One-Eyed Mystic: A Doc Savage Adventure (Doc Savage #111) Read online

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  Title: One-Eyed Mystic

  Date of first publication: 1944

  Author: Lester Dent (as Kenneth Robeson) (1904-1959)

  Date first posted: Jan. 10, 2021

  Date last updated: Jan. 10, 2021

  Faded Page eBook #20210120

  This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

  WHO IS

  DOC

  SAVAGE

  The bronze giant, who with his five aides became world famous, whose name was as well known in the far regions of China and the jungles of Africa as in the skyscrapers of New York.

  There were stories of Doc Savage’s almost incredible strength; of his amazing scientific discoveries of strange weapons and dangerous exploits.

  Doc dedicated his life to aiding those faced by dangers with which they could not cope.

  His name brought fear to those who sought to prey upon the unsuspecting. His name was praised by thousands he had saved.

  DOC SAVAGE’S AMAZING CREW

  “Ham,” Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, was never without his ominous, black sword cane.

  “Monk,” Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, just over five feet tall, yet over 260 pounds. His brutish exterior concealed the mind of a great scientist.

  “Renny,” Colonel John Renwick, his favorite sport was pounding his massive fists through heavy, paneled doors.

  “Long Tom,” Major Thomas J. Roberts, was the physical weakling of the crowd, but a genius at electricity.

  “Johnny,” William Harper Littlejohn, the scientist and the greatest living expert on geology and archæology.

  WITH THEIR LEADER, THEY WOULD

  GO ANYWHERE, FIGHT ANYONE,

  DARE EVERYTHING—SEEKING

  EXCITEMENT AND PERILOUS

  ADVENTURE!

  ONE-EYED MYSTIC

  Kenneth Robeson

  ONE-EYED MYSTIC #111

  PRINTING HISTORY

  One-Eyed Mystic was originally published in Doc Savage magazine, January 1944. Copyright 1943 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  ONE-EYED MYSTIC

  I

  He had a queer little face, the face of an imp. He was a small man, built like a mosquito. Fragile limbs and a fragile body. His skin was about the same color as the brown-leather suitcase he carried. He was one of the passengers in the air line’s limousine in which Renny Renwick rode from the Grand Central Air Lines ticket office out to LaGuardia Field. But in the beginning Renny Renwick paid no attention to the small brown fellow, for Renny had other things on his mind.

  Renny was taking a vacation. For two weeks or so, he was going to stop being Colonel John Renwick, the eminent engineer and member of Doc Savage’s group of five aids. Renny was going to fish.

  He held his hands apart as far as he could, illustrating the size of the fish he was going to snag.

  “That big,” he said.

  Doc Savage was riding out to the airport to see Renny off on the vacation. So were Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks, the latter pair being two more of the group of five assistants.

  Doc said, “This will be the first vacation you have had, Renny.”

  “Yes. I’m slipping in my old age,” Renny said, grinning.

  There was no truth in the statement, and they both knew it. Renny, with his great size, big fists, homely face, and his exclamation of, “Holy cow!” for every unusual situation, wasn’t slipping. Not at all. The thing he still liked most was excitement.

  But things were slow enough for a little vacation. Things did not often get that slow, so Renny was taking advantage of it.

  “If something comes up that looks good,” Renny said, “be sure and let me know about it.”

  “Of course,” Doc Savage assured him.

  Doc Savage was a giant bronze man whose appearance was almost as astonishing as his reputation. His bronze hair was only a little darker than his skin, and his eyes, one of his most spectacular features, were like pools of flake gold always stirred by tiny winds. He was obviously a man of great physical strength.

  They were known all over the world—Doc Savage and his group—for their rather fantastic profession of pursuing fantastic adventure, of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers who seemed to be outside the reach of the law.

  Renny rubbed his hands together.

  “Fish this long.” He illustrated again, exaggerating. “And Norman Monaghan’s camp cooking—yum, yum! Brother, I’m going to have me a couple of weeks of peace and plenty.”

  The limousine, a sleek streamlined affair, rushed along in luxury and silence. It was a fall day, crisp and bright.

  Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks got into a fuss. It began mildly over Monk’s pet pig or Ham’s pet chimpanzee whichever had chewed up one of Ham’s dress gloves. From a mild start, in a couple of minutes, Monk and Ham were threatening to tear each other’s heads off.

  The row didn’t mean anything except that Monk and Ham were feeling good.

  The queer little brown imp of a man showed no interest in them, except once, when he glanced at them—and Renny realized the little imp had one eye.

  The little brown man was wearing a brown patch over his left eye.

  At the airport, Renny shook hands around, said good-bys, took some good-natured ribbing about the microscopic size of the fish he’d probably catch, and prepared to board the plane.

  “You say this Norman Monaghan is a good cook?” asked Monk.

  “Swell. A fine woods cook. It’s his hobby. That, and fishing,” Renny said enthusiastically.

  “I hope he’s got patience enough to put up with you for two weeks,” said Monk, chuckling.

