Flash Gordon 5 - The Witch Queen of Mongo Read online

  THE WITCH QUEEN OF MONGO

  THE WITCH QUEEN OF MONGO is the fifth in the series of fabulous novels inspired by the famous comic strip FLASH GORDON, read daily and Sunday by millions of fans throughout the world.

  Victimized by a psychic teenage prankster, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov find themselves instantly transported to the planet Mongo, where Flash is captured and drugged by the ravishing witch Queen Azura and her evil cohort—none other than Ming the Merciless, Jr.! But Zarkov and Dale escape to Arboria, and enlist the aid of Prince Barin, who, by use of a brilliant ruse, sets in motion a series of violent encounters and hair's breadth escapes that place Flash's life in imminent peril.

  OTHER FLASH GORDON ADVENTURES

  from Avon Books

  #1 The Lion Men of Mongo

  #2 The Plague of Sound

  #3 The Space Circus

  #4 The Time Trap of Ming XIII

  #5 The Witch Queen of Mongo

  #6 The War of the Cybernauts

  THE WITCH QUEEN OF MONGO is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1974 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

  Co-published by Avon Books and King Features Syndicate, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-380-00180-2

  Cover art by George Wilson

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Avon Books.

  First Avon Printing, December 1974

  Printed in U.S.A

  THE WITCH QUEEN

  OF MONGO

  CHAPTER 1

  Heat lightning flashed beyond Black Hat Mountain, silhouetting the low-lying desert-ranch laboratory of Dr. Hans Zarkov in the distance. From twenty miles away in the flat empty desert, Flash Gordon saw the outlines of the buildings and turned to Dale Arden beside him in the seat of the X-905 WM Sport Car.

  “We’re almost there, Dale,” he said with a smile. “I hope this puts an end to your worries about our safety.”

  Flash was a strapping young man with curly blond hair, blue eyes, and an engaging smile. He was dressed in loose-fitting sports clothes with an open collar and trim slacks.

  “Go on,” Dale said ruefully. “Tell me I’m just a silly girl. But I’ve been feeling very odd about this trip.”

  She was a slender, dark-haired girl in her early twenties, slightly tall for a woman, but pleasantly feminine in an outdoorsy way. Dressed in a short skirt and blouse, she was a perfect specimen of the Earth female.

  “Come on,” said Flash, trying to tease his companion out of her strange mood. “We’ll be there in a few minutes. Doc Zarkov will tell us why he invited us out on such short notice, and we can all sit back and have a good laugh at your fears.”

  “I hope so,” said Dale between pinched lips. She glanced again out into the darkness of the desert, which stretched away into vast emptiness all around them. In the distance to the rear of them, she could see the vague glow of Megalopolis West, which they had left over two hours before.

  Flash sighed. “All right. Out with it. What do you think is bothering you?”

  “I think someone is watching us, Flash,” said Dale. “I can’t help it.”

  Flash waved his arm vaguely toward the vast space about them. “Now who could be doing that? You can see for miles.”

  “I know,” Dale said worriedly. “But I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  The X-905 WM zoomed along the flat road that cut across the desert as straight as an arrow.

  “If only Doc Zarkov wasn’t such a boor about his darned old lab,” she complained, snorting. “We could fly in with one of the aircars. But no—he’s got to have all that security nonsense—radar traps, anti-magnetic nets, the works.”

  “You know Doc,” Flash said gently.

  “He could have turned off all the scanners until we got down safely,” she said, grumbling. “But no, he makes us crawl to him in an ordinary terrestrial car!”

  “I haven’t seen Doc for six months, Dale. I’ll be glad to see him. I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

  Dale shrugged. “I don’t either.” She looked about her again suspiciously. “There’s something out there, Flash.”

  It was extremely dark in the desert where Flash was driving between Megalopolis West and Zarkov’s famous ZZZ Rancho in the middle of the Mojave Desert, USA, Earth. It was eleven-thirty at night. He had gotten the vidphone call from Zarkov at about nine and had then picked up Dale at the World Council Building, where they both now worked, and had driven across the valley and into the mountains in his X-905 Sport Car, the newest World Motors model for terrestrial driving.

  “Did he give you any hint about what he wants to show us?” Dale asked.

  “No.”

  Dale sat there rigidly, with her hands clasped in her lap. “I hope it’s not one of those bothersome practical jokes of his.”

  Flash did not have time to respond. The transformation occurred so suddenly that he did not even see the change in the landscape or in the lighting. That is, there was no end to the night and the desert and no beginning to the brightly lighted, strange, indescribable terrain through which they were driving.

  “Flash!” Dale gasped, her eyes wide.

  Flash turned to her with a frown. “What happened?”

  “I—I don’t know!”

  Instinctively Flash slowed down the X-905 and stared out at the strange terrain. It did not resemble earth at all, or wilderness, or even a moonscape of mineral formations. It was indeed a most strange and unbelievable sight. It seemed to Flash, in his dazed mind, that they were driving through a giant mound of ice cream topped with chocolate sauce and a bright red maraschino cherry.

  The car rolled to a stop.

  Flash flipped the OFF switch.

