Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 159 - Death is a Round Black Spot

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DEATH IS A ROUND BLACK SPOT
A Doc Savage Adventure by Kenneth Robeson
This page formatted 2004 Blackmask Online.
http://www.blackmask.com
? Chapter I
? Chapter II
? Chapter III
? Chapter IV
? Chapter V
? Chapter VI
? Chapter VII
? Chapter VIII
? Chapter IX
? Chapter X
? Chapter XI
? Chapter XII
? Chapter XIII
? Chapter XIV
Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine May 1946
DEATH IS A ROUND BLACK SPOT . . . and so it was. Doc Savage found that round black spot
everywhere . . . in print, in life around him, and in uncomfortably close connection with plain,
unadulterated terror. Pat Savage, Doc's gorgeous cousin, stumbled on it first . . . stumbled literally, we
mean . . . and that was the beginning of the merry chase. . . . Read it for yourself in this issue, and if you
like it, tell us!
Chapter I
IT was past sunset. Outdoors it had become nubian black as the last of the twilight faded. Shortly after
sundown the air had seemed of a sudden to grow faintly warm and moist, like a baby's breath. This
darkness, this warmth and moistness, filled the outdoors and, embedded in it, the many red and green
marker lights of the airport glowed without winking. The night had assumed a mood, a mood poised and
black. This humor prevailed everywhere except inside Three Hangar where the young man, seated in
an airplane, seemed to be kicking at a dog that wasn't there.
Patricia Savage watched him in horror. A few moments ago, Pat had drawn back until the west hangar
wall had stopped her retreat; she now stood upright against the wall; the back of her head, both shoulder
blades, were all pressed tightly to the hangar wall.
She knew he was near his end. His spasms, each of which began, and ended, with the violent kicking by
his right foot, as if he might be booting away at an invisible dog, were fewer.
Presently the dying young man threw a great chestful of air out of his lungs. It whistled past his parched
lips. He was now done. He was dead. It was his last breath, his last pulse. He had proved that the young
die hard, even the immoral young.
The hangar, which would now be described in all the newspapers, became a repository for cavernous
silence. It was a vast building made of corrugated iron nailed to a skeleton of yellow pine two-by-eights,
achieving a naked, horribly ugly effect. Large sliding doors in the south end were closed. A row of small
windows dotted across the north end were unwashed and fly-specked, and the spider webs in them held
a trapping of fly skeletons.
The English sparrows roosting high on the cross braces looked down now in fright, their eyes pin-pointed
by the banana-yellow light that came from the string of a dozen fly-specked light bulbs down the middle
of the slatternly cavern of a structure.
Six planes stood on the oil-spotted concrete floor, like rigid, frightened dragonflies, and at first glance
they differed but slightly in size, color, minor details. Actually there was considerable difference in what
they had cost their owners.
Patricia Savage began to cry. It was a dry kind of sobbing, the sound and movement were there, but no
tears, for terror had frozen the tear ducts. Terror had dried them. And she cried, after a few moments,
without sound either, only with strangled, frenzied heavings of breast and twistings of lips.
Finally she pressed both hands against the hangar wall, shoved, broke the grisly spell that held her, and
thus got herself moving. Once started, she kept going all right. But she walked strangely. She looked
down at her feet and placed one foot ahead of the other with infinite care as if just learning how.
She was a bronzy-blonde in her twenties, oval-faced, trim, with rather striking looking light brown eyes
that, when they were less blanched by horror, were more gold than brown. Her figure had a good deal in
the right places, particularly for slacks. Her slacks were sand-tan. Her leather flight jacket, the muffler of
white parachute silk tied peasant style over her head and under her chin, was the sort of thing the younger
set wears around an airport.
She moved with horrifying care, although all she was trying to do now was leave the hangar. Then she
stopped. She did not look back at the dead man, but her attention went back to him, and, after a lot of
awfully hard trying, she went back also.
The magazine on the dead young man's lap was open at an advertisement. It was merely an
advertisement that happened to be in the magazine, but it featured a round black spot.
