by Paul Malmont
“Still, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Walter,” Norma said, turning to look at the weary man. “The Golden Vulture did have a happy ending for us. It led Lester to Doc Savage.” She was suddenly distracted by a tug on the paper in her hand. The chicken was pecking again at the mag cover.
“China Boy!” Litzka admonished him and he turned sheepishly. “He knows better.”
“That’s my mag,” Ron noted. “I got it from Lovecraft.”
“Lovecraft?” Walter looked shaken to hear that name.
“Long story,” Ron answered. “He tried to write something on it but it’s just garbage. I couldn’t read his writing when he was alive and I guess I can’t figure it out when he’s dead either.”
“Let me see that.” Norma handed the magazine to Walter. He looked at it for a moment and then his face lit up.
“Code,” he chuckled. “It’s my code.” Gibson eased himself into the armchair. “But without the offset number I can’t decode it.”
“Offset number?” Norma felt a thrill stab through her.
“It’s the number which tells you how many letters to move forward in the alphabet to find the correctly corresponding letter. There’s no point in writing something in code if nobody else has the key. How’d you get this?”
Ron started to tell him the tale of the dead man who came to the White Horse Tavern. Norma picked up the mag while Walter and Litzka listened incredulously.
“Well,” Norma said as Walter reached the point where Lovecraft began to melt, “this monster has seven tentacles drooping from his face. Couldn’t that be the key? Seven?”
“Seven?”
“I’m pretty good at finding treasure clues,” she said proudly.
Gibson rifled through an end table drawer and came up with a pencil and something which looked suspiciously to her like a decoder ring. “Read the letters to me.” He went to work fiddling with the ring as she read and scribbling on a notepad, stopping occasionally to cough violently. Finally he looked up at her, eyes gleaming. “Atropa belladonna plus/minus hyoscyamine.”
“That sounds like some sort of compound,” Ron said with a tone of indifference. He had been reading the paper while they worked and now he looked up. Norma wasn’t certain but she thought he was a little sore that he hadn’t been the one to figure out the code. “You’d need a chemist to know for sure.”
“Maybe it’s an antidote for the gas?” Norma said.
“Good boy! Good China Boy! See Walter? China Boy loves you! He’s trying to help.” Litzka picked up the chicken and hugged it while it clucked contentedly in her arms.
“Anyone know a chemist?” Gibson asked.
“Sure,” Ron replied, turning another page of the paper his nose was buried in. “We all do.”
“What?”
“Dr. Smith. He’s one of us. He’s a pulpateer.” He realized that they were all staring at him. “What? You don’t like the word pulpateer? I just made it up.”
“No,” Walter said as slowly and as patiently as he could manage. “I want you to find Doc Smith!”
Episode Forty-Two
“IS IT just me?” the cowboy asked Driftwood. “Or is Mrs. Dent one helluva damn fine dame?” They were standing on the stern of the Star of Baltimore watching the sun come up over the East River.
Driftwood felt a surge of possessive jealousy. “Yeah. She’s all right.” He had taken a strong dislike to the cowboy and didn’t like his speaking about Norma in that way.
“Shoot. Just all right! I’ll say. First of all, those stems of hers are dynamite. And could you imagine waking up with those gray eyes looking at you from across the pillow? Or running your hands through that hair? I do love the blondes, y’know.”
“Hey, I think she’s spoken for, so why don’t you just step off that high horse you’re on about her and let someone else have a ch—I mean leave her to her husband. I saw her first anyway.”
“Hell, I know she’s spoken for, pard. What I want to know is where can I find one just like her that ain’t spoken for. I been at sea a long time and marooned on a desert island. I’m ready for a real woman. A mate of mine told me about a cathouse down in Chinatown,” he added in a slyly conspiratorial tone. “Y’know, after once the police get here.”
“You were marooned for how long? A few days?”