  He stared out the side of the car.

  “I’d swear I was having an hallucination,” he said half to himself.

  “Me, too,” said Dale. “It—it looks like—an—”

  They both said it together: “An ice-cream sundae!”

  Dale sat up straight. “It’s one of Zarkov’s little tricks, you can bet on that. Mass hypnotism, perhaps.”

  Flash nodded. “I think you may be right.”

  He glanced out once again, and the scene had not appreciably changed. The ice-cream terrain rose from the pavement upon which the car rested, sloping up into a rounded mound on each side of them. A huge layer of what seemed to be chocolate sauce extended to the top of the hills on both left and right.

  Flash opened the car door. “I’m going to find out what this is all about,” he snapped.

  Dale said nothing. She was staring out her window at the bizarre landscape.

  There was a brightness in the air, but when Flash looked up there was no sun. The atmosphere seemed to be indirectly lighted all around, as if they were in some special world that needed no sun or moon.

  “What’s this?” Flash muttered and looked down at his feet. He had stepped out of the car onto the pavement, which he had supposed to be the same macadam upon which they had been driving. But it had changed. Indeed it resembled a kind of licorice.

  He bent down and touched it with his fingers. The material was slick and slightly pliant, and when he took away his fingers and held them to his nose he knew he had been right—he could smell the unmistakable odor of licorice.

  He touched his tongue to his finger. “It’s licorice, Dale!”

  “What are you saying?”
/>
  “The pavement—it’s licorice!”

  “Licorice?” she repeated, suddenly realizing that she had not been imagining what he said.

  “Licorice.”

  She opened the door unbelievingly and stepped out, frowning in bewilderment. She, too, bent down to touch the licorice pavement.

  “It’s mad!” she whispered.

  Flash had turned to study the strange landscape formation stretching away from the licorice pavement. He walked over to it and touched it.

  Then he turned around and stared at Dale. “You won’t believe me, but it’s vanilla ice cream, Dale.”

  Dale’s face turned white. “I knew you were going to say that.”

  Now Flash’s eyes discerned a break in the creamy surface of the terrain and he began walking along the pavement toward it.

  Dale caught up with him. “What’s that shape?”

  “I’m going to find out,” said Flash.

  As they approached the formation, they could see that it resembled a kind of milky crystal. The shape of the material hinted at mineral formation, but as they got closer to it they saw that it was not rock at all, but something approximating rock.

  They stood by the waist-high crag for a long moment before Flash had the nerve to put out his hand to touch it.

  “Dale,” he whispered, “you know what this is?”

  She shook her head, almost fearfully.

  “Have you ever eaten rock candy?”

  Dale blinked. “Yes. When I was a kid we used to have it once in a while. It’s just boiled sugar, isn’t it? Boiled sugar dried out on strings until it crystallizes?”

  “That’s right,” said Flash. He touched the rocklike excrescence and then put his finger to his lips once again. “Rock candy, Dale.”

  She moved past him and touched the rocklike formation too, tasting it.

  They both stared at one another.

  Then Flash said, “That’s it! That’s it!”

  “What?”

  “We’re in it now. The Big Rock Candy Mountain!”

  Dale stared at him as if he were bereft of his senses. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain? Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe I am,” said Flash, half-laughing. “But that’s where we are. There was an old song: ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ It’s what every child imagines when he’s a kid. Going to a place where there are lollypops for trees, where there are streams of soda, lakes of chocolate sauce, and ice-cream houses.”

  “But it’s only in someone’s imagination, Flash,” Dale said in a whisper.

  Flash nodded. He turned and looked up along the curved slope of the ice-cream hill.

  “But how did we get here?” he asked.

  “And how do we get out?” Dale asked, shuddering to herself. “Why, it’s like being inside someone’s diseased mind!”

  Flash stared at her. “Diseased? A man’s mind might be diseased, thinking of this. But not a child’s mind, Dale. If it were a child’s mind, it could be a very healthy one.”

  Dale blinked. “Doc Zarkov? Some scheme of his? Putting us into someone’s imagination?”

  “I don’t know,” Flash said, shaking his head. “It’s beyond me.” He took Dale’s hand. “Come on, let’s go back to the car.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  “Just drive along the road and see where it leads,” he said.

  Dale thought a moment. “I guess that’s all we can do.”

  They went back to the car. For a moment, Flash stood by it and then walked over to the side of the road.

  “What are you going to do?” Dale asked.

  “I’m going to sample this stuff and see if it’s real, too, or only an hallucination.”

  Dale came over by him. “I want to try it, too.”

  Flash leaned down and scooped up a bit of the ice-cream substance in his hand and began licking it slowly.

  “Vanilla,” he said. “And a very good flavor of it, too.”

  Dale ate some of the ice cream. “I’ve never really tasted such a fine flavor.”

  Flash sighed. “Come on. Let’s get back in the car and see what’s next in this programmed little game.”

  Dale turned to him. “You think—?”

  “It’s Doc Zarkov, all right! I only wish I knew what he’s trying to prove.”

