The Land of Terror ds-2

by Kenneth Robeson

  Doc’s machine gun clattered. He knew where to aim. Greater even than the learning of Johnny, whose profession was knowing the world and all its past, was Doc Savage’s fund of knowledge on prehistoric reptiles and vegetation. Doc realized this pterodactyl probably had little or no brain. He shot for the neck bones and shattered them.

  The air reptile tumbled away. Johnny lifted a grateful face.

  "My shots didn’t seem to do much good!" he called.

  "Try for the neck or eyes!" Doc replied.

  Strong air currents now made themselves felt. The parachutes were swept rapidly to one side, away from the edge of the crater.

  Directly below, Doc’s gaze rested upon a remarkable sight. It would have been a fearsome sight, too, except that his practiced eye told him they were going to be carried clear of danger by the wind.

  A mud lake, narrow, but spreading for thousands of rods along the crater side, was below. A crust, resembling asphalt and apparently very hard, covered the lake. This must be nearly red-hot, judging from the heat of the moist air which rushed upward.

  Probably this amazing mud lake reached in a horseshoe shape halfway around the crater. Certainly, the ends were lost to sight.

  A natural lava wall confined it to the crater side, well above the floor.

  The ruined plane fell into the mud lake. Its weight broke the crust. Instantly, there was a great eruption at that point. A geyser column of scalding, lavalike mud shot hundreds of feet upward, driven by steam pressure gathered beneath the crust. Steam itself now exuded. It made a deafening roar.

  A thunderous crackling swept over the mud lake as the crust settled. From countless points came minor eruptions. The steam, squirting outward and upward, enveloped the falling parachutes.

  They could not see where they were landing!

  * * *

  THE parachutes pitched like leaves in the disturbed air. Not only did the gushing, superheated winds carry them clear of the mud lake, but they were flung far out on the crater floor.

  Doc, compact machine gun in hand, waited. His golden eyes sought to pierce the steamy world. The air was so hot as to be near sickening. It possessed a weird, unusual fragrance.

  It was like the atmosphere within a greenhouse — impregnated with the odor of rankly growing plants.

  The thunderous crackling from the mud lake subsided as quickly as it began.

  Suddenly a shocking din arose below. A piercing, trumpetlike cry quavered. A coarse, beastly bawling joined it. Tearing of branches, the hollow pops of green timber breaking, the dull reverberations of great bodies thumping the earth, made a nightmarish discord. It was a sound to make the flesh creep.

  "Renny! Monk! The rest of you!" Doc’s resonant tones pealed through the hobgoblin clamor. "Spill air from one side of your ‘chute and try to avoid the vicinity of that noise!"

  From below the abyss of steam, where his men were lost from view, came replying shouts. But there was little time to comply.

  The frond of an immense plant brushed past Doc’s mighty bronze form. The plant was of colossal size. It seemed to be something on the order of a tree fern. So towering was it that there elapsed a distinct interval before the parachute reached the ground.

  Doc landed in a tangle of creepers and low trees which looked like ordinary evergreens. More ferns, these much smaller, made a spongy mat of the whole. It was like descending in a pile of enormous, coarse green cobwebs.

  Shucking off the parachute harness, Doc sprang to less tangled footing. The ground was a soft mulch underfoot — as though fresh plowed.

  The hideous uproar they had heard from the air had subsided! A low rumble had replaced it. This rumble seemed to be some great monster in flight! The sound was already some distance away, and departing like an express train.

  Of a sudden, there came into the surrounding air the low, trilling note that was part of Doc. Now, more than ever, was that sound suggestive of a strange bird of the jungle. It might have been a wind filtering through the ghostly, fantastic forest around about.

  And as always, that inspiring sound conveyed some definite meaning. This time it was — be silent! There is danger near!

  Doc knew that grisly, caterwauling concert he had heard while in the air meant a fight between behemoths of a prehistoric reptilian world. He recognized the plant forms about him. Some had been extinct for ages.

  Doc had dropped into a land which was very much as it had been countless ages ago. A fearsome, bloodcurdling land where survival of the fiercest was the only law!

