PRISONER
The bronze man’s awakening was slow, merely an ebbing of the phantom unconsciousness which had gripped him. There was some discomfort, a faint nausea, and a vague dullness of mind.
Strangely enough, this stupor departed, and his mind was quite clear before his muscles would respond to nerve impulses, so that, as he lay there, he was able to think for a time, to ponder the mystery, to turn its angles over in his mind.
Thought, however, brought no explanation of the riddle. The whole thing was uncanny, and in the light of sober thought, smacked of the impossible.
Doc Savage was able to arise after a time and examine his surroundings. A sable blackness enclosed him; he seemed imbedded in the darkness. His exploration was limited to the sense of touch, and he went over his own person first.
He had, his sensitive fingers told him, been searched thoroughly. His garments, excepting only stout duck trousers, had been taken away. A slight rawness under his finger nails and toe nails indicated they had been scraped, to remove any chemicals which might have been harbored there.
Hurriedly inserting a finger in his mouth, Doc explored. In the rear of his jaw he ordinarily wore an extra tooth, cleverly fitted in place. This held a small quantity of ingredients which, mixed, formed an explosive of great power.
But the tooth was gone. Whoever had searched him had done so with great thoroughness. His hair had even been washed, lest it hold chemicals that he might employ in escaping.
His hands told him that a stone wall encircled him. The room was round, and the stones of the wall were fitted together with such mastery that there was not a crack large enough to admit even a finger nail.
A leap upward, arms extended, proved the ceiling to be nearly ten feet in height. Doc began a more thorough inspection of the walls, walking slowly, dragging his hands over the stone, pushing frequently with all of his great strength.
There was an opening some seven feet above the floor, an aperture almost a yard square, and inset with vertical flaps of stone that were not unlike bars.
Clinging to these bars and thrusting an arm through, Doc found only emptiness beyond—and intense darkness. The livid murk accounted for his not finding the aperture earlier.
Grasping the stone slabs, he wrenched at them. They did not give in the slightest, failing even to groan in their sockets.
Doc continued working. By clinging to the edge of the hole and performing something of a gymnastic feat, he managed to insert his legs between the bars and after some effort to hook his toes together beyond them. The hold, akin to the “scissors” of a wrestler, gave him tremendous leverage.
Sinews became hard as metal, writhing and knotting as Doc labored and perspired.
The stone groaned.
Shifting his grip a little, Doc applied more pressure and began to swing himself from side to side. That did it.
With a sound as brittle as breaking glass, one of the slabs collapsed. After that, it did not take long to work the ends from the stone sockets so that Doc had an opening which would pass his giant frame.
He eased outside.
Along the intensely black passage Doc crept, and up a flight of steps.
Sunlight appeared ahead, very brilliant.
Doc approached the light slowly, so that his eyes would accustom themselves to the glare. He could see fairly well when he looked out.
Before him was a sort of plaza, covering perhaps an acre; and in the center of that was a structure, the sight of which caused the bronze man to stand motionless for many seconds.
This was a pagoda, too.
Doc reasoned—by the manner in which the streets converged upon it—that it occupied the very center of the abandoned metropolis in the jungle. Carved hands and feet had ornamented the most-outlying buildings of this ghost domain. Then, closer in to the heart of the city other parts of the human anatomy had been the decoration motif. So the ornamentation of this central pagoda was not unexpected.
Doc eyed it steadily.
A pagoda of heads!
Its architectural lines were not those of the usual pagoda, for the shape of the thing was that of a monstrous, repulsive head. From the head projected other smaller heads by the thousands.
Those small heads explained why Calvin Copeland, the explorer, had been so anxious to reach this eerie place—each head represented a fortune, as civilization measures wealth.
They were of gold, possibly not solid, but at least thickly plated, and each forehead was set with an enormous jewel. The eyes were gems; the teeth lesser brilliants.
Doc calculated the size of the heads. They were small only in proportion to the pagoda as a whole, hence some of the jewels—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, pearls—were enormous.
The opening through which Doc Savage peered was not large enough to admit his huge frame. He went on, came soon to another and larger aperture, and crouched just within it, listening and using his eyes.
He had come upon a tiny ledge of a balcony. Below lay a narrow alley, stone-walled.
Unexpectedly, Doc heard sound, the first noises he had distinguished other than the fantastic shufflings and flutterings to which this fabulous ruin had given birth. But this sound was as unreal, as hair-raising as that other, for it was a low murmuring, a throbbing undertone which grew louder.
The cadence had a regular beat, a monotonous rise and fall. It was not unmusical—this undulating groan, yet it possessed a quality of repellent fearsomeness.
Doc waited where he was, for the noise seemed to be approaching. He noticed that the sun was low, causing the strange buildings to cast grotesque shadows. In an hour there would be darkness—possibly in less time, for there is little twilight in the tropics.