“I wrote a poem for her.” The cowboy lit a cigar stub he had found on the dock. “‘On the sea is a memory of dreams that have gone. Of oceans of sorrow and fathoms of fair hair.’ What do you think?”
“Seems a little personal.”
“I think she kinda likes me too,” he added. “Something in the way she comes in real close to talk to you, y’know?”
“Well, since you shot up the Star of Baltimore we’ll never know, will we?”
“I could say the same about you cracking up her boat, pard.”
“None of that would have happened if you’d stayed on it.”
Driftwood was relieved to hear automobile tires rumbling along the planks of the dock. “I think the cavalry’s arrived.”
He walked to the wreckage of the gangplank, leaving the cowboy at the stern.
“The cops sure do drive nice cars up here, don’t they?” the cowboy called to him.
The sedan was one of the most elegant cars Driftwood had ever seen. As it stopped, five men climbed out and stood upon the dock.
“There’s good news,” the cowboy said. “Somebody sent in the marines.”
“That’s U.S. Army,” Driftwood said, feeling his old friend, that sinking feeling, clutch at him. “And that ain’t good news.”
The other men drew their sidearms. The last man out of the car was an officer; Driftwood recognized authority when he saw it, even when it wore a non-issue overcoat. The man wore his silver hair in a crew cut. His skin was nearly brown from years spent in tropical climes. He picked up a piece of paper and crumpled it. He flipped his head up, his gunmetal eyes blazing at them from under his furrowed eyebrows. In an instant Driftwood realized that he knew exactly what the man’s voice would sound like. He had heard it over the radio of the Albatross less than an hour ago.
“Run!” he shouted at the cowboy.
The cowboy had good preservation instincts. Not needing further prompting, he dashed down the deck. Driftwood last saw him scurry into an exhaust vent. He swiveled his head around. The crashed crane on the deck made it impossible to advance to the bow. Driftwood turned and saw the hold behind him. The only way out was in. He leapt into the opening, landed on a crate, and using the crate and drums as steps down, he moved quickly to the floor of the hold.
Trying to ignore the disturbing sight of the contorted dead men on the floor, he scanned the four walls looking for an exit. A metal watertight door was set into the wall opposite his position. Far away. He heard the soldiers clambering up the cargo net. Damn, he thought, damn me for not pulling that up when I had the chance. He snatched up a fire axe. It gave him a momentary sense of power which faded into futility when he realized how useless it actually was. The soldiers had guns.
He sprinted across the floor hoping to reach the hatch door, leaping over the corpses, feeling vulnerable and exposed to the great sky above. He reached the door and threw back the metal bar which held it fast. The room was dimly illuminated by a thin beam of light from the window in the hatch of the far end of the room which seemed to lead to a corridor. He took a step into the room, then saw something that chilled his blood. He forgot all about the armed soldiers above and froze instantly.
Not all the Chinese sailors had been killed when the bullet punctured the drum. A handful of them had made it this far and managed to swing the door shut behind them. But they had been just a little too slow. One of them swung its head around to look at him now. The skin of its face had pooled around its jaw like melted wax from a candle, pulling clumps of matted hair down along with it. Drool mixed with blood foamed from its toothless maw. They must have been hit with a liquid burst of the chemical bef
ore it became a gas.
With a guttural howl, the creature threw itself at him, while the others, alerted to his presence, followed on its heels. He stumbled back into the hold, swinging the door shut as he did so. He threw the fastening bolt. He felt the creature slam into the door and saw its enraged face through the glass as it tried to gnaw its way through the porthole.
Homicidal soldiers on deck and slavering monsters below. Scylla or Charybdis, he thought. The lady or the tiger. Okay, put a plan together. I could…
“Down below! Hold it right there! Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”
One of the soldiers had Driftwood in his sights. Without hesitating Driftwood raised the axe over his head. The nadir of its trajectory was the top of a one of the barrels. “Anyone moves and I’ll split one of these eggs wide open!” he shouted. “Have you seen what this shit can do? Look around. You won’t have time to piss yourselves.”
