?” demanded the girl, waving the small, pearl-handled revolver. Noticing it, she tucked it away in its holster at her belt, absently.

  Zarkon shrugged. “I am more interested in the reverse of that question,” he admitted.

  She blinked puzzledly at him; then her expression cleared, and she voiced a little laugh.

  “Oh, I see what you mean! How did I recognize you as Prince Zarkon of Novenia, the head of the Omega organization?”

  “Precisely,” Zarkon nodded.

  She shrugged airily. “Oh, fooey! That’s no big secret. A young man I sometimes date works for the FBI in their Knickerbocker City office. The last time I had dinner with him, he was simply raving about some case, of yours. Seems you had just single-handedly
broken up a sinister Chinese tong or something. Nobody in the law enforcement business had any idea or even realized that one of those old-fashioned secret societies from the Twenties was still around; but you found the headquarters and went in alone to beard the arch-villain in his lair, or words to that effect!”

  Zarkon said nothing, his face expressionless. But he felt distinctly uncomfortable: he didn’t enjoy being praised for his work. Of course, he remembered the case to which the young lady was referring, but he didn’t care to make any comment.

  The girl laughed a bit breathlessly. “My boy-friend was impressed by this feat of yours; he raved about you all through dinner. He simply couldn’t talk of anything else. At first, quite naturally, I was rather piqued. After all, a girl expects to be paid attention to! Eventually, he got my curiosity aroused. I bugged him until he agreed to show me a picture of you. I wanted to see what such a superman looked like!”

  Zarkon (who had a marked aversion to the camera, and studiously avoided being photographed on every possible occasion, on the theory that a man in a profession as dangerous as his works much more safely when his enemies don’t know what he looks like) frowned.

  “A picture?” he repeated disapprovingly. The girl nodded, blond curls tumbling about slim, rounded shoulders.

  “Sure!” She grinned. “Seems the FBI keeps a pretty complete dossier on you. My friend sneaked it out one evening and let me look at it. That’s how I recognized you when you turned around just now. Oh ... sorry about the gun, by the way. It was empty, anyway.”

  “Because you fired it at the volcano monster?” he asked.

  She looked surprised.

  “How did you know that? Come to think of it, what are you doing here, anyway? And how did you know who I was?”

  “I climbed the mountain hoping to find you,” he explained patiently. “I knew you were here because Señor Valdez told me you had vanished during the night, and I followed your tracks here. I didn’t have a description of you, but I hardly assumed there would likely he two young white women climbing about the mountain at the same time.”

  She absorbed this thoughtfully.

  “Golly, I’m sure sorry to have worried Señor Valdez! He’s such a nice old gentleman; very hospitable. Now that you’re here, too, p’raps you will help me find my fiancé, John —”

  “— James Jones,” he finished for her, with another rare smile. There was something about Miss Phoenicia Mulligan that made Zarkon want to smile, although generally he was very sober and serious and maintained an impassive expression around women. She was so plucky and resourceful, so natural and outspoken: a touch of the tomboy, but with more than a bit of spice and sauce mixed in.

  In a word, girls such as Fooey Mulligan were rather a new experience for Prince Zarkon. He didn’t quite know how to act in her company. And this, too, was a new experience. He wasn’t at all sure he liked feeling so ever-so-slightly confused and off balance and flustered.

  “How’d you know that?” the girl demanded interestedly.

  “Your fiancé’s name, and the fact that he’s been missing since yesterday? From your Uncle, Braxton T. Crawley.”

  A mutinous glint flashed in Fooey’s big blue eyes.

  “Uncle Braxton is here?” she asked hotly.

  “He met us in Mantilla, and we flew him out to the island,” Zarkon admitted.

  The girl bristled, then wilted. “Oh, fooey! He would come butting in, just when things start happening! Guess I’d better go down and face the music,” she said glumly. “I’m ready if you are, Prince.”

  Zarkon nodded and took her arm to help her down the steep part of the slope. But just then there came to his ears two sounds he easily recognized. One was the inimitable squall of Scorchy Muldoon in a fight. The other was the sibilant firing of one of the mercy-guns he made his lieutenants carry.

  “What’s that?” asked Phoenicia Mulligan, jumping at the unexpected sounds.

  “One of my men, in trouble! Stay here,” said Zarkon, briefly. He whipped around the rock, ran with light and rapid strides to the lip of the crater, and vanished into the plume of rising vapors. So swiftly did the golden man in gunmetal gray move, once he was in motion, that he literally flashed out of the girl’s sight.

  She stared after him, open-mouthed, for a long moment.

  Then her small, firm chin hardened willfully.

  “If he thinks he’s going to leave me behind when the fun gets started,” Phoenicia Mulligan said between gritted teeth, “he has another think coming!”

  With a determined stride the blond girl climbed to the edge of the crater, circled it, and started down the opposite slope.

  Monster or no monster!

  Zarkon in time would learn that such as Fooey Mulligan simply would not be left behind when the mystery thickened and things started happening right and left.

