"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 139 - Weird Valley" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

midtown skyscrapers. They maintained a private garage in the basement which usually contained several
cars, all of them special machines which they had equipped for their peculiar needs. They took a dark
sedan which was the least unorthodox of the cars.

They headed uptown.

“Hey, shyster, where we going?” Monk demanded of Ham.

“I've got a friend,” Ham said. “He's the world's leading authority on witchcraft, Salem, and the Salem
period. What he doesn't know about Salem just didn't happen.” He glanced at Methuselah Brown.
“We'll soon have our two-hundred-ninety-year-old friend smoked out of his bush.”

The old gaffer snorted.

“You're in for an awful shock,” he said.



HAM'S friend lived in one of the more impressive stone houses in Westchester County. By the time the
ride up there ended, Monk and Ham were losing their confidence, and their patience with themselves
along with it. They felt it reflected on their good sense to believe that there could be any truth in such a
preposterous thing.

But the ride had given them a chance to inspect old Methuselah Brown at close range, and they could see
unusual evidences of, if not ageless antiquity, at least something strange. His skin, for one thing, had a
leathery quality that was not quite natural. In fact, the more they looked at it, the more it looked like a
hide that might have been on a man for nearly three hundred years.

The old gaffer's teeth were worn off nearly to the gums. Not decayed. Worn off. They were sound teeth,
but they were worn the way no man's teeth become worn in a normal lifetime, or even two or three
lifetimes.
Monk caught Ham eyeing him, and grimaced, muttered, “We're getting sucked in to something.”

Old Methuselah Brown chuckled. “You fellows are making fools out of yourselves, did you know it?”

“That's just what we were thinking,” Monk assured him.

“No, no, by bein' so sure I am either crazy or a practical joker,” said the old man. “That's what I mean.”

Monk and Ham mentally threw up their hands.

“Here is where my friend lives,” Ham said.

The witchcraft-collector friend was a tall, lean, spectacled gentleman with a merry smile and twinkling
eyes. Monk liked him immediately, and kept on liking him until he discovered the fellow was one of the
bluest of the bluebloods, controlled a fortune reputed to be more than a billion dollars, and was a society
leader. After that, Monk's admiration cooled. There was no sensible reason for this. The man was still a
fine fellow. But Monk had become so accustomed to grumbling at and about Ham's social-leader friends
that he just couldn't stomach the idea of one of them being a nice guy.