THE WORLD OF BLACKNESS
Mohallet’s voice penetrated the door in the stern bulkhead. He sounded frightened. He was very angry.
“Wallah!” he snarled. “When you spoke in the tongue I did not understand you planned a trick! That khanzir—that pig! What has it done to my men! Wa-asafah, akhkh! Alas! And to me, too!”
Doc came close to the bulkhead. “Have all of your men been affected?”
“The fools?” grated Mohallet. “They have! Like dogs, when they began to itch they scratched each other, and that spread the curse!”
“That is very bad,” Doc said.
“It will be bad for you, bronze man! We are going to put a bomb in the submarine and go off and leave it if you do not tell us how to get rid of this devilish affliction!”
“Try washing it off.”
“Curse you! That only spreads the agony! What is it that you have given us, bronze man?”
“It would be terrible, would it not, if, after hours of the pain you are undergoing now, the flesh should begin to turn white, then drop off in great chunks?” Doc suggested.
Mohallet swore shrilly. “You are trying to frighten us!”
In the rear of the sleeping compartment, Monk whispered to the gloomy Ham: “Doc’s got ’im goin’! This stuff makes a little white blister! They’ll be scared green when they see those!”
Doc continued badgering Mohallet.
“It would not be pleasant,” said Doc, “if, as you watched lumps of your own body drop away, there was great agony. But not quite enough agony to kill you until, perhaps, you could see a few of your own bones. Nice thought, eh?”
Mohallet launched a stream of his best maledictions.
“That stuff won’t have such an effect!” whispered bony Johnny.
“Is Doc saying it will?” Long Tom snorted. “He’s just askin’ the guy how he’d like them things to happen.”
Mohallet was screaming: “We shall go away and leave a bomb——”
“Go ahead!” Doc rapped. “Go off and die!”
Mohallet apparently did leave for a few moments, evidently running a little bluff of his own. But he was back before long, driven by the smarting of the pernicious chemical.
“We will let you out, bronze man, if you will agree——”
“We agree to nothing!” Doc told him shortly.
Mohallet outdid all his previous outbursts of vituperative. His sulphurous word flow ran some three minutes, seemingly without time out for a breath intake.
“What are your terms?” he asked.
“Send the white-haired girl to turn us loose!” Doc ordered. “You and each of your men will advance, one at a time, and hand over all his arms. Then you will gather on deck.”
“And after that?”
“You get an antidote for what ails you. Beyond that, we make no promises!”
Mohallet departed again. There was a long wait, punctuated by much irritated yelling and galloping about. Too, several times there was sound of boxes being moved in the storeroom.
“They’re cookin’ up somethin’!” Monk decided uneasily.
Moving water continued to gurgle along the hull of the Helldiver.
“I wonder where we’re at,” pondered big-fisted Renny. “There are no rivers along this coast.”
Mohallet came to the bulkhead and cried angrily: “We accept your terms!”
* * * *
Complying with instructions, the white-haired girl loosened the mechanical dogs which secured the door. Her eyes were radiant. She said something, happy and excitedly, but unintelligible, in her native tongue.
“Shed your weapons!” Doc yelled at the evil faces framed in the compartment to the stern.
A pistol skittered across the gridded floor. More followed, then rifles.
“Don’t forget those poisoned knives and swords!”
Shimmering in the electric luminance, blades cascaded to the floor. The heap of arms grew, spread.
“Holy cow!” chuckled Renny. “They carried enough weapons for an army!”
Finally, Mohallet snarled: “That is all! Now the cure!”
Doc stood for a moment watching the brown men. They were in great discomfort, to say the least. Their fingers were going almost steadily, scraping their smarting hides. Their efforts only spread the chemical and caused it to work deeper.
“Out on deck!” Doc directed.
The swarthy men backed away. They could be heard climbing the companion which led to the main hatch above the control room.
“Go mix the antidote, Monk,” Doc directed.
Monk hurried to his little stateroom. He carried a remarkably compact assortment of chemical ingredients—almost a complete laboratory in itself—with him wherever he went. The stuff had been rifled, but none of the bottles broken.
He worked swiftly at mixing a potion which would stop the smarting instantly. To a man with his vast knowledge of chemistry the task was an easy one.
The pig, Habeas Corpus, appeared. The unlovely specimen of a shoat seemed not greatly bothered by the itching chemical.
“That’s what comes of having a hide toughened by Arabian fleas and lice!” Monk chuckled. He lathered Habeas Corpus liberally with the antidote, grinning: “Gotta get you prettied up! Ham is gonna kiss you!”
Monk rejoined Doc. The group clambered for the deck. They did so warily, expecting trickery, alert for it.
“Holy cow!” Renny bawled when he had his head outside.
They were in an abysmal darkness. Sunlight had been glaring, nearly blinding, when they had gone below. It had been morning. Night could not have come so quickly. And there never was a night with blackness such as this pitch darkness.
Water gurgled; it seemed to sob and course all around them. The air throbbed with the sound of it—the sucking, swishing and splashing of a vast, muffled waterfall. This noise was not loud; they had not noticed it while below, had been aware only of a stream pouring past the moored Helldiver.
