The Adventures of Dr. Shadows, Book 1: The Eye of Darkness Read online

THE EYE OF DARKNESS

  An Adventure of Dr. Shadows!

  by Teel James Glenn

  Published by Pro Se Press

  Part of the SINGLE SHOTS SIGNATURE line

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this publication are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part or whole of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

  Copyright © 2015 Teel James Glenn

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Who is Dr. Shadows?

  Prologue: A Thief in the Night

  Chapter One: A Gathering of Friends

  Chapter Two: The Empress of Japan

  Chapter Three: Masques and Marauders

  Chapter Four: Arrests and Twists

  Chapter Five: Stiff Opposition

  Epilogue: Mysteries and Murderers…

  Who is Dr. Shadows?

  Anton Chadeaux was the son of an oil speculator who traveled the globe to many far-flung wildcat projects. He was something of a wastrel as a youth, a playboy who even dabbled in stage magic in his school days, which is where he used the stage name ‘Dr. Shadows.’

  When he accompanied his parents on a plane trip to Northern Korea on the Chinese border, the plane was shot down by Chinese bandits in the employ of the Japanese.

  After the crash the bandits murdered Chadeaux’s parents and left the paralyzed boy for dead. He was found by monks from a hidden Wei Monetary where the monks immersed him in herbal baths for years that bleached his skin to a pale grey and nurse him back to health. They first teach him to focus his mind with the ancient art of Sulsa Do which allows him to re-claim his physical self from the shattered wretch he had been after the crash.

  For three years he lie, completely paralyzed and near death, learning ancient secrets of focusing his mind. Then, as his flesh recovered he learned the monk’s existence of meditation, fasting, and rigid discipline. He was reforged to be a master of the ancient art, giving him abilities beyond the common. With the guidance of the Abbot, and the treasure of the monastery at his command, he left those remote Korean mountains a new, better, and stronger man a man with a purpose: to help the helpless and be the last hope of the hopeless.

  He gathered around him a small group of likeminded friends into the Shadows Foundation for Justice.

  Thus was born, the granite man, the grey wolf of justice that the world came to know as Dr. Shadows!

  The world trembles on the brink: In China, the Japanese have invaded and annexed Manchuria, In Europe, Germany plays cat and mouse with a frightened and impotent League of Nations, and across the sea America does its best to ignore the gathering storm clouds. The year is 1938…

  Prologue: A Thief in the Night

  Kowloon is the peninsula of mainland China that juts out into Victoria Harbor facing south towards Hong Kong Island. The word Kowloon comes from the Cantonese words "gau lung" meaning "nine dragons" which referred to the eight hills of Kowloon with the ninth being the Emperor.

  High on one of the hills, where there was a good view of Victoria Harbour and the Island of Hong Kong beyond, stood the house of Professor Lee Lui Chan, curator of antiquities for the Royal Museum of Hong Kong.

  Many evenings the professor would sit on his broad veranda as the evening breeze and the sounds of the harbor drifted up to him, catching up on correspondence, sipping tea, and reflecting on life.

  He was not the image of a traditional scholar with the long Confucian beard; instead he was a barrel-chested Chinese with a thin dark mustache and long hair swept back from his forehead in a suave wave. He wore glasses, but they were sporty and modern as was his western style clothing.

  It all would give an unknowing person the impression that he was an outdoors type with robust vitality projected with his every move that he was anything but a bookworm. And that impression was only partially wrong one for while he was one of the preeminent experts on ancient cultures of Southeast Asia, but he often went on archeological digs around China and all of Asia.

  He reveled in the physical as much as the mental and found that his career allowed him a good dose of both. The trouble in the North of his country often bothered him, but he considered the best course of his life was as a scientist, not a politician, and the Japanese and the Kuomintang’s actions, as horrible as they were, were out of the scope of his ability to affect so he put them mostly out of his mind.

  He sat reviewing the latest scientific journals, keeping up his correspondence with colleagues around the world before getting to the work on a recent expedition.

  His housekeeper came out from the house. “Chan, you have left your office a mess again,” said the housekeeper, Mrs. Wu. As she entered the veranda she put on her coat for the short trip to her home in the New Territories. She was a little fury at cleaning that belied her grey hair and stooped posture, treating Chan more like a slightly simple grandchild than an employer.

  “I know, Madame Wu,” he said peering at her from over his glasses. “I promise it will be all straightened by the time you come in tomorrow. I have some work to do on the Angkor Wat findings tonight.”

  “Silly to go traipsing around digging up old things,” she said. She often lectured him on the pointlessness of his profession. He had long ago given up contradicting her. He just smiled, and nodded.