The monotonous droning loudened, and now that Doc had heard it for some time, he was sure that it did not have a definite pattern, a tune. Too, it possessed a human quality.
The sound was, he realized abruptly, a long chant, mumbled by human voices. He watched closely for a glimpse of those who chanted.
Around a corner, some two-score yards distant, a Thousand-headed Man appeared.
Doc stared at the awesome individual. For once, the bronze man was surprised to such a degree that his metallic features registered his feeling.
There was more than one thousand-headed man!
Another appeared, a third, a fourth—a long file of them. They resembled each other greatly. All were huge, larger even than Doc Savage.
Balanced atop his head, each monstrosity carried a basket. The containers were large, possibly two-bushel capacity. They were tightly woven of rattan, and each bore a rich ornamentation of gold and precious gems. Hinged lids on all baskets were closed tightly.
In the middle of the file of fantastic, head-studded creatures walked a white man. The man had long, uncut hair and a profuse beard; hair and beard were white. His body was thin and wasted, and his walk was that of an automaton. The flesh seemed to have melted away under his skin, leaving only bones and a few muscles that were like strings. He stared straight ahead, a hopeless rigidity in his gaze.
The white man was Calvin Copeland, the explorer, but vague indeed was his present resemblance to his newspaper picture which Doc Savage had seen in London.
A slender stout line of sutera was looped around Copeland’s neck. One of the many-headed men held the other end of the cord, leading the Englishman.
The odious procession approached. Except for the white man, obviously a prisoner, those in the file kept in step. As they moved they chanted, their low, guttural voices mingling in a harmony which rose and fell, only a few of the words being distinguishable.
This chanting was the sound which Doc Savage had heard. He now tried to identify the words. His knowledge of languages was vast; he spoke and understood most of the dialects of the orient. This speech eluded him partially, however, although certain of the words might be of khas origin, that being the tongue of the aboriginal inhabitants of Indo-China.
Doc stepped back. He flexed his arms, crouched and straightened to limber his huge tendons; then he waited.
The cavalcade passed below. Doc let the first few go on; but when Calvin Copeland shuffled abreast, Doc leaped.
The drop was nearly ten feet. Doc landed beside one of the many-headed men, lightly and silently.
The bronze man swung a fist. The head-studded victim saw it was coming and shrieked, his voice a great, frightened bawl. The sound ended as if his jaws had been invisibly corked, and he fell on his heads.
His rattan basket rolled end over end across the white cobbles. From within it came a sudden fluttering and shuffling—the weird sound which before had always presaged unconsciousness.
Doc hurtled forward. His hands grasped the being who held the sutera cord that ran from Calvin Copeland’s neck. That monster also began to cry out.
Doc wrenched. There was a tearing sound, a convulsion among the heads which covered the man’s body—and the hideous appendages came away.
The heads were not real! They were hideous little things carved out of wood and attached to a tight-fitting garment that resembled human skin.
The man inside the masquerade covering was a huge brown native. Doc struck at his face. The other ducked and Doc missed, his fist grazing two of the orange-sized heads which had merely been glued above the man’s eyebrows.
Doc struck again, stunning the fellow. Then he grasped the man and ran him backward like a battering ram. For all of his huge size, the brown native was soft; grasping him was like holding a rubber tire filled with warm water.
Speed had marked Doc’s movements. The other figures in the procession barely had time to turn. Then they were knocked from their feet. Their baskets went spinning, and began to give off a sinister fluttering and rasping.
Gaunt, wasted Calvin Copeland stared, stupefied. With a snap, he came to life, his lethargy vanishing.
“Run!” he screamed. “Don’t fight them. Run!”
Just to satisfy himself that none of the heads which covered the strange big men were genuine, Doc Savage wrenched another skin-tight garment off the victim.
“There’s hell in those baskets!” Copeland shrilled. “Run for it!”
Taking his own advice, the explorer legged it down the alley of a street.
Abruptly comprehending the man’s meaning, Doc Savage set after him. Copeland was weakened; his speed was not great. The bronze man quickly overhauled him.
“Where is your daughter?” Doc demanded.
Copeland was so astounded that he would have stopped, had the bronze man not grasped his arm and propelled him on.
“Lucile—my daughter—here?” Copeland gasped. “Where? Have they got her?”
Doc Savage, not answering, turned his head and looked back. The thousand-headed men were scrambling to their feet, dashing for their rattan baskets. Not until they had secured these did they rush in pursuit.
“Where’s the best place to make a fight for it?” Doc demanded.
Copeland shuddered so violently that he nearly fell. “There is no such place,” he said. “Those devils range the jungle for miles on either side. There are hundreds of them, all members of the thousand-headed sect.”
“Sect!” Doc echoed.
“A cult of fanatics,” Copeland explained. “They worship The Thousand-headed Man.”
“Is there actually such a being?”
“There is no Thousand-headed Man,” Copeland muttered. “That is only the name of their hideous mythical deity.”