  Doc’s strange sound trailed away in echoes that, although they possessed no definite tune, were entrancingly musical in their quality.

  Now he could hear some gigantic horror breathing near by! The breathing was hurried, as though the terrible thing had been engaged in strife. The sounds were hollow, very loud — almost like the pant of an idling freight locomotive!

  Suddenly vegetation swished and crashed as the monster got into motion.

  It was charging Doc!

  Doc’s mighty bronze figure flashed sidewise, moving with a speed such as it possibly had never before attained. But as he changed position, his golden eyes were sharpened for sight of the peril that rushed him.

  He saw it — as fearful and loathsome a sight as human eyes ever beheld!

  * * *

  THE shocking size of the horror was apparent. It bulged out of the steam like a tall house. It hopped on massive rear legs, balancing itself by a great tail, kangaroolike.

  The two forelegs were tiny in proportion — like short strings dangling. Yet those forelegs that seemed so small were thicker through by far than Doc Savage’s body!

  The revolting odor of a carnivorous thing accompanied the dread apparition. The stench was of decaying gore. The hide of the monster had a pebbled aspect, somewhat like a crocodile. Its claws were frightful weapons of offense, being of such proportions as to easily grasp and crush a large bull.

  Perhaps the most ghastly aspect of the thing were the teeth. They armored a blunt, revolting snout of a size as stupendous as the rest of the hopping terror.

  So great was the weight of the thing that its feet sank into the spongy earth the depth of a tall man at each step.

  "What is it, Doc?" Monk shouted.

  "Tyrannosaurus!" Doc answered him. "Look lively!"

  The monster reptile, after bounding past Doc, stopped. An instant following Monk’s called words, the beast charged the sound of his voice.

  "Dodge it, Monk!" Doc barked. "Dodge it! The thing probably has a very sluggish brain. That has always been supposed to be a trait of prehistoric dinosaurs. Get out of its path, and several seconds will elapse before it can make up its mind to follow you!"

  Shrubs ripped. A stream of shots erupted from Monk’s compact machine gun. Bushes fluttered again. Monk gave a bark of utter awe.

  "Monk!" Doc called. "You shouldn’t have tried to shoot it! Nothing less than a cannon can even trouble that baby!"

  "You’re tellin’ me!" Monk snorted. "Man! Man! The bat of a thing that chewed the wing of our plane was a pretty little angel alongside this cuss! O-o-op!Here it comes again!"

  The noisy charge, and Monk’s dodging, was repeated. Monk did not fire this time. He knew Doc was right. The little machine guns, efficient though they might be, would bother this reptilian monster less than beans thumbed at an alligator.

  "Made it!" Monk called.

  "Then keep that noisy mouth shut!" snapped the waspish Ham. "It rushes the sound of your voice!"

  The steam — it had come from the eruption of the mud lake — was rapidly disappearing. The ferocious tyrannosaurus would soon be able to search them out with its eyes!

  "All of you get over with Monk!" Doc shouted.

  He nimbly evaded the great reptile as it sought his voice, then worked over until Monk’s anthropoid figure loomed in the dispersing steam.

  Oliver Wording Bittman was there. The taxidermist’s face was the color of a soiled handkerchief. His jaw jerked up and
down visibly, but he had his tongue thrust between his teeth, fearful lest their chattering attract the awful bounding reptile.

  Doc felt surprise. Bittman had turned into a craven coward! But this direful world in which they found themselves was enough to reduce the valor of even the bravest.

  Johnny, Long Tom and Ham were with Monk. They, too, were pale. But the light of a magnificent courage glowed in their eyes. They were enthralled. They lived for adventure and excitement — and it was upon them in quantities undreamed of.

  "Where’s Renny?" Doc’s tone was so low the odious tyrannosaurus, still prowling about, did not hear.

  Renny was not present!

  Doc’s shout pealed out like a great bell. "Renny! Renny!"

  That drew the giant reptile. With frantic dodging, they evaded it.

  But there came no answer from Renny!

