THE GREEN FACE
Doc Savage raced his flashlight beam down the passage. Clouds of dust boiled in the air. In that fog, a jewel seemed to flash, traveling with eye-defying speed. Renny felt himself seized and jerked aside by Doc Savage even before he could realize the glinting thing was a thrown knife. It clanged on the stone behind them.
Renny yelled and ran forward, pushing his own flashlight beam out before him. He saw brown men, two of them. One had a knife. He threw it, and the blade was easily evaded. The pair appeared to have no other weapons, for they spun and raced away.
“Them’s two of the guys who helped grab the girl before she was hypnotized!” Renny roared.
They charged down the narrow tunnel, pursuing the brown men. A murmur, faint at first, became louder, and since they already knew what it was, it was easily identified as the rumble of the motor generator set.
The brown men were screeching for help. They dived into a chamber which was very dark, the floor slimy with earth moisture.
Doc and Renny, overhauling them, were well over a third across the cavernous place when a hollow voice caused them to wrench to a stop. They swung in the direction of the eerie tones.
A face had appeared, the hideous green visage of the Mystic Mullah, swinging in mid-air as it always did. The lips writhed, seemed to snarl.
“It was convenient of you to come here,” the voice advised.
Renny jerked his flashlight around, intending to turn it upon the satanic, ghostly visage, but something the light disclosed caused him to stop the beam.
Grisly green serpentine things were crawling through the air toward them. Hideous and fantastic, the horrors seemed alive, yet unreal. The flash beam, passing through them, hit the wall, and there were only vague shadows to show that the green objects were real.
Then there came a cataclysmic roar and a flash that seemed to turn Renny’s brain to fire. He knew instantly, as he was tumbled backward as by a giant hand, that Doc Savage had thrown another of the grenades, and before he recovered himself the big bronze man had a hand upon his shoulder, urging, “Run!”
They ran for the door, but Doc Savage paused and switched his flash back. The wall where the green face of the Mullah had appeared was considerably torn up, and a slab of stone had fallen in, uncovering an opening of some size.
The Mystic Mullah himself was not in sight.
But out of the hole in the wall, like monsters from a cave, came the green monstrosities. They were true monsters, now, for some were a yard thick, great, squirming nebulous dragons, without shape or method of movement.
Renny, halting and glaring at the green things, bellowed, “Why, dang it! I see what them things are now!”
He started forward.
“Stay back!” Doc Savage’s voice had a smashing power that wrenched Renny to a stop.
“I’ll take a chance!” Renny howled. “That Mystic Mullah is in there somewhere!”
“If that green stuff touches you, it’ll kill you!” Doc said grimly. “He was using two kinds. One only burned the skin and produced senselessness. The other was mixed with the venom of the neotropical rattlesnake.”
“Neotropical——”
“Something like that,” Doc rapped. “Venom of the neotropical rattler centralizes its effects in the nervous system around the nape of the neck and causes a form of nerve destruction which makes it appear that the victim has a broken neck. This poison probably had additional ingredients which heightened its effects, causing a muscular constriction which actually snapped the vertebræ in most cases.”
Renny shifted in an endeavor to peer into the hole in the wall, at the same time avoiding the green horrors.
“But, holy cow, the way these things move!” he growled.
“Always launched so that a current of air will carry the green mist toward the victims,” Doc said, and himself moved to glance into the wall opening. “Probably the stuff is squirted from some kind of a pump gun. That would give the snakelike effect.”
Renny roared, “But they’re bigger now!”
“Which means the pump was ruptured by the grenade, possibly,” Doc said.
They drove their lights into the aperture. The green, smokelike cloud of poison vapor filled all of the passage beyond the hole, but through its transparent body they could see a sprawled form, a figure enfolded in rich clothing.
It was impossible, however, to make out the features. But Renny boomed a guess.
“The Mystic Mullah!” he thumped. “The guy got his own medicine!”
* * * *
The streamers of green poison were filling out into the room. Moreover, yells indicated an approaching attack. So Doc and Renny spun and raced on in pursuit of the two brown men who had fled.
Near the door, Renny tangled in an affair of wires, and fell back. He got up, growling, and turned his light on the contrivance.
“Blazes!” he gulped. “Here’s how he stuck that green face around and made it disappear!”
