TEMPLE SINISTER
The three new skyriders lost no time in making their intentions evident. Rudders waggled, aligning ships toward Doc’s craft, and suddenly Doc’s plane was enwrapped in nebulous threads of gray. These swayed, seeking Doc’s ship with a hideous veracity.
The gray threads were lines of smoke laid down by the smouldering chemical in tracer bullets. The guns on Sen Gat’s ship were not synchronized to shoot through the propellers, but were mounted out on the wings, and were cable-controlled.
Doc jacked the throttles back and muscled the control wheel. His big ship pointed up into the sky, gaining altitude. The motors labored and panted, vibrating the fuselage.
Back in the cabin, Monk was distributing parachutes and Renny was opening ammo cases which held the cartridge drums of their little supermachine pistols.
Sen Gat’s tracer bullets found their right wing. There was the sound as of cats fighting on a tin roof—tracers spattering chemical sparks. The wing acquired a ragged hole.
Doc tilted the stick, came down heavy on left rudder, and they slanted clear. Bullets stitched across the rear of the fuselage, then Monk and Ham opened with their superfirers. The bawl of these nearly split their eardrums.
“Use inflammable bullets!” Doc yelled. “Try to get their gas tanks! No doubt they’ve got parachutes.”
Other ammo drums were slipped into the machine pistols.
Doc yanked the nose up into a near stall, side-slipped, leveled, and all but made a right-angle turn directly into the path of an enemy ship.
The other pilot pulled up, evidently with the idea of doing an Immelmann to conserve what altitude he had.
Renny turned loose with his gun. The bullets scalded the wing of the other plane like liquid fibre, splashing chemical so hot that it actually melted ribs and metal skin fabric.
These inflammable slugs, like other things about the superfirer pistols, had been developed by Doc. In their noses they carried a thermite compound which, once it was ignited, would melt through almost all known metals—and it ignited on impact with a target.
Chill fingers of terror clamped the other flyer as he saw great holes melt in his wings. Instead of completing his maneuver, he booted over and plunged into the concealing clouds.
A few seconds of that fire and his ship would have been incapable of flying.
Doc looped the heavy bus, flew upside down for a time while equipment boxes bounced about the cabin like pebbles in a tin can, then came down in a screaming dive upon another plane.
This one held Sen Gat. The tall oriental was not flying the plane himself, but occupied a cabin seat. Both his arms, their hands made grotesque by their capped finger nails, leveled at Doc Savage. His face convulsed as he yelled something.
Doc’s five men had opened cabin windows and leaned out, superfirers ready. They shot, and where their bullets hit the metal skin of Sen Gat’s ship, it was as if hot sparks had dropped on paper.
One burst of these incendiary bullets upon a house was sufficient to set it afire in a hundred places. Sen Gat’s metal ship would not burn, but the fuel in the tanks would. Sen Gat evidently realized this. He lost his nerve. Again his arms pointed, his face contorted, and it was evident that he was ordering retreat.
Both of Sen Gat’s planes abruptly sought the concealment of the clouds.
Doc plunged his craft into the vapor after them, hunting.
The bird battlers had not noticed it, but the other plane—the one piloted by the fake Monk—had stopped to spiral in the sky and watch the fight.
The fake Monk was having his troubles. These were due to a story, true in no detail, which he had told to Lucile Copeland and Maples.
The fake Monk was the burly leader of the spurious group of bobbies who had attempted to deceive Doc Savage’s men in London, giving his name as Evall. It happened that this was actually his name.
This was not the first time Sen Gat’s three planes had been sighted. They had, in fact, followed Evall’s ship over most of Afghanistan and all of India, keeping to the side and a few miles in the rear.
“Doc Savage and the rest of his gang are in them three sky-wagons,” Evall had declared, playing the part of Monk.
Maples had believed the story; it sounded reasonable. Lucile Copeland had taken it as the truth, also. Her thoughts were mostly for the jungles of Indo-China and what it might hold—her father and mother, if they were alive. Ordinarily, she would not have been one easily deceived.
Now, as she watched the sky brawl behind them, several things were combining to make her suspicious.
“You say that lone ship is Sen Gat?” she demanded.
“Yeah—the bum!” snarled the imitation Monk.
“Why don’t you go back and help?” snapped the young woman. “That one ship is getting the best of the other three!”