  "That — that cross between a crocodile, the Empire State Building and a kangaroo, must have got him!" Monk muttered in horror.

  "A terrible fate!" gulped Johnny, the geologist. "The tyrannosaurus is generally believed to be the most destructive killing machine ever created by nature! To think that I should live to see the things in flesh and blood!"

  "If you wanta live to tell about it, we gotta get away from the thing!" Monk declared. "How’ll we do it, Doc?"

  "See if we cannot leave the vicinity silently," Doc suggested.

  * * *

  AN attempt to do this, however, nearly proved disastrous. The monster tyrannosaurus seemed to have very sensitive ears. Too, it could see them for a distance of many yards, now that the steam had nearly dissipated. It rushed them.

  Doc, to save the lives of his friends, took the awful risk of decoying the reptile away while the others fled. Only the power and agility of his mighty bronze body saved him, for once he had to dodge between the very legs of the monster, evading by a remarkable spring snapping, foul, fetid teeth that were nearly as long as a man’s arm.

  Gliding under a canopy of overlapping ferns, Doc evaded the bloodthirsty reptile.

  Darkness was descending swiftly, for the steam above the pit, although it let through sunlight, kept out the moonbeams and made the period of twilight almost nonexistent.

  While the days within the crater were probably as light as a cloudy day in the outside world, the nights were things of incredible blackness.

  Doc found his companions in the thickening murk.

  "We’d better take a page out of the life of Monk’s ancestors and climb a tree for the night!" suggested Ham.

  "Yeah!" growled Monk, goaded by the insult. "Yeah!" He apparently couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  "We can tackle that tree fern!" Doc declared, pointing.

  The tree fern in question was on the order of a palm tree, but with fronds all the way up. In height, it exceeded by far the tallest of ordinary palms. Doc and his men climbed this.

  "Remarkable!" Johnny murmured. "Although this species is closely related to fern growths found in fossilized state in certain parts of the world, it is much larger than anything — "

  "You must consider the fact that this crater is merely a spot left behind in the march of time," Doc interposed. "Some changes are bound to have taken place in the countless ages, however. And after all, science has but scratched the surface in ascertaining the nature of prehistoric fauna and flora. We may; indeed, we surely should, find many species undreamed of hitherto — "

  "How we gonna sleep up here without fallin’ off?" Monk wanted to know.

  "Sleep!" jeered Ham. "If you ask me, there won’t be much sleep tonight. Listen!"

  In a distant part of the crater, another ferocious fight between reptilian monsters was in progress. Although the sound was borne to them muffled, it had a fearsome quality that brought a cold sweat to each man.

  "What an awful place!" Oliver Wording Bittman whimpered. Terror had literally frozen the taxidermist to the limb to which he clung.

  * * *

  IT was a ghastly night they spent. No sooner did one titanic struggle of dinosaurs subside, than another arose. Often more than one noisy, blood-curdling fight was in progress at the same moment.

  Vast bodies sloughed through the dense plant growth, some going with great hops as had the tyrannosaurus, others traveling on all fours.

  Sleep was out of the question. Doc and his friends felt safe in their fern top — until some monstrous dinosaur came along and browsed off the crest of a fern which they could tell by the sound was nearly as tall as their perch. After this, throughout the night, they rested in momentary expectation of meeting disaster.

  But, had they been in perfect safety, they would not have slept. Slumber was unthinkable. There was too much to hear. For they were wayfarers in another world!

  They might as well have stepped back in time a thousand ages!

  Daylight returned as suddenly as it had departed. With the appearance of the sun, a heavy rain fell, a tropical downpour that lasted only a few minutes. But as the water hit the red-hot surface of the mud lake up on the crater side, tremendous clouds of steam rolled.

  The day was about as bright as a very cloudy winter afternoon in New York City, due to the "steam" clouds always above the crater.

  It was at once evident that the ferocious dinosaurs preferred to prowl at night. For with dawn, the hideous bloodshed within the crater subsided to a marked degree.

