Chapter VIII

THE VOICE FROM HELL

BALID was one of the four prisoners. In the language of his race, Balid’s name meant “stupid.” It was not an apt descriptive. Balid had acquired the nickname in his youth, when he had been wont to pretend to being a very dumb lad, entirely lacking in the brains to commit the clever thieving of which he often stood accused.

Since he was the man who had been knocked off by Doc’s hard fist, Balid was first to revive. The others had been overcome by the mercy bullets, the effects of which were more lasting.

In awakening, Balid’s arms and legs sought to perform the usual nerveless twitchings. Strangely enough, they would not move. Balid realized he was in a place which was very warm. He opened his eyes.

He emitted an involuntary cry of horrified surprise.

A hideous apparition towered near by - nothing less than a fiery skeleton. The thing was all of eight feet in height. Its blazing fire was an uncanny greenish hue.

All the rest of the room was in blackness, the solid sepia of an abyss. There was no sound.

The eerie skeleton of fire suddenly extended its arms on either side. The arms stretched slowly. To Balid, it seemed that each arm became at least twenty feet in length.

The thing of fiery bones opened its skull mouth. A spurt of flame came out, brief, blinding. This was accompanied by a squirming ball of white smoke.

Balid watched the smoke. Instead of spreading, it writhed and drew into a compact bundle. Then it suddenly assumed a definite shape. Balid’s eyes protruded. He tried to cry out, but was so shocked that the screams rattled in his throat.

The smoke puff had suddenly become the head and shoulders of Baud’s master, Mohallet. Mohallet’s throat was cut neatly from ear to ear. Crimson rivulets trickled from the gash.

The hideous apparition then vanished abruptly. A glowing arm of the odious green-flame skeleton now stretched down and touched Balid. There was a hissing and crackling. An intolerable agony shot through Baud’s frame.

He tried to move, to get up and flee. But he could not move. His limbs seemed paralyzed. He was hot, oh, so hot.

“You are here!” said the skeleton in a hollow, sepulchral voice.

That was no news to Balid. He knew he was present. And how! A more frightsome place his superstitious brain had never imagined.

“You are at the great halfway point, a place between the worldly sphere and the Great Beyond!” continued the fearful, tomblike voice. “It is at this spot that your material life is reviewed, and your future determined!”

Balid did his best to shudder. although his body would not move. He was dead! He was sure of it! There was no other explanation.

Out of the darkness before Balid’s eyes, a hook now appeared. Upon it were fiery characters in Arabic. Across the top was a heading: “The Deeds of Balid.”

The volume closed before Balid could read more. “This is a record of your life,” said the awful voice. “It is all there. It is a very bad record. It almost consigns you to the place where the evil go. There is one thing which may save you. Tell the closing events of your worldly life. Speak the truth, and it may mean your salvation. Lie, and I shall certainly know it!”

Balid made several croaking sounds, then got his explanation under way. “I was one of the men Mohallet brought to the United States with the whitehaired girl - “

“Begin further back than that!” commanded the sepulchral one.

BALID was almost sobbing in his terror. “Shall I start with the first appearance of the whitehaired girl, 0 mighty one?”

“Further back than that! Start with something of Mohallet!”

“Mohallet is the chief of a robber tribe which operates on the southern Arabic coast!” Baud whimpered. “He has many followers

“What of the Prince Abdul Ra ah?”

“There is no such person. That is only a name which Mohallet uses at times.”

“Tell the truth, 0 worm!” thundered the ghostly skeleton of flame, its fiery teeth chopping the words out. “Lie, and I will know and condemn you to everlasting damnation! Now tell me of the whitehaired girl!”

“Mohallet found her walking along the coast,” Balid wailed. “She wore strange garments. and upon her wrist was a bracelet of a white metal. This Mohallet kept. She spoke not the language of any people we knew.

“She was held a prisoner, and in the weeks which followed, Mohallet learned her language.”

Balid paused, but when the fiery arm of bones reached out and touched him, with a resulting surge of tingling pain, he continued wildly.

“I know not what Mohallet learned when the whitehaired girl could speak with him! Whatever it was, it greatly excited Mohallet! He took six men and the girl in a motor launch with him one night. I know not where he went, but he came back in a great rage, and the six men were not with him, but only the whitehaired girl.

“We later found the bodies of the six men, dead on the beach. We said nothing of it, because they had died from poisoned bullets of a size which fitted only Mohallet’s pistols.”

“Mohallet killed them so they could not tell where he had gone?” rumbled the voice from the bony jaws.

“I know not, but I think so.”

“Continue!”

“With an armed party, Mohallet sought to penetrate the great desert of Rub’ Al Khali, where no man from the outer world has gone. There are savage tribesmen along the coast. They drove us back, with great loss of fighting men.”

“Mohallet sought to enter the great desert, and could not?”

“Yes. Then he came to the United States on his yacht.”

“His yacht?”

Balid squirmed - or tried to. “Perhaps, 0 flaming one, it is not Mohallet’s boat. He stole it from an Englishman some months ago.”

“Mohallet came after the submarine owned by Doc Savage?”

“He did.”

“And why did he want it?”

“I know not! I can only guess. It must have been that he wished it to reach something of which the whitehaired girl told him - something located in the great desert of Rub’ Al Khali.”

“The truth, 0 worm! What is this thing Mohallet seeks?”

“It is the truth I tell - what it is, I know not!”

“Where is Mohallet’s yacht anchored in New York?”

“In the river the Americans call the Hudson, near the street numbered One Hundred!”

“You have talked well!” said the ghoulish voice.

Monk’s tone pealed out in ribald laughter. “I’ll say he has!” he chortled. “As a reward, we’ll have to return him to life!”

