The Avenger 15 - House of Death (12 page)

The Avenger snapped off the flash and felt along the cliff. There were three more holes in the direction of the dock. Presumably they went on and on, a hole about every two yards.

He back-tracked, with Smitty and Mac watching him in the dimness and wondering what on earth had attracted his attention. They couldn’t see the holes.

The regular line of holes stopped with the fourth one toward the north.

“Come on,” said The Avenger. “Back!”

He led the way thirty yards past the last hole, and they crouched there.

“What—” began Mac uncertainly.

“Blasting holes in the cliff face,” said Benson. “They seem to run from that jutting boulder down there, clear south past the dock. No telling how far.”

“Blasting holes?” repeated Smitty, mystified.

“Yes. Someone has undermined the whole face of the cliff behind that dock. And recently—those holes look quite fresh. I don’t like the appearance of the thing, so we’ll stay behind the line of blasting holes for a little while.”

Mac nodded. “You think it might be some kind of trap.”

“Yes,” said The Avenger, pale eyes lambent in the darkness. “We know the owner of this island doesn’t encourage visitors. The dogs prove that.”

Mac and Smitty, through the darkness, could barely see the struggling knot of men about halfway up the stairway. But Benson’s hawk eyes could make out more detail.

The three pursuers had caught the first two, and there was a life-and-death struggle going on. The two Orientals from the boat were putting up a good show against the three.

While Benson peered, he saw one of the three arch backward suddenly, under a treacherous kick. The man grabbed for the rail and missed. His body went head over heels through thin air for thirty feet and slammed on the rock next to the water.

Then it was two and two, and the fight became even fiercer! But for a moment The Avenger’s pale gaze was drawn down to the dock again. Drawn by the entrance of a new element into the battle.

That was dogs!

Seven or eight of the same type of huge brute as the two they had been regretfully forced to dispose of suddenly came lunging along the water from the south. With slavering jaws, they flung themselves against the men, indiscriminately, leaping for the throats of attackers and attacked alike.

But this didn’t last long, either. For it was at about this time that the full nightmare quality of the fracas came clear.

Benson’s gaze had been jerked to the stairs again by a low but agonized cry. He just caught sight of another man flying over the stair rail to fall toward the water’s edge.

But this one hit something on the way down—hit it and broke it.

The Avenger thought he saw something like a thick black fishline break as the man’s body scraped along the cliff wall. He thought so, but even with his marvelous eyesight he could not be sure.

The next moment he knew what it was.

There was a low, but tremendous roar. Then the entire face of the cliff at that point seemed to surge sullenly up a foot, to subside again with another roar that was more long-drawn-out.

That black length had been a wire, broken by the man’s falling body.

The men at the foot of the cliff were no longer trying to keep silent. They were all yelling, with their screams almost lost in the racket of falling rock and earth and trees. And then the mass, thousands of tons, hit them!

Men, dogs, dock, and boat disappeared.

It was as if a blanket had been thrown over a heap of puppets on a miniature stage set, covering them carelessly for the ensuing night. Only these puppets were men, and the night would be the long one of death!

The sullen rumble of the last falling rocks died away. The quiet that followed seemed even more breathlessly still than before.

“Whew!” breathed Smitty, wiping cold sweat from his forehead.

Mac said nothing. He stared in awe at The Avenger. Once again this man had saved their lives by his marvelous powers of observation. Who but Benson would have seen those little holes, read their meaning, and acted with such methodical precaution? Those blasting holes might be freshly drilled and loaded. They might be part of a trap that might be sprung while the three were in a bad place for it. So The Avenger had led them back from the line of holes. And they were living, now, instead of sharing the fate of the others under the grinding mass of rock, trees, and earth.

“Hold on,” Mac whispered. “One of the skurlies got clear, after all. See? He must have been beyond the blasting line in the other direction from us.”

The Avenger’s colorless, telescopic eyes finally made out the figure even at that distance.

“Shan!” he said in a low tone. “He let his men fight for him while he kept safely out of range.”