That the submarine was moored became speedily evident.
Mohallet’s voice came out of the abyss to the right. “Wallah! The remedy, quick!”
A chorus of agonized yells echoed the demand, pleas by Mohallet’s men that their distress be relieved. Doc Savage knew now, as he had earlier suspected, that the insistence of Mohallet’s followers, ignorant and easily frightened, was responsible for the speedy capitulation.
Doc spiked a flashlight beam at the voices. He saw a huge shelf of stone, worn smooth, and grooved deeply by the waters of ages.
“An underground river!” Renny boomed. “We’re in a great underground stream!”
The engineer’s vast voice rumbled away in echoes, thumping, muttering, bouncing back and forth.
Following closely the echoes, as if set off by them, came a cataclysmic roar. It was as if the two halves of the world had jumped apart and come together like a clap of gigantic hands.
* * * *
The titanic sound of the blast mounted until it seemed to crush skulls, and it was followed by lesser noises, as if buckshot were rattling in a tin lid, only of infinitely greater loudness.
The waters of the underground river lifted, writhed, expanded, as if the stream were a colossal snake of liquid, sucking in a great breath. The Helldiver came up on that awful surface, chip-light.
The anchorage hawsers snapped like threads on a package. The sub rolled as if she were a steel hog trying to wet her back.
Doc gripped the big runners with one metal clamp of a hand. His other hand collared somebody—it was the white-haired girl. He held her from falling.
He called to his men to hold tight. That was hardly necessary. His great voice was lost in the whooping thunder which filled the huge cavern.
Back and forth gamboled the echoes, ear-splitting in themselves. The noise subsided, slowly it seemed, because of these echoes. The submarine ceased to pitch so greatly.
Kenny’s great voice boomed from toward the stern: “Everybody all right?”
“You’d better shut up!” came a somewhat shrill crack from Long Tom. “Lookit what you started with that other yell!”
Doc came to his feet. He bore the white-haired girl toward the deck hatch. She had made no outcry other than a gasp, and she was silent now. Evidently knowing her words could not be understood, she did not speak.
Fortunately, only the single hatch had been open. There was water below, but not enough to destroy the Helldiver’s buoyancy. Doc switched on pumps to clear the water before it worked into the battery rooms.
Doc threw the control which should have automatically started the engines. Nothing happened. He tried the electric motors. Again, no response!
He dived for the engine room. First glance showed him the trouble—Mohallet had been tricky enough to do what he had been deceived into thinking Doc’s men had done earlier. He had taken essential parts of the mechanism, light stuff, which could be carried easily.
Doc veered back for the deck, passing the white-haired girl, who was trying to smile her gratitude. He had wanted the engines going so he could cruise about in search of his men, had any been washed overboard.
On deck he found all five safe, but wet and puzzled.
“What happened?” Johnny pondered.
Doc did not answer immediately. He dropped back below, got an empty bottle, poured a little phosphorus in it, and corked it. Back outside, he flung the bottle into the water. The glowing phosphorus made a surprising light in the infinite darkness.
The shiny spark surged about, eddied this way and that, but did not move greatly. Doc turned his flashlight on the cavern walls. The submarine did not seem to be drifting.
“An explosion that blocked the river mouth!” he declared. “Mohallet must have planted the dynamite or nitro—we had a quantity aboard, plainly marked. He had a man stationed to set the blast at a signal. The fellow heard Renny yell, could not distinguish the words in the cavern, and thought it was Mohallet. He set the blast. And the river is blocked. We’re not moving! They must have set the blast to keep us from turning back!”
* * * *
They watched a bit longer, to make sure there was no motion. Doing that, they noted a fact of undeniable interest.
“The river is rising!” Johnny pointed out. “Rocks that were sticking out of the water a few minutes ago, you can’t see now!”
Yells came from the shore. Mohallet’s men! The peculiar acoustics of the cavern made them sound like an excited coyote pack.
“They’ve put themselves in a pickle,” Monk chuckled.
“And us in one, too,” Doc pointed out. “They have the engine parts. They closed the river mouth, to keep us from going back, of course!”
Going to one of the deck hatches, Doc opened it and broke out a folding boat—there were several aboard. He placed this in the water.
Long Tom, from his electrical equipment, produced a powerful portable spotlight. This was mounted with a clamp upon the bow of the collapsible boat.
Doc went alone to bargain with Mohallet.
He found the outlaw and his followers—a chastened, itching group—upon the ledge. Between scratching themselves and watching with popping eyes the rising water, they were exceedingly busy.
They did not curse the sight of Doc this time. A swimming sinner in the Great Flood never looked at Noah and his Ark with more longing gaze.
Mohallet tried to make terms. “You must agree to make us your equal partners when we reach the Phantom City.”
“The Phantom City?” Doc demanded. “What is that?”
“I will tell you when you take us aboard. You must also return our arms and permit us the run of the submarine.”
“That’s a laugh!” Doc jeered.
“We have parts of the machinery which you must possess before you can escape the rising waters which will soon flood this cavern!”
“Do you know how long the Helldiver can remain under water?”