The thing Renny had fallen over must have been blown across the room by the grenade blast. It was such a device as fake spiritualists and magicians sometimes use to make luminous heads appear in thin air—a telescoping tube of some length, to the end of which was fixed a thin-walled rubber balloon face which could be inflated by blowing through the tube; then, by suction, drawn back into the tube, and the telescoping affair collapsed. Manipulation of thin threads caused the appearance of lip motion.
Renny threw it aside, scowling as he recalled his own horror when he had first seen the thing in action.
They went on. Some one shot at them with one of the Tananese-made guns, but did not hit them, and Renny poured a deafening volley from his machine pistol. An instant later, they were in hand-to-hand conflict with four or five Tananese.
The latter were under an enormous handicap, in that they possessed, for light, only pans of tallow in which felt wicks burned. The flashlights in the hands of Doc and Renny blinded the others, and they did not last long.
Renny pumped mercy bullets into the fourth man, and Doc sank the fifth senseless with a tremendous fist smash.
They ran ahead, came unexpectedly into a chamber which was illuminated a pale pink by a heating brazier.
On the floor reposed tightly bound figures, mouths stuffed with wads of cloth. The apish Monk was nearest, and Ham was behind him, trying to free the homely chemist; beyond them were Joan Lyndell, Johnny, Long Tom and Oscar Gibson.
There were none of the Mystic Mullah’s men left in the room.
Doc and Renny went to work untying the prisoners, and there was much pointless shouting, largely to let off steam.
Monk, rearing up on his feet, glared at Oscar Gibson and howled, “You got us into this, you smart-cracker!”
Gibson said wearily, “I was desperate. I tried to trick Mihafi into taking me to the Mystic Mullah. How was I to know you were following me?”
“That reminds me!” Ham snapped. “Where’s Mihafi?”
They did not learn the answer to that until some five minutes later, when Renny ventured back to the room where the green poison vapor had appeared, and finding the vapor had strained out through ventilating apertures, stepped in and looked closely and long at the face of the Mystic Mullah.
He came back looking stunned.
“Mihafi is in there with him, down the passage a bit,” Renny mumbled. “Say, did you know that the Mystic Mullah was——”
“He showed himself to us,” Joan Lyndell put in jerkily. “And he made it clear why he had become the Mystic Mullah. He felt his power slipping. He was afraid I would eventually become the real power in Tanan. So he began operating as the Mystic Mullah to fight me—and to satisfy his desire for a great empire.”
“Holy cow!” Renny muttered, “I didn’t dream the Mystic Mullah was the Khan Nadir Shar.”
* * * *
They did not think they were remotely near a complete escape from their difficulties, for the populace of Tanan was laying siege to the yamen; but, as it developed, the situation was not serious.
Joan Lyndell, appearing on the yamen walls, managed to muster the loyal portion of her own guards. These, with the castle force who had remained faithful, fell upon the throng and there was violent fighting. The guiding genius of the Mystic Mullah, the Khan Nadir Shar, was sorely missed, and after a few hours, and somewhat before the noon hour, the thing was over.
Once it became bruited about that the Mystic Mullah had been the Khan, rage seized the Tananese, and they turned upon the Mullah’s faithful. Those who had lost relatives to the so-called green soul slaves of the Mullah, were especially bitter, and lives were taken all through that day, the ensuing night, and, for that matter, throughout the months that followed.
Doc Savage and Joan Lyndell managed to take a certain amount of control during the confusion, and established a representative government of leading Tananese. This body strengthened itself, soon becoming stable, so that peace returned, menaced only by grudge killings as some wronged Tananese evened scores with one who had gone over to the Mystic Mullah. But Tanan was a savage, medieval land, and there had always been such feuds.
Doc Savage and his five aides left Tanan as soon as they perceived conditions had attained moderate stability. They traveled east, flying across the Gobi, and as Tanan was lost in its mountain cup, Monk declared himself.
“If I ever seen a stranger country than that, I’ll let Ham make that traveling bag of Habeas Corpus’s hide,” he declared.
And Monk, little dreaming, recklessly offered to contribute Habeas’s hide to the cause of good luggage, as their plane volleyed over the caravan trail eastward across the Gobi.