  “Monaghan is a nice guy. I met him when I designed the building for the bank of which he’s a vice president. We’ve been fishing a couple of times together. He’s great. I hope you can meet him sometime.”

  “Sure. Get us a picture of the fish.”

  Ham said, “If he does that, he’d better take along a camera with a magnifying lens.”

  Renny got on the plane.

  He found that he shared his seat with the little brown one-eyed imp.

  The plane rolled to the other end of the runway, the pilot tested the motors, then they took off. Renny was an expert pilot, with several hundred hours in heavy transport ships, and he liked the way the pilot handled this craft. The pilot was good.

  Renny settled back to relax. The plane climbed, then flew westward smoothly.

  The performance of the plane was soothing. Renny, having nothing else to do, decided to practice a method of relaxing which he had seen Doc Savage use. Renny wasn’t sure of the exact procedure, but it seemed to consist of consciously relaxing each part of the body, then keeping the mind on something soothing and sleepy so that the muscles wouldn’t tighten up again. He tried it for a while. By gosh, it seemed to
work!

  The one-eyed little imp now spoke.

  “Stupid,” he said.

  “Eh?” said Renny, opening one eye.

  “Is that yoga you are trying?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Renny said. “Why?”

  “You do it stupidly.”

  “Nobody asked you for advice,” Renny said, and closed his eyes and prepared to resume his relaxing.

  But the little imp wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he was indignant. He seemed to be insulted. Renny had intended to offend him just enough—if the fellow wanted to be offended—that the man would shut up. But the little man was too insulted to become silent.

  “You stupid idiot!” he said to Renny.

  “That,” said Renny, “is three times you’ve flipped that word stupid around. The fourth time might get you a skinned nose.”

  The little man pointed a finger at Renny with great indignation. “You are attempting the diversion of the senses from the external world and the concentration of thought within.”

  “Eh?”

  “You,” said the little imp, “are as clumsy as a cow at it.”

  “Yeah? Maybe you could do better!”

  The small man gave Renny a look of frightful injury. “You are being sarcastic, of course. That is because you do not know who I am.”

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  “You would not realize if I told you!”

  Renny’s impulse was to grin. The little brown fellow was so cocky, so indignantly serious, and making his pronouncements with such a profound significance, as if each one of them was going to stop the world, that he was funny.

  “All right, tell me who you are,” said Renny. “Let’s see if I know.”

  That made the small man more angry. He slapped his chest. “It is wasting the essence of inner dynamic fluidity to talk this way to you. You are nothing. You are bones and some meat. That thing you think is your mind is a rusted, worthless tool. A sponge too dried out to soak up anything.”

  “Dumb, in other words,” said Renny.

  “Exactly.” The little man leaned forward. “Do you really want to know who I am?”

  “Frankly, I don’t give the least part of a damn,” said Renny.

  The one-eyed imp slapped his chest again. It sounded as if he had hit a small drum.

  “I,” he said, “am Cici, the omnipotent. In the Central Council of the Fartherest Inward, I am the most completely self-equipped.”

  “I hope you know you’re not making sense,” Renny said.

  “I am Cici, of Kukilcuaca,” the imp said. “You do not know where Kukilcuaca is, doubtless. It is in Mexico, a very remote part of Mexico. Have you ever been in Mexico?”

  Renny said, “I’ve been in Mexico, and I never heard of—”

  “Kukilcuaca is in the part of Mexico where you weren’t,” said the indignant small brown man. “No one, no one of your kind I mean, has seen it. Few have seen it. But I, Cici, am the most honored there. I am the mystic. There has been, in twenty generations, no other great enough to be the mystic.”

  He leaned back and sneered at Renny.

  “That,” he concluded, “is who I am.”

  Renny’s grin loosened, and finally faded. The little goof was making him uncomfortable. The imp was some kind of a nut, of course, and like anybody else Renny was never very comfortable in the presence of an eccentric.

  “O.K.,” said Renny sourly. “Now that we’ve settled that, how about some peace and quiet?”

  The one-eyed mystic gave Renny a look which contained much more hate than the situation seemed to warrant.

  “You,” he told Renny, “have offended me grievously. I do not let such offenses go unpunished.”

  Renny got a little indignant himself.

  “You keep fooling with me and you’ll get your behind paddled,” Renny said.

  Then he leaned back and closed his eyes, ignoring the other.

  Later, Renny realized that it was somewhat strange that he should go to sleep almost immediately.

  A hand, shaking his shoulder, aroused Renny, although the awakening was slow. He tried to speak, to say that he was awake, but the words sounded thick and strange.

  “Wake up, Palsy,” a voice said. “Snap out of it. You’re almost home.”

  Renny said, “Sure, sure,” and it was another mumble.

  Getting his eyes open was a job which he finally managed. He was, he decided, in a taxicab.

  The cab driver, a thick-necked individual with a pocked face that would look better behind jail bars, was leaning back over the seat.