“Doc’s orders were to stay out of any fights,” insisted Evall. “He don’t want you and Maples hurt.”
“Go back, anyway!” Lucile Copeland commanded.
“Nix.”
The young woman narrowed her eyes. She was recalling another suspicious circumstance. The plane was equipped with a radio. Their escort had pretended to use this to keep in touch with Doc, but he had only employed it when his two passengers were asleep.
Evall kept one eye on the young woman and he could read the signs. She was becoming suspicious.
When Lucile Copeland suddenly wrenched a gun out of her breeches pocket, Evall was not surprised.
“Land this plane!” the girl snapped.
Evall laughed. “Behave, sister! I got your gun last night and took the powder out of the cartridges.”
Lucile Copeland made a grim mouth. “I know that.”
“You what?” Evall’s jaw sagged.
“So I loaded the gun with fresh cartridges.”
The girl pulled the trigger unexpectedly. Hot powder fumes dashed into Evall’s face. A bullet snapped past his ear, and opened a round hole in the plane window.
“You——”
“Land!” Lucile Copeland meant business.
Evall, snarling, began to turn pale.
In the rear of the plane, Habeas Corpus awakened abruptly and scrambled forward, big ears distended.
“You will land this plane!” Lucile Copeland stated grimly. “Otherwise, the next bullet won’t miss.”
Evall began desperately, “Listen, I’m Monk——”
“Down!” The girl cocked her gun.
Evall shoved the stick forward.
Lucile Copeland retreated from the spurious Monk a few paces and had Maples disarm the fellow, then threw occasional glances through the cabin windows.
The four distant planes, having disappeared into the clouds, did not show themselves again.
“I’m worried!” she gasped.
“None of them have been shot down, or we’d see ’em fall below the cloud,” Maples pointed out. “That cloud bank is big—spreads over several miles. Maybe they’re fighting above the jolly thing.”
Evall showed scant interest in the other planes, his concern being the jungle below. The verdance was uninviting, creepers entwined and draped like green serpents.
“Ain’t nowhere we can land,” Evall yelled.
“Find a place,” Lucile Copeland ordered.
There was no sign of the other planes above.
They flew over a small stream, overhung by bamboo, where water birds fled; and they frequently saw buayas, the monster crocodiles native to these jungles.
One of the buayas, nearly thirty feet in length, basked on a sandbank and did not stir, while vultures and insects made a hovering cloud over some prey which the cayman had half devoured.
“Over there!” the girl cried suddenly, and pointed. She had sighted the top of a small pagoda.
Evall obediently changed the plane’s course, and details of the pagoda became more distinguishable. It was of a bilious yellow stone, possessing little of the color and brilliance which usually characterizes such structures. Indeed, the pagoda seemed to be in a state of partial ruin.
“Could this be the city of The Thousand-headed Man?” Maples demanded eagerly.
“No!” Lucile Copeland shook a vehement negative. “The city is deeper in the jungle.”
The pagoda, it developed, stood in a clearing which was itself of weird nature. Nowhere did grass or bushes grow. The ground was bare, bleak as an expanse of bone.
The fake Monk turned his head. “Ain’t room enough there for me to make a landin’!” he grunted.
Lucile Copeland handed her gun to Maples. “Watch him.”
The young woman went forward, displaced Evall at the controls, and proceeded to demonstrate that she was an excellent flyer. Booting the plane about in the sky, nursing it down, skidding away speed, she made a perfect three-pointed landing. The ship stopped rolling with a full hundred yards to spare.
The girl turned her head swiftly to make sure that Maples was keeping Evall in check. He was.
They alighted from the plane. The young woman stood on tiptoe and stared, head upturned, saw the sky held no sign of the four planes, then glanced about.
“Maples!” she said sharply. “Did you ever before see a pagoda made like that one?”
Maples squinted at the pagoda. He wrinkled his brows, but he was careful not to remove the menace of the revolver from Evall.
“It’s deuced unusual, at that,” he admitted.
“You’ve traveled a great deal in India, Indo-China, and Siam, haven’t you?” questioned the young woman. “You are familiar with religious architecture.”
“Righto. But I never saw carvings such as these.”