  They climbed into the car and Flash started it up. They moved down the licorice highway for a half mile, and now they could see brightly colored lollypops on the side of the road, forming a kind of candy forest. They crossed a bridge then, made of hard-candy cane rails and chocolate logs. Under the bridge a stream of what was obviously sparkling soda pop flowed along merrily over candied boulders. A great excrescence of gumdrop rocks was strewn over a hillside that looked like pulled taffy.

  Then suddenly there was laughter—booming, familiar laughter.

  “Doc Zarkov, you fiend!” cried Flash, half in jest “What is this latest trick of yours?”

  Dale screamed.

  Flash could feel the wheel in his hand turn to licorice whips. And now he could see that the car itself had turned into a different kind of material—hard, white, Easter-egg chocolate with whipped-cream upholstering.

  Yet they continued riding merrily along.

  “I don’t believe it!” yelled Flash.

  And next to him he could hear Dale Arden weeping in sudden fear.

  “We’ve gone mad, Flash. Mad!”

  The sky above them suddenly began melting and the car itself was disintegrating at the speed it was traveling. The ice-cream hills rolled down toward them, and they were both sinking down and down into a morass of sugar and cream and chocolate.

  And then, quite suddenly, they were seated quietly in a familiar room.

  “Well,” said Doc Zarkov, grinning at them in that maudlin and exasperating way he had, “how did you like that exhibition?”

  And he threw back his head and laughed uproariously.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dr. Hans Zarkov, a large burly man with a big black beard and intelligent dark eyes, folded his arms across his chest and smiled broadly.

  “Don’t look so baffled, my friends,” he told Flash and Dale.

  Flash rose from the chair in which he had just discovered himself, and advanced toward Zarkov. “Doc, is this another of your fool tricks? And if it is—how does it work?”

  Zarkov lifted his head and boomed with laughter. “Pretty mystifying, isn’t it?”

  The dark-haired girl shifted in her chair and snapped, “Doc, you’re a child at heart. Do you know that? You’ll never grow up.”

  Zarkov’s eyes widened innocently. “What’s the matter, Dale? You seem put out.” He laughed loudly again, rubbing his fingers across his black beard.

  “What was it?” Flash asked, standing close to Zarkov, almost threateningly. “Tele-hypnosis?”

  Zarkov waved Flash back, his eyes betraying a fear that Flash would bodily attack him in his massive annoyance. “Sit down, Flash. Calm yourself.”

  Flash stared and then retreated.

  Zarkov moved about the spacious quarters of his desert laboratory’s living room, peering once out into the darkened night, and then wheeling to face Flash and Dale, muscular arms folded over his barrel chest. He was wearing a light-colored sport shirt and tapered slacks that fitted into leather desert boots.

  “Well, now,” he drawled. “I could have put you two under hypnosis once you arrived here, told you to forget the last ten minutes of your drive across the desert, and made you imagine your drive through the strange land of ice cream and candy, you know.”

  “Darn you, Doc,” Flash growled, half-rising from his chair. “If you’re going to play games—”

  “No games,” Zarkov retorted hastily. “I say, I could have done the trick by using posthypnotic suggestion. Right?”

  “Right,” Dale said calmly. “But you didn’t.”

  “That’s right, I didn’t.” Zarkov moved across the room and stared down at his two friends. “Ever hear of p
sychokinesis?”

  “Sure,” said Flash. “It’s the power of the mind to move objects about in space.”

  “Right. It’s a kind of active extrasensory perception. Very little is actually understood about it. But it is scientifically known to exist.”

  Flash frowned. “But I don’t see how—”

  “Let me finish,” Zarkov said, smiling. “Closely allied to extrasensory perception is clairvoyance, the power of seeing something which is distant from one and out of his sight.”

  “That’s basic science,” Flash said, snorting.

  “Don’t be impatient, my friend,” said Zarkov. “Clairvoyance is the power to receive a picture of something not in one’s sight. We don’t know enough about ESP to understand it clearly, as I said, and we don’t actually know how it works.”

  Dale nodded.

  “And we don’t really know enough about ESP to be sure a person can’t send a message to someone else by telepathy, now, do we?”

  “Okay, Doc,” Flash said. “Are you telling me you sent us a message to drive through the Big Rock Candy Mountain?”

  Zarkov stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Not exactly,” he said. “But by adding up the facts of ESP, we do conclude that such a thing might be possible. Right?”

  “Oh, sure,” snapped Flash. “I’ll concede it might be possible.”

  Zarkov chuckled gleefully.

  Dale sat up straight in her chair, her dark eyes wide. “But you have done it to us!”

  “I haven’t,” Zarkov said softly. “But somebody else has.”

  “Who?” Flash frowned.

  Zarkov moved over to Flash and stood above him. “First, I want you to admit that you could have been involved in a kind of telepathic delusion.”

  Flash frowned. “Oh, all right. I’ll concede that.”

  “And then I want you to promise me not to laugh at my—my subject.”

  “Who is it?” Dale asked.

  Zarkov turned and looked at the far door, which Flash knew led to one of the three bedrooms in the house. “Willie!” he called.

  A short silence.

  The door opened slowly. Flash and Dale watched it with intense concentration.