A hideous cracking and rumbling began to reach his ears. He could hear it plainly when he laid his head to the ice under foot.
It was the noise of the icepack piling on the shore. This uncharted land must be but a narrow ridge projecting from the polar seas.
Doc neared the shore.
An awesome sound brought him up sharp. It split through the banshee howl of the blizzard. It put the hairs On Doc's nape on edge.
A woman's shrieking!
DOC SPED for the sound. The snow collapsed under him unexpectedly. Only a flip of his Herculean body kept him from dropping to death on the snaggled icy bottom of the wide crevasse far below.
He ran on as though he had not just shaken the clammy claw of the Reaper.
A white mass hulked up before his searching golden eyes. It looked like a gigantic iceberg cast upon the shore. But it had a strangely man-made look.
A ship!
The ice-crusted hulk of the lost liner Oceanic!
Doc raced along the hull. It canted over his head, for the liner was obviously heeled slightly. A hundred feet, he ran. Another!
He came to an object which might have been a long icicle hanging down from the rail of the liner. But he knew it was an ice-coated chain. The links were a procession of knobs.
These knobs enabled Doc to climb. But the mounting was not easy. A greased pole would have been a stairway in comparison. The blizzard moaned and hooted and sought to pick him bodily from his handhold.
The woman was no longer shrieking.
Doc topped the rail. A scene of indescribable confusion met his eyes. Capstans, hatches, bitts, all were knots of ice. The rigging had long ago been torn down by the polar elements. Masts and wire-rope stays and cargo booms made a tangle on the deck. Ice had formed on these.
The forward deck, it was. A frozen, hideous wilderness! The gale whined in it like a host of ravenous beasts.
Doc reached a hatch. It defied even his terrific strength. The years had cemented it solidly.
The deck did not slope as much as he had thought. It was not quite level, though. He glided for the stern.
An open companion lured him. Snow was pouring in. Half inside, he saw the floor was seven feet deep in ice snow which had formed a glacial mass through the years.
Doc tried another companion. The door was closed. It resisted his shove. His fist whipped a blow which traveled a scant foot. The door caved as though dynamite had let loose against it.
Doc pitched inside.
A wave of pungent aroma met his nostrils.
It was the smell of the thing which had stalked them on the glacier! It was horrible yet there was a flowerlike quality to it.
Gloom lurked in the recesses of the cabin where he stood. Formerly, it had been a lounge. But the once luxuriant furniture was now but a rubble on the floor. Some fantastic monster might have torn it to bits, as though to line a nest.
Bones lay in the litter. Bones of polar bear, of seal. Flesh still clung to some. Others were half-eaten carcasses.
Doc sped ahead. He shoved through a door.
A SHUFFLING movement came from across the room. Doc charged the sound.
There was a squealing noise, ratlike, eerie. A door slammed. Doc hit the panel. It was metal. It smashed him back. His fists could not knock down an inch of steel. He wrenched at the lock. That defied him, too.
Doc sought another route for pursuit A companionway deposited him on a lower deck. He went forward.
It was more gloomy here. Doc's capable bronze fingers searched inside his parka. They brought out a flashlight of a type Doc himself had perfected.
This flash had no battery. A tiny, powerful generator, built into the handle and driven by a stout spring, supplied the current. One twist of the flash handle would wind the spring and furnish light current for some minutes. A special receptacle held spare bulbs in felt beds. There was not much chance of this light going out of commission.
The flash sprayed a slender, white-hot rod. Doc twisted the lens adjustment to widen the beam.
Doc went on. His flashlight cast a funnel of white. He stopped often to listen.
The derelict liner seemed alive with sinister shufflings and draggings. Once a bulkhead door banged. Again, there came another of the ratlike squeals.
Even Doc's sensitive ears could not tell whether that squeal was human! The flowerlike odor was stronger.
He came to a long passage. It was painted white. It might have been used but yesterday. For wood does not decay in the bitter cold of the arctic.
He reached the third-class dining room.
Here his eyes met a sight that would make any man cringe. It was the explanation of the loss of the Oceanic.
The room was filled with bodies bodies of the passengers and crew of the ill-fated ship. Bullets had done their work, and the northern cold had kept this tableau of carnage inviolate!
Doc thought of Victor Vail.
So this was what had happened during the time the blind man was unconscious!
Pirates, human fiends, had taken over the Oceanic. They were as bloodthirsty a gang as ever swung a cutlass or dangled a victim from a yardarm on the Spanish Main. Wholesale murder, they had committed.
Keelhaul de Rosa, Ben O'Gard, Dynamite Smith greater villains never trod a deck. And, like the corsairs they were, they had fallen out over the loot.
The whole thing might have been lifted from the parchment chronicles of another century and transplanted to our time.
Doc quitted the hall of murder.
Uncanny whisperings and shufflings still crept through the lost liner. Yet Doc saw nothing. it was as though the tormented souls of those butchered here were holding spectral conclave.
Like that except for the flowery odor of living things. It was present everywhere.
Doc stepped out into another lounge.
His light picked up movement!
What it was, his sharp eyes failed to detect. The thing dropped behind the massive furniture before more than the backglow of Doc's light found it.
Warily, Doc sidled along the lounge wall. This was no animal confronting him.
What happened next came without the slightest sound.
Something touched Doc's bronze neck. It was warm. It was soft, yet it possessed a corded strength.
It encircled Doc's throat!
DOC MADE one of the quickest moves of his career. He ducked and whirled. But he did not get the beam of his flashlight lifted in time. All he saw was the blank panel of a tightly shut door.
He wrenched at it.
Chug! A hard object hit him in the back with terrific force.
Only the sprung steel of cushioning muscles kept his spine from being snapped. He was knocked to all fours. But he did not drop his flashlight.
He sprayed the beam on the lounge. A dozen frothing, hideous figures were leaping toward him.
It was seldom that Doc felt an impulse to hug an enemy. But he could have hugged these.
For their appearance dispelled the sinister air of supernatural foes which hung over the lost liner.
These were but Eskimos!
Doc doused his light. This was something he could cope with. He glided sidewise.
An avalanche of bodies piled onto the spot he had vacated. Clubs it was a thrown club which had hit Doc's backbeat vigorously. An Innuit or two squealed painfully as he was belabored by a fellow. They seemed to use the squeals to express both excitement and pain.
Silence fell.
The Eskimos were puzzled. Their breathing was gusty, wheezing.
"Tarnuk!" whined one of the cowering Innuits.
This gave Doc a clew to the dialect they spoke. Roughly translated, the word meant "the soul of a man." So swiftly had Doc evaded their charge that one of the Eskimos had remarked he must be but a ghost!
"Chinzo!" Doc told them in their own lingo. "Welcome! You are my friends! But you have a strange way of greeting me."