  It took more than a murdering ogre of walking red-hot stone to keep the likes of Phoenicia Mulligan out of trouble!

  The young lady had a nose for it. She was attracted to danger in the same manner a honey-bear is attracted to honey. You could say that the angelic-looking young lady generally tended to rush in foolishly, where even real angels feared to tread.

  But you didn’t say so where Fooey Mulligan could hear you.

  CHAPTER 9 — — And Now You Don’t!

  Scorchy was boiling mad. His blue eyes were fairly spitting sparks.

  “Faith, an’ Oi been a-teIlin’ ya,” he said, sizzling. “The craytur’ wuz right there on the trail — right there where y’do he standin’, ya long drink a water, yez!”

  “Then where did it go?” asked Nick Naldini, not at all unreasonably. “Walking stone ogres just don’t vanish into thin — Hey, chief, Scorchy’s been hitting the hootch again. This time he’s seeing monsters!”

  Prince Zarkon had just come into view, rapidly descending the side of the volcano by a winding trail. The identical same trail, in fact, that Scorchy had just been pointing out with the most vehement of gestures.

  “You saw the creature, then, Scorchy” demanded the Lord of the Unknown, climbing down to where they stood, with Señor Valdez, by the place where the second island boy had been murdered.

  “Aye, that Oi did,” snarled the feisty little Irishman. “And it’s nary a nip I’ve been sippin’, chief, I’ll be promisin’ ya! Sure an’ y’know I’ve been on the wagon these many years!”

  Whenever Scorchy got upset or excited, he slipped automatically into a mode of speech which Nick Naldini unkindly called his “stage Irishman’s brogue.” The lanky vaudevillian generally threw in a crack about him sounding like he was trying out for a role in the Barry Fitzgerald Story, or something equivalently Hibernian.

  It is perhaps attributable to Nick’s own excited state of mind that in the present instance he refrained from his usual comment. Instead, the tall magician waved his long arms about for attention.

  “What is it, Nick?”

  “Scorchy actually saw the critter, chief! Says he’s big as a house and made of burning rock.”

  “Is this true, Scorchy?”

  The little red-headed fighter gulped and shuddered.

  “Sure as Oi’m standin’ here on me own two feet,” he said shrilly. “Looked loike a gorilla, it did, it did, only twice as broad ... smokin’ all over, it wuz, and runnin’ wid dribbles o’ molten rock ... ever’ time the craytur’ moved, little pieces o’ stone’d break off it, sorter, and go clatterin’ down ... faith~ chief, it wuz standin’ right there where you do be standin’ now!”

  Zarkon turned to survey the slope of the mountain where the trail zigzagged up to the smoking peak.

  “You mean it came down this trail?” he asked incredulously.

  Scorchy nodded vigorously.

  “Aye, that it did! Sure’n’ Oi emptied me gun right at the varmint, but dint do it no harm, just cracked off a bit more o’ that smokin’, red-hot rock.”

  The blond girl stared at the little Irishman blankly. Then she pursed her cupid’s-bow
of a mouth and made a rude sound. Scorchy assumed an injured expression.

  “And is it that ye’d be doubtin’ me word, miss?” he growled. She tossed back her long hair with a loud sniff.

  “You bet!” declared Phoenicia. “Prince Zarkon and I just came down that trail like a couple of jack-rabbits. And I can promise you, Red, if there’d been any concrete walking statues of King Kong on the trail, we’d of seen ’em!”

  Scorchy’s scowl became truculent.

  “Me name’s not ‘Red,’ ” he snapped. “Aloysius Murphy Muldoon, that’s me; and me friends call me Scorchy.”

  Zarkon made no comment, ignoring this byplay. What Phoenicia Mulligan had stated was quite correct; it was hard to see where the monster could have gotten to in so short a time, and they certainly would have seen the thing, had it been anywhere on the trail or near it when they had come down.

  There was no point in belaboring the obvious, so Zarkon made no mention of this. His keen eyes were busily searching the trail. He stooped and picked up several small bits of rock. They were remarkably light, crisp and colored dark brown, and were distinctly hot to the touch. He held one up so that Scorchy could see it.

  “Was this the kind of rock that cracked loose from the monster’s body when he moved?” he inquired.

  Scorchy indicated that it was. Nick climbed up to examine the bit of rock, curiously. No geologist, he couldn’t identify the stuff.

  “You know what it is, chief?”

  “Yes,” acknowledged Zarkon. “The spume or crust that rises to the surface of a lava lake. It hardens quickly when exposed to air.”

  “Lava? Isn’t that the name for molten rock?”

  “It is,” said Zarkon woodenly. “If the ogre was covered with this stuff so that it dripped off or flaked away whenever he walked, he must have waded through the lava up in the crater. There are no streams of lava on the mountain.”

  “Molten rock, eh?” marveled Nick Naldini with a low whistle. “Pretty hot stuff, isn’t it?”

  “About one thousand degrees,” said Zarkon without inflection. “Fahrenheit,” he added soberly.