“Hold your fire!”
“Hey, son?” He heard another voice. It was kind and fatherly and concerned. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he replied. He kept his arms raised and tense and his eyes focused on the drum.
“My name is Colonel Towers,” the voice continued.
“I know who you are.”
“No one needs to get hurt here.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened here.”
“Well, Colonel, it all started when I followed a white rabbit down this hole.”
“That’s very funny,” said the colonel.
“Yes, sir. It just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.”
“Your arms getting tired there, friend?”
“No, sir. I could do this all day.”
“I’m sure it won’t come to that. I can tell by the way you call me ‘sir’ that you’ve seen service duty. What branch?”
“I’m part of the Fredonia Freedom Fighters.”
“We’re not going to get very far if you don’t start cooperating.”
“I don’t really feel the need for cooperating, Colonel. I just want to get out of this alive.”
“All right, then. Now we’ve found something we both want. I’ll let you off this boat if you just step away and let me have my cargo.”
“Can’t do that, sir.”
“Why not, friend?”
“Driftwood. Otis P. Driftwood. Lieutenant Driftwood.”
“Okay. Why not, Lieutenant Driftwood?”
He could feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck and his palms were getting slick. He was back in the silver mine again. Only this time there was no cover and the man with the gun knew where he was. “Because we both know that this gunk is supremely deadly and we wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
“Lieutenant Driftwood, those barrels were forgotten about when you were still in short pants in whatever backwater you come from.”
“So it’s okay to give ’em to the Chinese to use against the Japanese?”
“This weapon will end a conflict and save tens of thousands of lives.”
“Or it could escalate that conflict and cost hundreds of thousands more. Only not just soldiers. Innocent women and children. Either way, if these canisters are opened, more people die. If I can stop you from letting that happen, I will.” He heard footsteps clattering on the other side of the wall and realized that the colonel had sent men into the ship. They would reach the outer hold door soon.
The colonel, stalling for time, sat down on the edge of the crane. “I first heard about this chemical more than a dozen years ago from one of its creators, an old officer much like myself who felt like confessing. I assured him of his absolution. In spite of what he told me, it was incredibly difficult to find. No one seemed to know where it had wound up. If I could have pursued it full-time, then I might have found it in half the time. As you can see, I’ve got a job.
“But I kept coming back to it. Found a journal notation here. A chart there. But no antidote. Never an antidote. So once I found it, even though I knew where it was, I had to wait and see if an antidote could be developed. I got so damn close, but that asshole Jeffords up in Providence could fuck up a free lunch! You know one of his morons actually burnt the antidote?”
“Guess you can’t use it, right? So we can all go home, right?”
Towers barked a short, cruel laugh. “Hell no! I was thinking about it all wrong. I just decided I didn’t need an antidote after all. First we are gonna use it against the Japanese. And then we’re gonna use it against the renegade Chinese to bring them in line. And if a few Chinese soldiers get killed in the cross fire, who’s gonna even care what happens on that side of the world? They’ve got scientists in China too. They can figure this stuff out. Make more of it. I can see us sailing into Tokyo Bay with a shipload of this stuff and conquering Japan without firing a shot. Who knows after that?”
“Russia’s just a steppe away.”
Towers laughed. “But I’m not a warmonger. I want peace. It’s going to be hard to enjoy a vast fortune if I’m constantly at war.”
Driftwood shifted his weight.
“The police aren’t going to show up to save you, you know. No matter what happens out here, my connections will keep them from showing up. I pulled in all my favors. Dug up all my best threats. Looks like you pulled a very long watch. Bet you’d like a cigarette?”
“Yeah. I’m dyin’ for one. What happens to you if this goes up in smoke, Colonel? What’s the army going to do to you when they find out about this?”
“There’s still time to put all this right,” was the reply. “This ship will sail. It may not be carrying as much money as we had hoped. But it will still tip the entire balance of power in the Pacific. In my favor.”
