X-40 Corpse contraband by Brant House

Author:Brant House
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Pulp Adventure
Published: 2020-05-18T07:00:00+00:00

THE Agent’s first sensation was that of being hurled through empty space. Cold empty darkness was all about him, and there was a sickness in his stomach such as an aviator, power diving from the sky, might feel.

Then there was the dawn of light, a graying of the blackness, and the nausea passed. He sat up, looked dazedly about him. He might have been transported by magic to secret Asia. A smoky, yellow light coming from a brass-screened storm lantern of ancient design illuminated the room. Directly in front of him and back against the wall was a hideous, crouching demon, fashioned in brass and gaudily painted. Cruelty was cast into its metal face.

On each side of the brass god stood three tall, sinewy Mongols clad in white, tunic-like garments of silk. Their shaved heads were covered by peaked white caps around which scarlet silk was wound, turban fashion. The Mongols were as motionless as the hideous image they guarded.

X turned his head. On the other side of the room a white man was stretched on the floor, his torso stripped of all clothing. To all appearances the man was dead, or blissfully unconscious. His hands and feet were roped to rings in the floor. A half of a huge coconut husk rested on his chest, and from beneath the husk came greedy, squeaking sounds. Cold chills wound around the Agent’s spine like serpents. He had heard of such things, but he had never expected to see them.

X got to his feet. His powers of recuperation were truly remarkable. There was a slight pain in his head and a sensation of dizziness. Aside from that, he felt fit for anything — anything except that, as his eyes returned to the man on the floor, to the coconut husk that retained the hungry, squealing thing.

A door opened. Through it came first a small, gray-haired man with brassy-looking spectacles. X recognized the man immediately as Morton Englewood, the pottery dealer who had so strangely disappeared; for X had seen Edgewood’s picture in the newspaper before he had left for Washington. There was an expression of utter despair in the pottery dealer’s eyes.

Behind Englewood came a man and a woman, arm in arm. The man was tall and lean. Very little else could be told about him, for his face was masked by a golden Yezidee devil mask, fully as leering and hideous as the face of the brass god guarded by the Mongols.

The woman — it was she who called herself Erlika. Erlika dressed in flaming yellow, her long, dark hair coiled upwards in two horns about a conical, pagoda-like cap of gold. Her lovely face was flushed. Her mouth smiled. In her eyes was an unholy animation, a gleam that softened immediately and became strangely alluring as her eyes fell upon Agent X. Resting in the girl’s hand was a sort of scepter to which was attached a life-like image of a lizard, its tiny jaws open.

“Welcome to the temple of

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