  Doc at once led his friends — with the exception of the whimpering Oliver Wording Bittman, who would not desert his perch in the fern tree — to see what had happened to Renny.

  They found Renny’s collapsed parachute at last. The spot where it lay was some hundreds of yards from the nearest giant fern which would offer safety to a man.

  Monk had been making himself a cigarette. But at sight of what lay near Renny’s parachute, his big and hairy hands froze, can of tobacco in one, papers in the other.

  For all about Renny’s ‘chute was torn and ripped turf. And blood! Amid the gore lay Renny’s hat.

  It looked like a dinosaur had devoured Renny!

  "Maybe — he got away?" Long Tom mumbled hopefully. But Doc, after a quick circle of the spot, replied: "There is no human trail away from this place! I’m sure of that! The soft earth would take the prints. Renny never walked away from here!"

  Monk slowly stuffed the tobacco can in a pocket. He had no appetite for a smoke now.

  A reverent, sorrowful silence prevailed, dedicated to the memory of Renny.

  This was broken in a frightful fashion.

  "Over there!" Ham’s voice cracked. "What — "

  They looked, as one man, at first hoping Ham had sighted Renny. But it was not that.

  * * *

  OUT of the unhealthy rank jungle growth had come an amazing animal. In appearance, the thing was a conglomerate of weasel, cat, dog and bear. It was remarkable because it seemed a combination of most animals known to the twentieth century world.

  But it was approximately the size of a very large elephant!

  Monk gulped, "What the — "

  "A creodont!" breathed Johnny, awed. "The ancestor of a great many of our modern animals!"

  "Yeah?" muttered Monk. "Well, from right now on, you don’t catch me out of jumping distance of a tree!"

  These words brought home to the others the shocking fact that they were helpless before the nondescript but fierce creodont. This animal could not be dodged as they had evaded the tyrannosaurus. It could turn too quickly! And its jaws were full of great teeth; its claws long and sharp. And no safety lay within reach!

  The creodont abruptly charged!

  Their guns cracked. But the gigantic animal came on as fast as ever. The thing had its head low — they could not locate its small eyes for an effective target.

  The men spread apart. But that could help but little. The monstrous creodont would lay about among them, crushing and mangling. They could not hope to outrun it!

  Only a few yards distant, the creodont reared and separated its great, frothing ja
ws. It sprang with a hideous snarl.

  It looked like the end for Doc and his men — an end as terrible as they supposed Renny had suffered.

  * * *

  Chapter 17. RENNY, THE HUNTED

  WHILE Doc and his friends faced the dangers of this weird place the first night, Renny, lost from the others, had difficulties of his own.

  When Renny’s parachute lowered him to the spongy floor of the vast crater, he landed in the midst of such a scene as his wildest nightmares had never produced.

  He dropped squarely into the fight which was heard from the air. This was a ferocious battle between the same tyrannosaurus which had pursued Doc and the others, and a three-horned rhinoceros of a monster.

  Renny’s parachute spilled over the revolting face of the terrible tyrannosaurus. Renny instantly squirmed out of the ‘chute harness and dropped to the cushionlike earth.

  The tyrannosaurus, pitching about like a tall house caught in a tornado, soon got the silken folds out of its face.

  But Renny had no time to witness that. The other beast came thundering straight for Renny.

  The iron-fisted engineer had inspected the pictures of a few of the genus triceratops in textbooks, and had gazed without particular interest at a skeleton of one as displayed in a great museum. Beyond that, his knowledge did not extend.

  He recognized the thing as a triceratops, for Renny had an excellent memory. But he didn’t know it was a herb eater. He wouldn’t have believed that at the moment, anyway. The thing looked like it was bent on making a meal out of Renny.

  The monster dinosaur came at him with all the noise and impressive size of a snorting locomotive. Renny didn’t have time to clutch for his gun. It was just as well. He could not have stopped the triceratops.

  The huge reptile possessed three rhinoceroslike horns. Two jutted straight forward, one above each eye. These were fully as long as Renny’s by-no-means-short body. The third horn was much smaller, and set down on the nose, as though for rooting purposes.