Read Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon (The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage) for Free Online Page B

the hilltop. The jounce was accompanied by a commotion such as might be produced by a pig being fed alive into a meat grinder. A compressed procession of piggy squeals, grunts and other porcine sounds filled the van interior, then abruptly ceased.
    “What the hopping hell was that!” exclaimed Hornetta Hale, sounding a little like a teamster now. She peered out the side mirror, but saw nothing. For she had begun her slide down the grade, and became busy keeping the van on the road. The graded dirt road behind her was no longer in view.
    When the road smoothed out, she fed the engine gas and the van continued its progress. The piggy cacophony continued intermittently, finally settling down.
    Before long, Hornetta pulled onto a side road that ran through unkempt weeds until it reached a clearing where an old barn stood slowly falling into ruin.
    For some reason—simple homespun thrift probably—farmers have a tradition of letting old disused barns succumb to the elements rather than paying to demolish the structures.
    This one was in the early stages of decomposition. The weatherboard sides had been stripped of all vestiges of paint by time and rain and wind. The roof presented a profile like a broken-backed carcass. Obviously, a beam had caved. The sides were solid barnboard, however. And when Hornetta Hale stopped the van and got out to run the door open, it still operated, although its big hinges squeaked in protest.
    Dusk was falling now. Hornetta drove the van into the barn and darkness swallowed the big machine. Then, jacking a bullet into the chamber of an automatic she reclaimed from the front seat, she stormed around to the van and addressed the closed doors.
    “Listen, you mugs! I have a gun and I ain’t afraid to use it.” To prove her point, she fired a single slug into the barn roof. Old hay and sawdust filtered down from above. “If either of you overrated clowns try to jump me, it will just be too damn bad, see?”
    No response came from the padlocked van body.
    Hornetta pressed on. “Now I’m going to open up these doors and we’re going to have us a good old-fashioned pow-wow. No tricks, either of you. Or else. Get me?”
    Still no reply came from within.
    “No tricks,” Hornetta repeated, “or it’ll be pow! And then wow! I know how to turn loose bullets, and I know where to shoot a man. Right in the belly where it hurts most.”
    Her bravado was met with even more silence.
    Hornetta seemed to hesitate. Her blue eyes narrowed suspiciously.
    Finally, she gathered herself and, unlocking the big padlock, threw open the doors.
    In the dimness of the barn, the interior of the van was a box of gloom. Still, one could see into it. There was sufficient light for that.
    What Hornetta Hale saw—or rather did not see—was enough to cause her stubborn jaw to hang open. Her flinty eyes struck sparks. The words that came tumbling out of her mouth would have done credit to a mule skinner.
    For the interior of the van into which she had forcibly introduced a two-ton sedan was utterly and undeniably empty!
    “I don’t believe it!” Hornetta snapped. “I do not believe it!”
    Incomprehension seemed to seize her voice, her expression and her mind. She stood as if stupefied. Then, succumbing to an irate anger that brought hot color mounting to her cheeks, Hornetta yanked a flashlight from a pocket and shone it inside.
    The beam disclosed nothing but the quilt-hung sides of the interior.
    It was impossible! Hornetta knew that mere minutes before, she had locked the sedan within. She had felt its weight and drag as she piloted the van to this destination. True, the last portion of the trip felt lighter, but…a sedan cannot be made to melt away into thin air, she knew. And yet one seemingly had!
    Hornetta Hale reached for a handhold, levering herself up and into the back, determined to investigate every inch of the van’s boxy body. Her mind was running to tricks with mirrors when she distinctly heard the