She took the magazine.
There was one small door in the north end of the hangar. She opened this. The ground, several feet
below, was reached by a flight of wooden steps between two wooden handrails.
She prepared to go down the steps to the ground. The preparation consisted mostly of gathering together
her jangling, flapping, screaming nerves, and of holding her teeth tightly together so they wouldn't clatter.
She held the magazine. It was still folded back, open at the advertisement with the spot. There was an
arrow pointing to the spot, and the copy said: This black spot represents the spot we were on when
conversion began at the end of the war. At the other end of the arrow was a group of pictures
representing the company's present product, what it had achieved in, according to the advertisement,
such a short time. That was the sort of an advertisement it was. Just an ad. Except that it had a round
black spot in it.
Patricia Savage began descending the steps.
She tripped on the second step. She fell the rest of the way, and, falling, screamed. The cork came out
with that scream. It was a scream that sounded as if it had a fringe made of the lining from her throat. She
went down bumpety-bump from step to step, landed on the cinders of a path.
Furtive, noiseless, a human-shaped shadow sprang from the thicker shadow under the steps. An arm,
carrying a bludgeon, lifted, then fell. The blow sound was low and sharp, as if a stenographer had
popped her chewing gum.
With a jerk, Patricia Savage upset, and with another jerk, her slender body straightened out on the
cinders. She was unconscious. But the assailant, the human-shaped shadow, struck her again, not as
effectively this time, however.
A moment was required for the assailant to feel around in the darkness and find the magazine. That was
what he wanted. When the shadow had that, it closed the magazine carefully, rolled it tightly several
times, the idea being to make it impossible to tell where the magazine had been open.
But that wasn't quite satisfactory, the assailant concluded, because the magazine still opened at the
advertisement with the round spot. The attacker, on the point of tearing out that page, had a better idea.
Instead, out came another page. A page that meant nothing, one that had no round black spot—or it
might have had at that. Round figures, round objects, are common enough in advertisements that this
might have had one. But the assailant took a chance it didn't have one, and dropped the magazine back
beside Pat, and kept the page.
The assailant moved a few yards, was swallowed by the darkness, and there was no movement.
Chapter II
PATRICIA SAVAGE'S scream had rebounded in echoes from the vast sides of the hangars. It startled
the darkness. Amazed silence reigned, lasted for a few moments more. Then livestock on farms in the
neighborhood began showing their outraged feelings. A dog howled, a horse snorted, a jack, the sire of
mules, began braying like the honking of a horn on a Packard. The first dog was joined by at least two
others and two hogs got in a fight, squealing as they fought hog fashion by chewing one another's ears.
These livestock sounds, while far away, could be heard distinctly.
“What'n hell was that?” cried Mr. Ivey, the night watchman.
The old man seized his flashlight in fright. He had been sitting in a chair in the line-shack office, half asleep
in the guilty way that old watchmen sleep when they're not supposed to be asleep.
“What was that?” he yelled. Cadaverous blue light from the fluorescent ceiling fixture made the old
watchman look like a pale, wrinkled, purple ghost.
The distant livestock racket and the nearer deathly stillness mixed together in the line-shack and further
terrified him.
“Hey!” he cried in alarm. “What could thata been?”
He sprang erect, upsetting his chair.
A man who had been lying on three other chairs sat upright. “For the love of Mike!” he said. He seemed
frightened. “What's the matter with you?” He stared in alarm at the old watchman. His name was Doc
Savage, but he had furnished the name of Stevens and he was supposed to be a bum. He had actually
been asleep on the three chairs for some time.
Lying across his face, as if to keep the light out of his eyes, there had been a newspaper. It had now
fallen to the floor, but it had landed on the floor with the same sheet uppermost that had been uppermost
when it was over his face. There was an advertisement for an alarm clock on that page, and the face of
the clock was perfectly round. Round, but not black.
“Didn'chu hear that noise?” Mr. Ivey demanded. He clutched his flashlight with trembling fingers.