To the click of electric switches, brilliant lights came on.

BALID stared about, eyes rolling. He was in Doc Savage’s laboratory. He looked down. He was incased in a box which reached to his neck - a box filled with nothing more mysterious than ordinary sand. The sand was heated to an almost unpleasant warmth by common electric irons embedded in it.

The skeleton was nothing more than a tall framework of wood, painted with phosphorus. The joints were rubber bands, which had permitted the amazing stretch of the arms. From the right arm of this contraption dangled an insulated wire. Touching Balid, this had introduced an electric shock.

The book which had portended to contain Balid’s life history, was a common scrap book, decorated with phosphorescent writing. In Balid’s pockets had been a coin purse with his name upon it, which had enabled Doc to head the book with the fellow’s cognomen. Also, in the book was a short story of what had happened at the hotel in the Times Square district - although Balid had had no time to read it.

Flashlight powder had made the flame from the skeleton’s mouth; a wadded sheet had imitated the smoke cloud. And the head of Mohallet, the throat cut, was merely a picture Doc had hurriedly executed from memory. Doc possessed no little ability as an artist.

Balid moaned and shut his eyes tightly. He began to wish he were actually dead. He had told all he knew of Mohallet and the whitehaired girl. If Mohallet found out, he would inflict a form of death far from pleasant.

Doc, speaking in his normal tone, said: “We’ll go take a look at that yacht of Mohallet’s.”

With a hypo needle. Doc administered a drug to each of the four prisoners. This would keep them unconscious until the application of another compound, a counteragent, revived them. Doc had no further use for the four.

Within a few hours, a mysterious white ambulance would come to the city and take the quartet away to the upstate institution, where they would undergo Doc’s unique treatment.

Doc’s speed elevator took the little group to the basement garage. They loaded into one of the big cars - the same limousine which the brown men had stopped earlier in the night.

Fifteen minutes later, they parked near the end of One Hundredth Street. Using night glasses, they peered out over the Hudson. They investigated the shore line.

Finally Monk ignited a chemical flare of his own invention. This gave a light of intense brilliance. The secret of its construction had earned the homely chemist a medal when he turned it over to the war department.

The light disclosed no yacht.

“Balid must have lied to us,” Renny rumbled.

“I don’t think so,” Doc said thoughtfully. “Superstitious cuss that he was, he really thought he was halfway to purgatory!”

“Then Mohallet has pulled his freight!”

“It’s likely,” Doc agreed. “The affair at the hotel probably gave him quite a fright. He was safe in figuring the town had become too hot for him. He’s set sail, all right! Come on!”

They ran back to the limousine. A regulation police siren wailed under the hood as they hurtled southward. They made directly for the vast pier warehouse - the Hidalgo Trading Co.

Each man ran to a plane. The wheels of the cradles on which the ships rested were well greased. Each craft rolled down the sloping concrete ramp to the river water under the impetus of its own propellers.

Taking the air, and using Monk’s powerful flares at frequent intervals, Doc and his aids made a search for any suspicious-looking yacht.

The skipper of a ferryboat gave them a description of the craft which had been anchored at the foot of One Hundredth Street, when Doc landed near the ferry shed upriver.

“She was a tub of fair side,” he explained. “A classy looker. You can’t fail to recognize her. She was all black, with gold striping and gold funnel bands.”

The planes were equipped with compact short-wave radio transmitter’s and receivers. Doc wirelessed the yacht’s description to his friends.

Flying up and down the harbor. circling Manhattan Island they kept an intent lookout for a black yacht. Doc’s five aids were all excellent pilots.

At the harbor mouth, a customs officer reported a. black yacht had steamed out to sea at full speed.

“They’re trying to make their get-away!” Doc informed his five men by radio. “We’ll see if we can overhaul them.”

FLYING out into the Atlantic, they found black clouds matted almost against the sea. They were leaking steady rain. Below them, fog was like wadded, dirty cotton. It hid all ships.

Back and forth, the planes swung. Time after time, Doc landed and, engines shut off, dropped the pick-up microphone of a submarine listening device over the side. This device, one used extensively in the Great War, would register the sound of a ship’s screws for a distance of many miles.

Doc heard numerous craft. The mouth of New York harbor was a busy spot. It was impossible to pick out the screw sounds of the yacht they sought.

Monk’s flares, brilliant as they were, could not combat the soupy fog. For some four hours, the planes combed the sea in a fruitless search.

“No use!” Doc spoke into the radio transmitter at length. “The fog has us whipped!”

The radio transmitters and receivers were synchronized perfectly on the same wave length. The effect was not unlike that of a party telephone line. Any man could enter the conversation at will.

“Want us to turn back?” queried the clipped voice of dapper Ham.

“The shyster is anxious to see his wife and thirteen nitwit offspring!” Monk chuckled.

“The winged ape speaking!” Ham jeered.

“Don’t you mugs ever get tired of that?” the roaring tones of Renny questioned mournfully. “We’re up against a stone wall on this proposition, and you eggs wisecrack!”

“Say, Doc,” Johnny’s scholastic voice put in, “you carried piece of bathtub away from that hotel. didn’t you?”

“Right,” Doc admitted.

“Why’d you do it?”

“Mohallet apparently flung the whitehaired girl in the bathtub for a time when he was holding her at the hotel,” Doc explained.

“So what?”

‘So she wrote a message on the tub.”

“What’d she use for ink?”

“A cake of toilet soap.”

“What’d the message say?”

“Search me,” Doc replied. “The characters are unlike any language that I have come in contact with.”

“Do we go back and try to read ‘em?” demanded Long Tom, for the first time taking part in the aerial conversation.

“We do,” Doc decided.