"I"m with you," said Tommy, getting upon his feet, and uttering an exclamation of pain as, forgetful of Dodd"s injunction, he let his head strike the rock roof overhead.
In the darkness he felt the outlines of his beetle-sh.e.l.l lying beside the torrent. He could hear Dodd in front of him, grunting as he raised Haidia"s unconscious form in his arms and deposited her in her sh.e.l.l. Tommy got his own sh.e.l.l into the stream, and held it there as the waters swirled around it.
"Ready?" he heard Dodd call.
Before he could answer, there sounded from not far away, yet strangely m.u.f.fled by the rocks, Bram"s bellow of fury. Bram was evidently fully drugged and beside himself. Inarticulate threats came floating through the rocky chamber.
"Bram seems to have lost his head temporarily," called Dodd, laughing. "A madman, Tommy. He insists that the marsupial lion-"
"Yes, I heard you telling him about it," answered Tommy. "You handed it to him straight. However, more about the marsupial lion later. I"m ready."
"Then let "er go," called Dodd, and his words were swallowed up by the sound of the hollow sh.e.l.l striking against the rocky bank as he launched his strange craft into the water.
Tommy set one foot into the hollow of his sh.e.l.l, and let himself go.
Instantly the sh.e.l.l shot forward with fearful velocity. It was all Tommy could do to balance himself, for it seemed more unstable than a canoe. Once or twice he thought he heard Dodd shouting ahead of him, but his cries were drowned in the rush of the torrent.
Suddenly a light appeared in the distance. Tommy thought it was another of the petroleum fountains, and his heart seemed to stand still. But then he gave a gasp of relief. It was a cl.u.s.ter of luminous fungi, ten or twelve feet tall, emitting a glow equal to that of a dozen 40-watt electric bulbs.
By that infernal light Tommy could see that the stream curved sharply. It was about fifty feet in width, and the low rock roof had receded to some fifteen feet overhead. Instead of a tunnel, there was nothing on either side of them but a vast tract of marshy ground thinly coated with the red gra.s.s.
As Tommy looked, he saw the sh.e.l.l that carried the unconscious body of Haidia strike the bank beside the phosph.o.r.escent growth. He could see the girl lying in the hollow of the sh.e.l.l, as pale as death, her eyes closed. Dodd was close behind. As the swirl of the current caught his sh.e.l.l, he turned to shout a warning to Tommy.
And Tommy noticed a singular thing, of which his sense of balance had already warned him, though he had hardly given conscious thought to the matter. The river was running up-hill!
Of course it was, since the center of gravity was in the sh.e.l.l of the earth, and not in the center!
But, again, the sh.e.l.l of the earth was under their feet!
Then Tommy hit on the solution to the problem. If the river was running up-hill, that meant that they must be near the exterior of the earth. In other words, they had pa.s.sed the center of gravity: they must be within a mile or so of the exit from Submundia!
Tommy was about to shout his discovery to Dodd when his sh.e.l.l grounded beside the two others, at the base of the clump of fungi.
Huge, straight, hollow stems they were, with mushroom caps, and, like all fungi, fly-blown, for Tommy could see worms nearly a foot in length crawling in and out of the porous stalks. The stench from the growth was nauseating and overpowering, utterly sickening.
"Push off and let"s get out of here!" Tommy called to Dodd, who was balancing his sh.e.l.l against the bank, and trying to peer into Haidia"s face.
At that moment he caught sight of something that made his blood turn cold!
It was an insect fully fifteen feet in height, three times that of a beetle, lurking among the fungi. He saw a hugely elongated neck, a three-cornered head with a pair of tentacles, and two pairs of legs as long as a giraffe"s. But what gave the added touch of horror was that the monster, balancing itself on its hind legs, had its forelegs extended in the att.i.tude of one holding a prayer-book!
That att.i.tude of devotion was so terrible that Tommy uttered a wild cry of terror. At the same time another cry broke from Dodd"s lips.
"G.o.d, a praying mantis!" he shouted, struggling madly to push off his sh.e.l.l and Haidia"s.
The next moment, as if shot from a catapult, the hideous monster launched itself into the air straight toward them.
(To be concluded in the February Number.)
The Cave of Horror
By Captain S. P. Meek
"Suddenly, for no apparent reason at all, one of the men on guard was jerked into the air feet upwards."
Screaming, the guardsman was jerked through the air. An unearthly screech rang through the cavern. The unseen horror of Mammoth Cave had struck again.
Dr. Bird looked up impatiently as the door of his private laboratory in the Bureau of Standards swung open, but the frown on his face changed to a smile as he saw the form of Operative Carnes of the United States Secret Service framed in the doorway.
"h.e.l.lo, Carnes," he called cheerfully. "Take a seat and make yourself at home for a few minutes. I"ll be with you as soon as I finish getting this weight."
Carnes sat on the edge of a bench and watched with admiration the long nervous hands and the slim tapering fingers of the famous scientist. Dr. Bird stood well over six feet and weighed two hundred and six pounds stripped: his ma.s.sive shoulders and heavy shock of unruly black hair combined to give him the appearance of a prize-fighter-until one looked at his hands. Acid stains and scars could not hide the beauty of those mobile hands, the hands of an artist and a dreamer. An artist Dr. Bird was, albeit his artistry expressed itself in the most delicate and complicated experiments in the realms of pure and applied science that the world has ever seen, rather than in the commoner forms of art.
The doctor finished his task of weighing a porcelain crucible, set it carefully into a dessicator, and turned to his friend.
"What"s on your mind, Carnes?" he asked. "You look worried. Is there another counterfeit on the market?"
The operative shook his head.
"Have you been reading those stories that the papers have been carrying about Mammoth Cave?" he asked.
Dr. Bird emitted a snort of disgust.
"I read the first one of them part way through on the strength of its being an a.s.sociated Press dispatch," he replied, "but that was enough. It didn"t exactly impress me with its veracity, and, from a viewpoint of literature, the thing was impossible. I have no time to pore over the lucubrations of an inspired press agent."
"So you dismissed them as mere press agent work?"
"Certainly. What else could they be? Things like that don"t happen fortuitously just as the tourist season is about to open. I suppose that those yarns will bring flocks of the curious to Kentucky though: the public always responds well to sea serpent yarns."
"Mammoth Cave has been closed to visitors for the season," said Carnes quietly.
"What?" cried the doctor in surprise. "Was there really something to those wild yarns?"
"There was, and what is more to the point, there still is. At least there is enough to it that I am leaving for Kentucky this evening, and I came here for the express purpose of asking you whether you wanted to come along. Bolton suggested that I ask you: he said that the whole thing sounded to him like magic and that magic was more in your line than in ours. He made out a request for your services and I have it in my pocket now. Are you interested?"
"How does the secret service cut in on it?" asked the doctor. "It seems to me that it is a state matter. Mammoth Cave isn"t a National Park."
"Apparently you haven"t followed the papers. It was a state matter until the Governor asked for federal troops. Whenever the regulars get into trouble, the federal government is rather apt to take a hand."
"I didn"t know that regulars had been sent there. Tell me about the case."
"Will you come along?"
Dr. Bird shook his head slowly.
"I really don"t see how I can spare the time, Carnes," he said. "I am in the midst of some work of the utmost importance and it hasn"t reached the stage where I can turn it over to an a.s.sistant."
"Then I won"t bother you with the details," replied Carnes as he rose.