Doc Savage was not concerned. “Huh?” he said. He was a very large young man with a skin of a rather
distinctive bronze color, the result of too much exposure to too bright sunlight sometime in the past, and
he had disguised its distinctiveness somewhat by rubbing a little dirt and grease on it. He had taken pains
otherwise to look like a cheap bum. He wore a green-striped shirt which had become sweat-stained
under the arms, and the coat of his pepper and salt tweed suit, badly worn, badly in need of pressing,
and more in need of cleaning, was tossed over the back of one of the chairs. The pockets bulged as if
they contained the remainder of his traveling wardrobe, which they did. The best touch, though, was the
fact that his flake-gold eyes were somewhat bloodshot. This was genuine. He had been without sleep for
quite a long time.
“Didn'chu hear it?” Mr. Ivey demanded excitedly.
“Hear what?”
“Sounded like somebody yelled.”
Doc Savage yawned. “Never heard a thing.” He loosened his green necktie preparatory to going back to
sleep.
“We oughta see what it was.” The watchman's moist potato-brown eyes were growing rounder with
emotion. He didn't say he was afraid, but he asked, “How about you going with me?”
Doc Savage stretched out on the chairs. He said, “I don't live here.” Then he masked another yawn by
patting his lips with the back of a hand, and closed his eyes.
Mr. Ivey glared at him. “Don'cha wanna go with me?” he demanded invitingly.
Doc Savage feigned snoring.
Mr. Ivey said bitterly, “That's the gratitude I get for givin' a bum a place to sleep!” The old watchman
departed unwillingly to investigate the female shriek he had heard.
DOC SAVAGE lay very still, not snoring now, but listening intently, until the old man's footfalls had gone
well off into the darkness, whereupon he rolled off the chairs, quite silently, and, not standing erect so that
he could be seen through the windows, in case the watchman looked back, crawled to the desk. He kept
on the floor, almost flattened out. His hand made a quick snatch at the telephone, and brought it down.
He made a discovery that bothered him for a moment. The telephone was not the type which
automatically summoned the operator when the receiver was lifted. It had to be rung. There was a crank
on a box beside the desk, fastened to the wall. The box had a bell that would doubtless ring loudly.
He finally solved the noise problem adequately, if not too successfully, by jamming a match in between
the bells and the clapper-shield, thus keeping the clapper from more than buzzing when he spun the
crank.
“The Traveler's Hotel,” he said. Presently he said, “Mr. Mayfair, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett
Mayfair,” to the operator. . . . “Doesn't answer? . . . Wait a minute. Try Ham Brooks. Brigadier General
Theodore Marley Brooks. . . . That's right.” Waiting, he listened for sounds that might show the old
watchman was coming back, but there was none.
Ham Brooks had the deep, modulated voice of an orator and a smoothie, a man who liked to do things
with words. Doc said: “Something cut loose out here. I don't know what, but a woman screamed, and it
didn't sound as if she had seen a mouse. . . . Better come out. But under cover.”
“What do you mean, under cover?” Ham demanded.
“Pretend to be somebody you aren't. . . . Think of something. It doesn't have to be too good. Just
something to keep your identity from becoming too public. . . . Yes, that would do. Bring Monk along.
By the way, where is he?”
“In his room, I suppose.”
“I called there. He didn't answer.”
Ham said bitterly, “They got a blonde waitress here at the hotel. I bet that's where he is.”
“Find him.”
“He's probably with that blonde, he is.”
“Don't give me any office when you show up,” Doc said. “Pretend you don't know me.”
“Okay, we don't know you,” Ham said.
MR. IVEY, the nightwatchman, now crept around the end of Three Hangar. “Hey, there!” he called
timidly. The old man was a-twitter with fears. He advanced a few cautious steps, which was the way he
had been progressing—a few steps, a pause to listen, to shiver.
“Hey, there!” he called again.
