Doc Savage: Glare of the Gorgon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage Book 19) Read Online Free PDF Page A

He saw the figure lying on the floor, smoke curling from a hot spot on the folded newspaper beside him, where the dropped cigarette had fallen.
    Up the hallway, an elevator door was closing.
    “Someone was in the hall!” barked Ham.
    DOC SAVAGE was already moving. A bronze flash, he raced for the sliding door, and almost made it.
    The door closed, and the elevator sank, according to the arrow on the wall indicator above the door.
    Changing direction abruptly, the bronze man went to another elevator, this one a specially designed super-speed lift that was not available for public use. He stepped aboard it, ran the door closed, and sent the cage rushing downward.
    This lift was designed for emergency use, among other things, and Doc’s feet all but left the floor with the momentum of its falling. There was no operator. The mechanism was entirely automatic.
    When the cage reached the ground floor, Doc had to brace himself lest he crash to his knees. Opening the door, he stepped out into the lobby, knowing that the speed lift would have beaten the ordinary elevator to the ground by a fair amount.
    Reaching the appropriate spot, the bronze man stationed himself before the shaft door, watching the arrow indicator reel off the floors as the cage sought the ground. The elevator did not stop along the way, indicating that it did not discharge any passengers on its way down.
    When the cage finally came to a rest, the door opened. The elevator boy looked out and saw Doc Savage standing there. “Mr. Savage!”
    Doc demanded, “Did you discharge a passenger on the way down, Jimmy?”
    “No, sir, I didn’t.”
    “Did you take one down from the eighty-sixth floor?”
    “No, but I received a call to go to eighty-six to pick up a passenger. But no one was there when I arrived. So I ran her back down.”
    Jimmy the elevator boy had been an employee of the building for several years, and his reputation was above reproach. So Doc did not bother to question him any further. Instead, the bronze man returned to the super-speed lift, sending it whining back to the eighty-sixth floor.
    Arriving there, he found Ham Brooks staring at a section of the corridor wall. Ham was one of Doc Savage’s aides, an attorney of considerable accomplishments and one of Harvard Law School’s most distinguished graduates. The wasp-waisted barrister was sharp of mind, feature and dress—often voted the best-dressed man in New York.
    Ham said tightly, “Doc, you must take a look at this.”
    The bronze man advanced, and when he spied the greenish-yellow blotch on the wall, a strange sound escaped his parted lips.
    It was a trilling, tuneless, yet definitely melodious, a sound which ran up and down the musical scale, pursuing no tune, and seeming to come from no particular spot. There was no easy way to categorize it. A searching wind slipping serpentine over shifting sand dunes could conceivably produce such a susurration. A chorus of otherworldly avians calling from some distant beyond might also have voiced it.
    This was Doc’s strange trilling, which only came when prompted by some unusual emotion. Here, a vague bafflement had brought it into existence, and the uncanny vocalization soon ebbed away to a nebulous nothing.
    It looked as if a shadow had been cast upon the wall. But the shadow did not move. It was fixed. The shadow was no patch of grayness, but rather stood out an extremely bilious yellow-green, a hue that brought to mind a splash of vomit.
    The figure depicted was on the shapeless side. Portions of the outline suggested a human being attired in a sack dress. The head of the thing, however, did not.
    For it was a complicated mass of twisting forms.
    Careful study caused both men to recognize the image depicted.
    Ham remarked, “Jove! If I did not know better, I would venture to say that this outline was that of the Medusa.”
    Doc said grimly, “It is exactly that, Ham. The outline suggests a snake-headed figure attired in a robed