  “Have a good night, Mrs. Wu,” he called as she went out through the house.

  “Do not work too late,” she called back. “You need your rest. I will bring Su Kan, my sister’s husband’s second cousin, by tomorrow. She’s in town for shopping and I thought she could help me with the cleaning.”

  This made him laugh. She also could not understand how a man his age had never wed so she was constantly trying to introduce one relative or another to him. He smiled and indulged her with constant amusement.

  After hearing the door click shut, he went back to reading the letters from friends around the world, sipping tea, and humming to himself with contented enjoyment.

  Less than an hour later, he finished his correspondence and took out his notes on the recent Gordon expedition to the jungles of Cambodia. He and several colleagues spent several weeks in the green maze, making some remarkable discoveries. He took one of those discoveries that he had brought back with him out of the wooden case on the table beside him. He positioned it under a lamp, intent on sketching it.

  It was a medallion of unusual design; its shape was round the size of a large silver dollar but of a dark copper color. On it was an ancient goddess image with clearly exaggerated sexual features and a single eye in the center of her forehead. Inscriptions around the edges of the coin indicated a language older than Sanskrit worn so close to the surface they were barely visible.

  He flipped the coin and studied the image of a horse-headed figure from some ancient myth on the reverse side; one which he had yet to discover the source. This was the reason he had done his correspondence early. He anticipated a long night trying to “meet” the ancient gods on the medallion. He wanted to have a great deal done before he saw his expedition colleagues the next evening.

  “You are a saucy woman,” he said to the female image on the coin. “Why do I need Madame Wu’s relatives when I have you, eh? You are so forward to look straight at me, but will you tell me your secrets?”

  He removed several sheets of paper
that had traced images of four other medallions similar to the one he held but with a different reverse side from the Cycloptian female. Each was of a different animal headed figure: elephant, cat, goat, and lizard.

  “She will tell you nothing,” a whispered voice came from behind the scientist.

  He whirled as a stinging pain at the back of his neck caused him to exclaim. “What?”

  He started to rise to face the intruder but felt a sudden weakness in his legs. He tried to reach for the place where the sting was but found his hand palsied, the fingers unable to grasp the dart he felt there.

  “You are the one who will tell me secrets,” the whispered voice said. “You will tell me everything I want to know.”

  The shape of the figure against the light from the house was a formless blur. It moved soundlessly toward the archeologist who dropped to his knees.

  Chan stared up at the shape and felt the words the intruder spoke as if they were carved into his mind.

  He answered each question posed to him against his will, the words ripped from him as if physically. He told all the dark inner thoughts he had hoped to never reveal, stating all his theories on the medallion and any other thoughts from within him that the voice wanted to hear. When he had nothing more to tell, the voice said simply “Become!”

  Chan didn’t understand what was happening, but he fell forward on to all fours at the whispered command. His body began to deform at the word and he started to convulse.

  In the glass of the double doors to the house, beyond the silhouetted shape of the intruder, Lee Liu Chan watched himself change and it frightened him.

  As he watched, his face began to elongate, his ears to grow up and out from his head. His shoulders widened, and try as he might, he could not rise from his bent over position.

  Chan tried to speak but only a short, barking bray could force itself out of his throat.

  The intruder laughed. “You are a jackass, Lee,” the intruder hissed. “So you should look like one!”

  Chan tried to move toward his tormentor, not thinking of a specific attack but contemplating, for the first time in his life, doing physical harm to another.

  Desires meant nothing, however, because he could not move toward the sneering torturer. Chan’s body was no longer his; he watched his reflection in horror as the changes continued.

  His nose mutating into a muzzle, his eyes widened and his ears elongated to the point where they flopped over. He stared dumbfounded as his clothes tore off his shifting and enlarging body. Hands, balled into a fist on the floor before him, begin to shift and change as he looked at them. The fingers seemed to fuse together and the nails growl longer and join into one clubbed shape.

  He suddenly knew what was happening as the arms and hands became the legs and hoofs of an equine.

  He was indeed becoming a jackass!

  Throwing his transformed head back, he brayed his agony.

  The sound seemed to free him from the spell of paralysis that held him, but instead of attacking, as had been his impulse before, he felt a deep unreasoning need to flee from the demonic intruder that had done this horrible thing to him.

  Chan turned, racing as fast as his four-legged stance allowed, leaping out over the low stonewall of the veranda into the empty space beyond.

  He brayed one final time, the sound stopped suddenly as he struck the stone of the hillside and snapped his neck, ending a brilliant and promising life in one horrid moment.

  Above, in the home of Lee Liu Chan, the shadowy intruder left with a leisurely walk and a chilling laugh that lingered behind in the air.