He drew near the short flight of steps which led up to the small back door of Three Hangar. Suddenly his
eyes flew wide, became in his old face like two boiled eggs lying on sand.
“Ooooooo!” he yelled. His flashlight had fallen on a human form, but he wasn't frightened any more when
he saw an exposure of curvaceous leg.
“D'ja fall, huh?” he gulped.
Patricia Savage was now sitting spraddled like a little girl playing in the sandbox with her toys, at the base
of the steps. Her mouth was loosely open, her eyes loosely narrowed, her chin, all the muscles in her face
were loosely held. All the muscles in her body were loose, flaccid, numb.
Mr. Ivey was puzzled by not getting an answer.
“Huh?” he said. He leaned down. “Wha's matter?”
Pat Savage's lips moved. They formed words without sound, words that were not even strong
lip-shapings.
“Hunh?” said Mr. Ivey.
Pat said, “Look—see—dead!” The words left her lips slowly and distinctly, with a painful separation
between each word.
The old man didn't seem to comprehend, acted as if he didn't understand at all. His blank face remained
blank for a moment, then changed slightly, as if he had decided she was trying to be funny. “Heh, heh,
you're not dead, lady,” he said. He thought she had made a joke apparently. He laughed at this joke.
“Heh, heh, heh,” he laughed. He was seeing, however, that his flashlight beam didn't wander from
exposed thighs. “What'd you do? Trip?” he asked.
“Look . . . inside . . .” The rest of what she was trying to say stuck in the glue that horror made in her
throat.
“Huh?” The bit of leg the old man was watching was the color of beer with a dash of cream in it.
“Please . . . go look!” She managed this just a bit more distinctly, more forcibly.
“Who? Me?”
“Please!”
“Where?”
“In the hangar.”
“Oh, in there!” said Mr. Ivey. He reluctantly changed the coverage of his flashlight beam, pointing it at the
steps.
“Up here, huh? Up them steps. What's in there?” He seemed about to become alarmed again.
Patricia Savage bowed her head in the bitterest despair. She was dazed, she had seen a murder, she had
been struck over the head, she had been unconscious, and the old man was a silly old goon, an idiot, an
imbecile. “You dumb old goat!” she whimpered.
The old man was quite startled.
“Ha!” he exclaimed. He was injured. He licked his lips, like an old dog licking a hurt.
Presently he climbed the steps. He mounted slowly and methodically, a step at a time, holding to the
bannister with one hand and pressing down on a body knee with the other hand to get extra lift. He did
not understand the situation, but he was thinking about it, and presently he changed his mind and went
back down the stairs again.
He picked up the magazine which was lying on the ground. He turned it around and around in his hands,
put his flashlight on it, opened it, let it fall open in his hands. He did this two or three times in a stupid
way.
“This your'n?” he wished to know.
Pat said nothing. But she looked at the old man in the way one would look at a sow that had just eaten
her own pigs. The old man was startled again.
Mr. Ivey climbed the steps. He was not unduly excited. He went up as he had gone before, helping his
knees with his hands. He even grinned a little, because, old though he was, he still liked a spicy female,
one with a nice turn of leg.
He opened the door and went into the hangar.
MR. IVEY jumped out of the hangar a few moments later. He was perturbed. He tried to yell, but could
only manage to blow a bubble of terror. He started down the steps and suddenly he was revolving in
space and shrieking.
He had tripped on the second step. He fell quite hard. There was a crunching sound as he landed, and
for a few seconds the awful shock of a broken leg—his right leg had broken—kept him utterly still.
Patricia Savage spent the interval staring up the second step. Finally she spoke, speaking largely to
herself, so that she could get it clearly established in her mind as a fact.
“That's the step I fell on,” she said. “But there is nothing wrong with the step.”
Beside her, the magazine began to make fluttering sounds as if it were alive. As if it had animation,
substance, reality, were coming to life and doing something for itself. Actually this was the work of a
vagrant breeze, which was turning the leaves of the magazine rapidly, making the fluttering sound. This
sound, the macabre voice of the magazine leaves, was so much like the dying rattle the young man in the
hangar had made a few minutes ago that Pat Savage, from horror, shook as if she was having a malaria
chill.