“What has that——”
“It can stay down several days in a pinch!”
“But you cannot leave——”
“We can stay down until you drown,” Doc said shortly. “We have diving suits aboard, the self-contained kind which need no air hoses. There is a diving lock which will permit divers to leave the Helldiver, and return while it is submerged. We can simply come and get the machinery from beside your drowned bodies.”
“You might not find it!” Mohallet said desperately.
“In a pinch, we would have enough time to make replacements right in the submarine.”
Doc now switched into Arabic, for the benefit of such of Mohallet’s men as might not speak English, and repeated his dire predictions. This had the effect he hoped for. The swarthy fellows began to insist on complete submission.
It ended with the missing parts being tossed to Doc in the boat.
The bronze man immediately guided his little craft away. He was pursued by wild cries. Some of Mohallet’s men wanted to go back with him.
* * * *
Doc left the replacing of the parts to his five aids. He still had not had time to question the white-haired girl. And, even now, it was necessary to postpone that a bit.
He wanted to inspect the scene of the explosion. With the bow searchlight of his boat ramming an expanding rod of white, he drove downstream. He considered, testing the air with his nostrils. It was foul, like that in a cave. If there was ventilation through crevices in the rock above, it was very meager.
He tipped the searchlight up. The roof was perhaps three hundred feet above. The opposite wall was fully twice that distance away.
The place was vast, but as underground caverns went, not without precedent. The huge Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico had a room both higher and wider than this. That did not detract from the uncanny air of the place, however. The darkness was especially effective. The searchlight beam was like a white inlay in ebony.
If this was a river, the water should be fresh, Doc decided. He dipped a finger, touched it to his tongue.
The water was very salty.
The scene of the explosion appeared. It was at a sort of sinkhole where the salt river dipped down to come out beneath the sea. The sinkhole had caused a whirlpool effect during high water, and this had worn ledges on which Mohallet had placed his explosive.
The river, as near as Doc could ascertain, was blocked completely. He investigated the surface of the piled rock. He stripped and dived at the front edge, ascertaining how much it sloped out, and thus getting an idea of the possible thickness.
He spent some thirty minutes in this intensive investigation.
Returning, Doc found the Helldiver in running condition, the parts replaced. They cruised slowly toward the spot where Mohallet and his men stood.
* * * *
Between the itching and the water—the latter was now around their ankles—the brown men were almost mad with fear.
Several sprang into the river, so frantic were they to reach the submarine. This excited the rest; they followed. Those who could not swim, and they were plenty, piled in after the others, fearful lest they be left.
Arms flailing, screaming wildly for help, they churned for the sub. Here and there, men began sinking. These, whenever their heads were above the surface, emitted grisly screeches. It was a bedlam.
Doc, Renny, and Monk promptly dived overboard to help the fear-crazed brown fellows. It was no mean task. The instant they came near a swarthy man, he sought in his mania to climb atop them. It was necessary to clip them senseless with fists.
Doc’s other three men, rapid-firing little pistols in hand, stood on deck and in the control room, and herded the swarthy gang below.
Mohallet was one of the first to come aboard. He scrambled down the metal ladder, jeweled teeth hidden by angrily puckered lips.
The other members of the villainous swarm were rescued and hazed into the sub.
Immediately, a yelling went up for the potion which would alleviate the smarting affliction.
Monk went to his tiny cubicle and concocted a fresh supply of the stuff. The first lot had been lost overboard in the turmoil of the explosion which had closed the underground river mouth.
The prisoners had been wedged into the compartment which had previously held Doc and his aids—the sleeping quarters. This chamber, intended to accommodate a large crew, was the most ample room in the Helldiver.
It would accommodate Mohallet and the others—more than a score and a half of men, all told. Mohallet had evidently left the rest of his followers on the gold-trimmed black yacht.
Johnny and Long Tom protected Monk with machine-gun pistols as he opened the compartment door to pass in the lotion. Monk handed in the large bottle. Then he thrust in his head. He intended to tell them that a thin application of the stuff would prove to be sufficient.
“Hey!” he howled.
He sought to leap into the chamber. A volley of fists, an avalanche of hissing brown bodies, opposed him.
Monk struck back, grunting and howling. Monk’s fights were always noisy. But the foes were too many for him. He was forced backward; the metal door shut, and the dogs rapped into place.
“What was it?” Johnny barked.
“That white-haired girl!” Monk groaned. “During the excitement as they came aboard, they must have seized her! They’re holding her in there!”
Jamming his homely face close to the steel panel, Monk ordered the young lady’s release. He promised fiercely to pull the ears, the arms, and the legs off each swarthy man if she was not freed.
They laughed at him.
Monk hit the steel door a few times, knowing he would never get in that way. He spun away. There was a cutting torch aboard. With that, they should be able to force the door.
Doc intercepted Monk.
“Let it ride,” he suggested. “The water is rising fast! We’d better sail upstream and see if we can find an exit. If we can’t, we’re the same as entombed.”
“But that girl——”
“We’ll drill a few holes in the bulkhead so we can watch and be sure they don’t harm her.”
“O.K.” Monk ran for the control room.