Driftwood heard a clang from beyond the door and then there were screams, and a single shot was fired.
“What’s that?” Colonel Towers asked. “What’s going on?” His confident tone wavered.
“Your boys just met some more of your boys,” Driftwood said. “You should be very proud. It’s a family reunion.”
The shrill scream of a man in terror penetrated thinly through the heavy door. A spurt of crimson blood jetted thickly across the porthole glass. Then the sounds stopped.
Towers raised his gun and clicked back the hammer. “Okay, Groucho, I’ve had enough of you.”
“The name’s Driftwood.”
“And I saw A Night at the Opera too!”
“Yeah? Remember the scene where Margaret Dumont falls off the patio into the pool?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Because you might have remembered that she didn’t fall, she was pushed.”
The colonel’s flat expression registered a touch of exasperation as he made certain of his aim. That was the look that Driftwood never forgot, the way he remembered Towers forever, because the man’s expression never changed even as the cowboy broke a wooden plank across his back. The pistol dribbled from his fingers and he took a step forward, then stumbled over the edge, his body twisting as he fell. He crashed heavily onto the crates above Driftwood’s head. The sound of the impact was so sickening that Driftwood was actually surprised when he heard the man begin to groan.
Driftwood lowered his aching arms. “Jesus Christ! Am I glad to see you.”
“Yeah.” The cowboy grinned as he threw down a rope. “I figured you’d be dead by now.”
The bitter end of the rope fell in front of Driftwood. The muscles in his arms screamed as he picked it up. “My arms are kind of deadwood.”
Towers continued to moan.
“Wrap it around your forearms and I’ll pull you up.”
Driftwood listened and watched, feeling helpless, as Lew dragged a block and tackle across the deck and hung it from a twisted piece of the crane wreckage. He began to loop the rope through the pulley.
Driftwood looked down from the figure of the cowboy to see Colonel Towers scrambling over the edge of the crates toward him, his face a
moist, shapeless, bloody mess. Except for the eyes. The eyes were gleaming with fury and murder. The colonel skidded down the stack of crates, the rough wood edges tearing cloth and flesh from his body.
The rope still felt slack. Behind him Driftwood heard the pounding on the hold door suddenly increase as if the creatures on the other side had suddenly grown more frantic.
Somehow Towers landed on his feet on the floor of the hold, and staggered with clumsy determination toward Driftwood, what was left of his teeth now gritted and showing as his lips peeled back. He raised his hands toward Driftwood not as if he were going to punch him, but as if he were going to claw him apart, rip his throat and his eyes out, dig out his heart and his bowels.
“Damn me,” Driftwood muttered to himself.
His arms were yanked up abruptly, and the pain snapped through his body with the force of a whip. His feet were leaving the ground. He felt the rush of air as Towers leaped for him and missed, and then he was several feet above the colonel and still levitating. A look of desperate frustration snarled across Towers’s face, and Driftwood knew that this man would never stop coming for him. His eyes never leaving Driftwood’s, Towers put his hand on the hold latch. Driftwood could hear nothing on the other side.
“I wouldn’t,” he cautioned Towers.
“I’ll meet you on deck,” the man snarled back. The latch slammed back and he threw open the door.
Driftwood caught a glimpse of the room beyond the hatch, gore and viscera as in a butcher’s shop. He would never eat a rare steak again. He saw Towers freeze in the doorway. Then the colonel turned and ran back into the hold. Driftwood watched him scramble madly upon a pallet of gas-filled barrels in the center of the hold. His quick glimpse of a rush of creatures slithering and mashing their way into the hold was suddenly obliterated by the brilliant sunlight as his head was raised above the level of the hold.
Driftwood grabbed at the deck and Lew helped him roll over onto his back. He lay on the deck, breathing deeply. The warm sun was shining on his face and he could hear seagulls crying in the air. The sea air smelled delicious. The pain was receding from his arms and he was alive. He began to chuckle, helplessly.