“Say—two got away,” said Smitty, pointing.

The man he pointed to was not far ahead, at the edge of the rock slide. They went to him.

They found that two had not gotten away. On the body of this man was a rock weighing several hundred pounds. What it had done to that body in its fall was something Mac and the giant found their eyes shuddering away from. But there was still a spark of life in the fellow.

“Russian,” said The Avenger, bending over the suffering face.

“Yes,” the man whispered raggedly. “White . . . Russian . . . Sharnoff! Shar—”

That was all. He was dead.

“So Sharnoff Haygar came with his gang,” said The Avenger. “He, or his men, lay in wait for Shan. Sharnoff’s gang jumped Shan’s—and both perished. As so often happens in the chess game of life, the board is swept clear of pawns, but the leaders remain.”

“All but Harlik Haygar,” said Mac, reminding Benson of the murder charge over his head.

“All but Harlik,” nodded The Avenger. “Some one of the others murdered him. Some one of them almost certainly has Harlik’s gold medallion, as well as his own.”

Benson stared toward the spot where Shan had last been seen. The tall, dark leader of the Oriental cutthroats was no longer there. He had gone up the cliff, low down there, and was in the shadows of the woods.

“Now?” whispered Smitty of Benson.

“To the house we saw from the plane, in the center of the island,” said The Avenger. “And—I think—to the secret of the golden disks.”

With the silence of trained woodsmen, the three men slid among thickset trees toward the center of the island.

“I still don’t get that set-up back there at the dock,” Smitty said. “All the Haygars decided to meet on this island at the home of Goram Haygar. All right. Sharnoff came with a gang of white Russians, probably concealing them from Goram when he landed. Shan came with his own gang. The Russians jumped the Orientals, probably to get Shan’s golden disk, since everybody seems trying to get everybody else’s medallion. All right. But what precisely brought down that cliff?”

“The owner of the island, as proved by the dogs,” said The Avenger, “discouraged visitors. One of his little discouragements was the undermining of that cliff. Then the explosive was wired to the house, so that from there, at a touch, Goram Haygar could destroy a young army attempting to land and attack him. When the man fell from the stairs his body happened to break that wire, short-circuiting the current and setting off the explosive.”

Smitty nodded, and they went on now in silence, since they were nearing the black hulk of the house itself.

They kept a sharp lookout for more dogs. Had they known that there was now only one mastiff left alive on the island, and that that one was across from them on the mainland side, they would have been relieved.

Had they known, however, what the dog was doing at the moment, their relief would have died a sudden death. In fact, their hair would have stood straight up on their heads!

But they didn’t know; so they went on to the house.

Mac touched Benson’s shoulder and pointed to something. It was a thing they had seen a lot since leaving the shore.

There was a regular trench dug through the woods in front of them. It was about four feet deep and looked as if it had been dug for a pipeline. But there was no pipe in it.

There had been more of these trenches through the woods, criss-crossing each other in a regular pattern. Just empty ditches. They seemed senseless; yet that regularity of pattern hinted at a purpose.

They strode across this last ditch, went on a few steps and reached the clearing. They paused a moment to look over the house with the three turrets.

The place was not as big as it looked. The turrets gave it an appearance of hugeness; actually, there were probably not more than fifteen rooms in it.

There weren’t many windows. The windows were heavily barred, save for a small one high up in each turret. These were without bars and probably gave on little rooms that had no purpose at all; there was no excuse for the turrets in the first place, save for decorative reasons.

The Avenger nodded, and the three men ran lightly and soundlessly across the clearing to the house wall.

There was a basement window at the side, also barred.

Smitty went to work on it.

Sitting down, he braced his feet against the wall and took a bar in each vast hand. Then he heaved.

The necessity for making as little noise as possible hampered him. He couldn’t jerk; he had to exert a steady, even pressure. It was four or five minutes before outraged steel began to give.