Finally the wind stopped turning the magazine which, undisturbed at last, settled itself with the leaves
open at the advertisement that featured the spot that was so round, so black.
Chapter III
WALTER WEEM, the sheriff's deputy, heard footsteps approaching in the darkness. He became
alarmed. His head, which had been bowed in thought and worry, whipped up, the cords which had been
slack in his scrawny throat became tense, and he listened.
“Who's that?” he barked in alarm. He addressed the demand to Mr. Ivey. “Who could that be?”
“My leg hurts so!” the old watchman whimpered.
“Somebody's coming!” the alarmed deputy said. There was egg stain on the deputy's maroon necktie of
cluster-striped wool.
He was Deputy Sheriff Walter Weem, and he was in charge, and he was wishing violently that he had
never gotten in politics, never been appointed deputy sheriff. Because Doyle, the regular sheriff, was sick
in the hospital and would probably die in a few days and he, Weem, was it. He and his pot-bellied
deputy, Ike Davis. Ike was a nephew of Sheriff Doyle's. Weem had a very low opinion of Ike. As a
matter of fact, Weem's opinion of the world in general was rather low, but it was particularly low of Ike.
The footsteps approached in the darkness.
“Who else is around here?” Weem barked. He was very alarmed.
“Nobody,” said the old nightwatchman. “Nobody but me, the young lady, the other officer 'n' you.” Mr.
Ivey was lying flat on his back on a table, his bony fingers clasping the table edge in agony. He had
apparently forgotten the bum—Doc Savage—who was pretending to be asleep on the chairs in the other
room of the line-shack.
“It must be Ike,” Weem said disgustedly.
It was Ike. Ike was short, very wide, and didn't look too clean. He wore a very new, very shiny, very
large revolver which hung around his middle in an equally new and shiny cartridge belt. Belt and gun, so
shiny, so new, looked as conspicuous as a diamond bracelet around his middle.
Ike examined Patricia Savage. His interest was active. Pat was still dazed; stupor made her face look
slack.
“Some babe,” Ike remarked.
Weem demanded, “You look at the body?”
“Heck, no,” Ike said. “I was just looking around outdoors. I didn't see nobody.”
Weem was disgusted. “I thought you'd gone to look at the body and see if he was dead.”
Mr. Ivey furtively shifted his position on the table, gnawing his lips in pain. He was trying to get a better
view of Pat's legs. The old man's right leg had been broken by his fall.
“We gotta get busy!” Weem said. He glared at Mr. Ivey. “You say the guy's murdered?”
“He didn't chop his own head half off with an ax,” said Mr. Ivey. He pointed at Pat. “I think she done it.”
“Huh?”
“I think she killed him.” Mr. Ivey again pointed at Pat.
Pat stood with her back to a glass showcase. The showcase literally propped her up. Her flake-gold
eyes looked washed-out, blank, as if she was not capable of hearing, seeing, nor was aware of anything
in any way. Threads of blood had dried on the calves of her beer-with-dash-of-cream legs.
Weem became alarmed by the bloodstains. “She's hurt!” he exclaimed.
“She just skinned herself,” the old watchman said.
The deputy's chivalry was aroused. “Where's a chair? Give her a chair.” He looked around for a chair.
Suddenly the deputy stiffened. “What the hell!” He stood rigid with attention, like a Gordon setter that
had gone on point.
He had heard a snore.
“What's that?” he yelled.
THIS room, the lounge room of the line-shack, was a large place, all pleasant windows on one side. One
wall was papered with regional charts fitted together in a nearly complete aëronautical map of the United
States. Tacked to a bulletin board were the late Weekly Notices to Airmen, CAR bulletins,
Trade-A-Plane, local traffic pattern blueprint. Shelves held parachutes, some in bags, some not. Other
furnishings included a pop cooler, gas heater, desk, bench, the table on which Mr. Ivey lay, chairs,
spittoon, radio. A glass showcase contained charts, goggles, log books, license folders, Civil Aëronautics
bulletins, computers these latter offered for sale. It was against this case that Pat leaned.
