"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 023 - The Mystic Mullah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

“Even the palace of the Khan does not excel this,” Hadim told himself.

Then he jerked to a stop. He could feel a slight breeze through the corridor. And he had heard a hissing
sound. This last was very faint.

Hadim turned slowly—and his voice went out in a sudden, wild shriek of terror. It was ear-splitting, that
shriek. In it was all of the agony of a man who knows he has met death.

Down the corridor, floating in the air, strange, fantastic things were approaching. They were like fat
snakes, their color an unholy green, their diameter perhaps that of a human wrist, their length the span of
an arm from hand to elbow. They whirled, contorted with a sort of dervish dance. They seemed to grow
fatter, then thinner.

Most hideous of all was the fact that these flying serpentine things seemed unreal. They were ghostly,
nebulous, without any real body or shape.

Hadim, screaming again, had his long knife out of his left sleeve. He retreated. The green things
overhauled him. He began to run backward. They still gained.

Hadim came to the end of the corridor, to a window. He beat it, knocking the glass out, but the metal
crosspieces defied him, thwarting him in his mad desire to jump through.

The green horrors reached him and Hadim struck with his knife, only to shriek out in fresh horror as the
blade passed completely through the green atrocity and nothing happened. He struck again; then the
serpentine things were upon him.

They brushed against his arms, his chest. One rolled like a hideous green tongue, caressing his face,
lingering about his mouth, his nostrils, then rolling up over his eyes. Hadim fought them with his hands,
shrieking again and again; he writhed down to get away from them, and squirmed on the floor.

Then the green things arose and drifted out through the holes which Hadim had beaten in the skyscraper
window with his fists. They went slowly, as if satisfied with the work they had done. They had changed
shape materially by now; one had been knocked to pieces and had resolved itself into half a dozen thin,
green strings, so pale that the eye could easily see through them, distinguishing the frames of the window
behind them.



Chapter II. THE FIRE-FACED MAN
DOWN the corridor a way, and around a corner, there was a plain metal door, the panel of which bore
a name in small letters of a peculiar bronze color:

CLARK SAVAGE, JR.

This door whipped back and a tall, incredibly bony man popped out. The man was thinner than it seemed
any human being could be and still exist. He wore no coat, and a rubber apron was tied about his
midsection. Rubber gloves were on his hands, and one hand held a magnifying glass made in the shape of
a monocle.

He peered about, blinking, searching for the source of the shrieks which had drawn his attention. But