There was a thin squeal, and the casement came loose. A little more pulling, and Smitty leaned back with the whole grating, somewhat out of shape, in his huge right hand.

He laid it down and slid downward into blackness. Mac and Dick followed him. As they did so, the wind suddenly increased its intensity from a moan to a low, but rising, howl.

A storm was coming up.

Mac’s flash lanced out briefly. It showed that they were in a small vault with an open door. Through this they could see still another door, partly closed.

“Try to find stairs leading up,” said The Avenger, voice low and vibrant.

They went through the two doorways and into a cell from which three doors opened. From the low, arched ceilings, moisture oozed, turning the atmosphere clammy. Festoons of cobwebs hung everywhere, beaded with moisture. Scurrying sounds on all sides indicated armies of rats, and several times the little red eyes of the loathsome rodents appeared in the distance like evil jewels.

“Mon, ’tis a ghastly place,” whispered Mac.

“Yeah, like a lot of burial crypts,” agreed Smitty, who had to bend his head low to keep it from scraping the cement ceiling.

They opened two of the three doors and saw only other vaults. The third showed a corridor. They started down that.

Dick’s arms swung wide and back, crowding Mac and Smitty backward again into the room they had just quitted. They shut the door save for an inch and peered through this crack, not yet knowing why The Avenger had retreated.

They heard steps down the stairs, then saw a light. The light was in the hands of a man so fat it appeared that he must weigh over three hundred. Beside him came a little wisp of a fellow who seemed to cringe with every step he took.

Obviously the big man was master and the little one servant. They went down the corridor.

“That fat boy must be Goram Haygar,” whispered Smitty.

Mac nodded, but did not speak. Another door had been opened far down the corridor, revealing light. The light was not intense, but it was steady.

They stayed there for perhaps five minutes before the man who looked like a rhinoceros and the servant who looked like a rabbit came back and went up the stairs. The Avenger started down the corridor, with Mac and Smitty following.

They came to the vault at the end, in which the two had gone for a moment. At the doorway, The Avenger stopped for an instant. His colorless, infallible eyes had picked out something in the wall of the corridor.

There was a line there, and when he looked harder he saw more like it. The line was about six inches across and went all along the corridor wall. Somebody had trenched out both walls and ceiling at regular intervals—just as trenches had been dug all through the woods. Then the trenches had been filled with cement again.

It took sharp eyes to see the difference in texture of the fresher cement. But once seen, it was easily distinguishable.

The three went on in, and Smitty gasped.

Two great tapers, burning on and on and filling the vault with an eerie, yellowish light. Between the tapers, an ebony trestle. On the trestle—a coffin with a glass lid revealing a corpse.

They went to the coffin and peered down. The dead man seemed rather asleep than dead. He was a dapper little elderly gentleman with a thin, high-arched nose and a thin line of gray hair on the upper lip forming a neat mustache.

Benson had studied a lot of old records on the American branch of the Haygar family and had seen pictures.

“Wendell Haygar, father of the present owner of this place,” he said. “There was an account of his eccentricity in choosing to be laid to rest in his own vault in an open coffin rather than buried.”

“Maybe he was afraid of being buried alive,” mused Smitty. “You know—lots of people fear falling into a cataleptic trance and then being buried for dead and coming to in a coffin six feet underground.”

“Looks almost as if he could get up and walk,” Mac whispered. “But he won’t—not with embalmer’s fluid in his veins.”

“What was that?” It was Smitty’s startled whisper.

“What was what?” said Mac peevishly. The giant had scared him into jumping a foot.

Smitty didn’t answer. He thought he had heard a low laugh in the corridor outside the vault.

The Avenger went toward the door, not seeming to strive for fast movement, but getting there in an incredibly short time. He knew he had heard a laugh. No question about it.

Mac and Smitty crowded after. And then, where there had been solid floor, there was only emptiness, and they were falling!

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac.

He had bumped so hard it had knocked the breath half out of him. He got it back and stood up and looked around.

The Avenger was on his feet and raying his flashlight around.