The snore had come from the other, a smaller, room, an office. This was obscured in darkness, although
a door connecting the two rooms was open.
“What was that?” yelled Weem.
Mr. Ivey blinked. The old watchman's hair, stringy, faded, was the color of a used floor mop.
“That's the bum,” he said.
“What bum?”
“The bum in there.”
“What's the matter with him?”
“He's asleep.”
“Well, for God's sake!” the deputy exclaimed. His hand went to his coat skirts, where his gun was. He
thrust his head into the room, found the switch, turned on the lights.
The deputy's teeth flashed in astonishment.
“Has he been lying there like that the whole time?” he demanded.
“He has been since I saw him,” Mr. Ivey said.
Doc Savage snored again. He did not quite achieve E above middle C, but he came close. He got F. The
newspaper was again in place over his face, open at the advertisement which had the perfectly round
design as a part of its illustration.
Deputy Weem's head came up; stretching made his young bull neck grow smaller. “He's not dead, is
he?”
“Naw, he's snoring,” said Mr. Ivey.
The deputy blushed. He had realized that dead men do not snore. “Who is he, anyway?”
The old watchman, lifting his head off the table to speak, resembled a rooster with a crick in its neck.
“Him?” His tone indicated he was no friend of Doc Savage's. “He was here when I came to work. I
dunno who he is.” He licked his lips. “He coulda killed the guy in the hangar.”
The deputy jumped. “He could have—wait a minute! I thought you said he'd been lying here the whole
time!”
Mr. Ivey blinked cunningly.
“He coulda went out and killed the guy without me seein' him,” he said. “It's possible.”
Deputy Weem hung his thumb in his vest armholes. “You think he did?”
“Did what?”
“Murdered the guy.”
“Sure,” said Mr. Ivey. “I bet he did.”
IKE, the deputy's assistant, spit on the floor. He didn't think much more of the deputy than the deputy
thought of him, and he could show his feelings because he was related to the sheriff and couldn't very well
be fired.
“Why the hell don't you wake him up and ask him?” Ike said.
Excitement turned the Deputy's cheeks from Ben Davis apple color to Grimes Golden apple color. He
laid his hand on his holster. “You wake him up, Ike,” he said. His oak-brown eyes were cautious. “I'll
watch him for you.”
Mr. Ivey raised his head and malicious excitement turned the old man's eye whites the color of leghorn
egg yolks. He watched.
“I betcha he killed him,” he mumbled.
Ike strode to the three chairs. He was brave. His manner said: Hell, I'm gonna arrest the murderer now.
He bent over the man on the chairs. Suddenly he emitted a cry of pain. He had been hit in the belly with a
fist.
“What's the idea?” Doc Savage yelled. “What are you trying to do to me?” He was acting, sounding, like
the bum he was pretending to be. The knot of his green necktie hung under his left ear, like a hangman's
noose. The newspaper with the round advertisement illustration, not a spot, but round, fell to the floor.
Ike cursed. He swung a fist.
As brief as an affray between two strange dogs on leashes which had snapped at each other as their
owners were passing, the battle was on, off again, in an instant. Ike picked himself off the floor. He held
his middle. He could hardly breathe.
Deputy Weem was quite pleased. He would have liked to hit Ike himself, but this was the next best thing.
摘要：

DEATHISAROUNDBLACKSPOTADocSavageAdventurebyKennethRobesonThispageformatted2004BlackmaskOnline.http://www.blackmask.com?ChapterI?ChapterII?ChapterIII?ChapterIV?ChapterV?ChapterVI?ChapterVII?ChapterVIII?ChapterIX?ChapterX?ChapterXI?ChapterXII?ChapterXIII?ChapterXIVOriginallypublishedinDocSavageMagazin...

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