  “Wake up, Palsy,” he said.

  “I’m awake,” Renny managed to say fairly distinctly.

  “O.K. Then I’ll take you on to the hotel.” The cab driver leered. “Thought you might want to be awake when you got there, in case there might be somebody unfriendly around.”

  Renny muttered, “Who do you mean?”

  The cabby winked. “I don’t know nothing, Palsy.”

  “Stop calling me pal!” Renny said.

  The driver shrugged. He sank back behind the wheel, and the taxi resumed progress.

  “What the devil’s the matter with me?”—Renny wondered. “Why does my brain feel so foggy? What—”

  “Holy cow!” Renny gasped.

  Where was the plane? Why wasn’t he in it? What on earth had happened to him?

  He leaned forward, took his head in both hands, and squeezed his temples. They ached. He managed to straighten out his thoughts—and he was quite positive that he should be in a plane en route from New York to Kansas City.

  Why wasn’t he in the plane? What place was this? Where was he now?

  “Driver!” Renny said. “What town is this?”

  He was amazed at how hoarse and thick his voice sounded.

  The driver glanced around. “Who you kidding, Palsy?”

  “Never mind,” Renny said.

  Renny had gotten a look at his hands. They were pale, unhealthy-looking. They should have been healthily tanned. Renny’s fists were—or should have been—enormous things, neither of which would have gone into a quart pail. But the hands looked smaller, and they felt drawn, as if they were trying to pucker themselves to become even smaller. The fingernails, Renny realized with loathing, seemed to be tinted like a girl’s.

  “Holy cow!” he muttered.

  The taxicab stopped in front of a cheap-looking hotel, the driver saying, “Here you are, Palsy.”

  Renny looked around instinctively for his traveling bag, his bait box, and the case containing his fishing rods. There was no such equipment in the cab.

  “Where . . . where’s my fishing stuff?” he asked.

  The cab driver laughed. “You’re a great kidder, Palsy.”

  Renny wanted to ask a lot of questions. But he didn’t like the driver, and he didn’t feel up to talking now, anyway. His head was too thick. He felt dazed.

  The meter said fifty cents. Renny gave the driver the fare, and a quarter tip, out of habit.

  Sounding dissatisfied, the driver said, “Palsy, you generally give me five bucks for hauling you.”

  Renny, dazed and out of patience, muttered, “I’ll give you a knot on the head if you start anything.”

  The driver grinned somewhat fawningly. “Now you sound more like yourself, Palsy.”

  Renny entered the hotel, and he was not surprised to discover that he had no recollection of having been in the place before. It was a strange hotel.

  Not knowing what else to do, Renny approached the room clerk’s desk.

  The clerk, a thin fellow with a dough sack for a face, tossed a key down in front of Renny, saying, “There you are, Mr. Gerson.”

  Renny picked up the key. Seven-fourteen. He considered, for a moment, giving the clerk an argument and asking some of the questions that were beginning to swarm up in the fog that filled his brain. But he was in no mental condition to talk intelligently.

  He rode to the seventh floor in an elevator
that had an odor. The key let him into seven-fourteen.

  The room, not in the least like the rest of the hotel in appearance, was extremely flashy. The furniture was elaborate, but very cheap. There were pillows everywhere, on the floor, in the chairs. The place smelled strongly of cheap incense.

  Renny could see nothing anywhere that he recognized as belonging to him.

  He stood there, peering about from aching eyes, and finally said, “Holy cow!” again, explosively.

  He stumbled to the writing desk, pawed open a drawer, and found the hotel stationery:

  HOTEL PRINCE ROYAL

  KANSAS CITY, MO.

  Well, at least he was in Kansas City.

  He made for the bathroom, where there would be a mirror. Because he had seen his hands earlier, he was somewhat prepared for what he saw when he looked into the mirror. But he gave a horrified croak at the sight.

  II

  The face in the mirror was somewhat the size and shape of the countenance Renny had been accustomed to shaving mornings. But that was about as far as the resemblance went. The visage which confronted him in the mirror was undeniably evil, dissipated, unpleasant. The complexion was pasty—as bad as the coloring of the clerk downstairs—and the eyebrows were a rusty red, as was the hair. Renny didn’t have red hair. The face wasn’t his.

  Scowling at the face, Renny said, “I’ll take another look at you later.”

  He stumbled back into the living room. He was very tired. I feel, he thought, like the morning after a tough night.

  He sank down in a chair, rested his head against the back, and endeavored to get his brain to do something that bore some resemblance to thinking. The effort was not very successful. He could recollect, with a hazy unreality, what had happened since he had awakened a few minutes ago in the taxicab. But before that—back to the time he had leaned back in his seat in the plane and gone to sleep—there was a gap.

  He could recall the little brown one-eyed imp who had said he was a mystic, whatever that was. Renny grimaced. The mystic was certainly a nut. Renny couldn’t recall having disliked anyone so intensely on such a short acquaintance.