The thing about the pagoda which had aroused discussion was the manner in which it was ornamented—the sculpture work. The carvings on pagodas are usually elaborate, and this was no exception. The usual style is to ornament the edifices with grotesque likenesses of the deity in various postures. To the European eye these figures are often striking because of their extreme ugliness.
But this pagoda was ornamented with only one thing—hands. There were big hands, little hands—all done in stone. Some clutched, some pointed, others were entwined together; many, judging from the way the tendons stood out, the fingers distended, represented hands in agony.
The pagoda roof itself was four great hands.
“The Pagoda of the Hands,” Maples said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?” Lucile Copeland was startled. “Have you heard of this place?”
“Vaguely.” Maples’s nod was slow. “But I can’t recall in what connection.”
The girl surveyed the sky again. The surrounding jungle thrust up to a surprising height, cutting off the view.
“Let us go up on the pagoda steps,” she suggested. “We can see more. I am anxious about those planes.”
“I don’t like this dump,” mumbled the apish Evall.
The girl frowned at him. “Do you know something about it?”
Evall shrugged. “Nope.” His voice was not firm.
“I think you’re lying,” the girl told him. “Sen Gat must know what is in the city of The Thousand-headed Man. Otherwise, why should he be so mad to reach the place? Did he tell you what is there?”
“No, blast it!” snarled Evall.
They climbed the steps. These were pocked and worn as if thousands of feet had trod them. The pagoda seemed to increase in size, and it became evident that the structure was larger than they had thought. A sinister silence overlay the place. There was an odor, vague, hardly definable, which might have been the muck smell of the surrounding jungle.
“Look!” Lucile Copeland shuddered and pointed.
The stone steps which they were treading had once been carved with literally hundreds of hands—hands knobbed into fists, splayed as if in agony, some merely palm uppermost. Long use had worn many of these away.
The steps mounted to a sort of dais, upon which the main structure of the pagoda stood. They reached the top of this, stopped.
Maples, standing on tiptoe, barely managed to reach the full height of one of the carved hands.
“Jove!” he ejaculated.
“What is it?” Evall as well as the girl seemed startled.
“I just recalled how I came to hear about this Pagoda of the Hands,” Maples explained. “It’s supposed to be a very sinister place. As far as I know, only two explorers have found it and returned to tell about it.”
The girl shivered. “What happened to the others?”
“Jungle mystery—one of many in this country,” Maples shrugged. “Nobody seems to know.”
The girl had brought a pair of binoculars from the plane. She began to sweep the sky, and when she could discern nothing, an expression of anxiety grew in her face.
“There’s a steam over the jungle,” she murmured. “The planes could be flying low, but I believe we could hear them before we would see them, due to that foglike steam.”
“Then we’ll listen——” Maples began, and abruptly fell silent. “Listen!”
The girl palm-cupped her ears in the direction of the jungle.
“No!” Maples told her. “Behind us—in the pagoda. A rustling sound.”
The girl listened. Then she screamed. Her voice had a splintering horror that knifed through the sinister silence about them.
“That sound—it’s like we heard in my father’s camp. Run—run!”
She leaped away, but she had been a long time in the plane and her muscles were slightly stiff. Perhaps, in her mad haste, she miscalculated slightly. She slipped, flailed her arms furiously, failed to recover, and pitched headlong down the steps.
Her slender form bounced, struck, rebounded again. She shrieked, and the sound ended suddenly, like something broken off. She toppled the full length of the steep steps and sprawled, a pitiful heap, at the bottom.
Maples stared, horrified. Evall’s eyes were also fixed, but not on the falling girl. He was calculating his chances of getting Maples’s gun. They looked good. He leaped.
Maples swore. He fired one shot. The two men wrestled, kicking and gouging, sledging blows. Evall was infinitely the stronger. He managed to wrest the weapon free and leap back.
In the excitement, both had forgotten that sinister rustling sound behind them. But now something happened. It was eerie, uncanny.
Evall suddenly shrieked and began to strike blindly with his hands. He fired his gun madly at the ulterior of the pagoda. His knees buckled and let him down. His mad struggles became weaker. Eventually, he became motionless.
Maples’s collapse was less spectacular. He went down with scarcely a gesture or a sound.
Silence enwrapped the weird Pagoda of the Hands, but it was soon broken by a faint, undulating roar which crept up from the distance, grew louder and resolved itself into the moan of a plane.