The Avenger 15 - House of Death (13 page)

Smitty was sitting on stone floor rubbing his head. Above them where a section of the floor had swung to plunge them down into a subcellar, was now, apparently, solid rock.

The three men abruptly stopped their methodical survey of their surroundings and their own injuries.

All round the floor, at the base of the walls, were ragged little holes. And these holes suddenly began spewing things out.

Rats!

Hundreds of rats, gaunt, starved-looking, black, brown, big, little. In a swarm they made for the men.

“Whoosh!” breathed Mac, beginning to do a sort of Highland fling as he tried to step on some and still avoid the others. He was joined by Benson and Smitty. The three seemed to be executing a weird waltz. But there was nothing funny about it. It was a dance of death!

Smitty yelled as a rat found his ankle in spite of the frantic stamping and jumping. The pale eyes of The Avenger were little chips of stainless steel. They’d be fleshless skeletons in a very short time if they couldn’t escape.

“Smitty, give me your hands. Mac, keep the rats off Smitty as much as possible.”

The Avenger leaped from the giant’s cupped hands to his vast shoulders. Standing there, he was about four feet under the ceiling. He crouched with bent legs while his pale eyes sought the crack around the stone block that showed which square of floor they’d fallen through.

Smitty moaned a little as tiny teeth ripped at his legs.

“Mac, you Scotch squarehead, keep those rats off!”

Mac, jumping and stamping and swinging at Smitty’s legs with his coat, let go a large, round oath.

“What d’ye think I’m tryin’ to do, ye ten-foot dimwit!”

The Avenger’s eyes had stopped at a certain spot in the line around the stone block. The thing swung on a pivot in the middle, evidently. That meant there had to be a steel bar at one side to catch the block and keep it from swinging when it was not supposed to. He thought he had located the significant bolt.

“I’m sorry, chief,” moaned Smitty, “but I’m not going to be able—ouch!—to take this much longer. Mac, gas the damned things.”

“Sure, and gas us, too,” snapped Mac. “Shut up and stand still.”

The Avenger whipped out a thin blade, toothed like a hacksaw but much thinner and finer than any regular saw ever was. He hadn’t used this on the basement window bars because the rasping noise might betray them. Now noise was meaningless; it was speed that counted. With all the phenomenal strength that lay in his average-sized, slim fingers, he leaned on that saw.

Three terrible minutes passed. Terrible for Smitty, anyway, and only to a slightly lesser extent for Mac.

“Chief—I can’t . . . much longer,” panted the giant. His ankles were something to keep from looking at.

“All right, Smitty.”

Benson pocketed the fine saw. He put his shoulders up hard against the block at the catch side.

“Heave!”

The Avenger’s body became a bent gray steel bar. His wrists went chalk-white with effort. And under him the huge Smitty pushed, too.

There was a loud crack as a partly sawed bolt gave. And then the stone block pivoted in the middle, with no catch to keep it secured any more.

Benson was up through the opening in one fast move. Smitty, hanging onto arms that were not overlarge but had all the strength of steel cables, followed.

“Hey!” yelled Mac, leaping up and down. “Me, too!”

Smitty’s hamlike hand came within reach, and with one arm the giant hauled him up so fast that he popped out of the hole in the floor like a jack-in-the-box.

They stood there, panting. Then they forgot the rat bites and the nasty death they had just escaped and all the rest of the deadly dangers of the night, forgot them in a sudden glimpse of something supernatural.

Ahead of them, down the corridor from the vault of death in which was the coffin of old Wendell Haygar, was a tenuous, dim white figure that seemed to waver like mist.

“ ’Tis a ghostie,” whispered Mac, appalled.

“It can’t be!” Smitty whispered back. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Try an’ disbelieve that one away!” Mac rapped out. “Look, it’s movin’—and it wants us to follow.”

“I’m following—the other way!” Smitty vowed, whirling.

But behind them was only the end wall of the crypt. They could only go ahead, toward the white thing.

The Avenger had already stepped across the hole in the floor and was going down the corridor. With their flesh crawling, Mac and Smitty followed in his wake.

The misty white thing had a face. They got glimpses of it as they caught up to it a little. It had a face, and a purpose. They found out the purpose in about twenty seconds.

The white figure stopped at a section of corridor wall. One misty arm went out toward a certain spot in the wall. So that was the purpose—they were to look here for something.

Then they really saw the face.

“Land o’ livin’!” jerked out Mac. “ ’Tis old Wendell Haygar, risen from his coffin!”

There was the delicate, small face, with a neat gray line of mustache. There were the sunken eyes, open now, and the dapper body.

Then there was nothing. The white shape disappeared utterly.

“Smitty, after him,” snapped The Avenger.

The giant raced on down the corridor, flash boring a thin white line into darkness. But only darkness. The white figure had vanished like mist, though it would seem there was no place to vanish to.

With the giant’s footsteps hastening down the corridor, Benson turned to the spot in the wall indicated by the white thing. He saw one of the many trenches gouged from the concrete and later replaced by fresh cement.

But this spot, for six feet, was larger, almost two feet wide instead of six inches. And it was cracked a little as if the base for the cement had settled behind the stuff.

The Avenger took out Mike, and four slugs whispered from its silenced little muzzle. The impact was not very heavy since the caliber was so small, but the cracked cement did not need much of a kick to break loose.

Half a dozen small fragments fell out, revealing the reason why it had cracked in the first place.

Back in there, a part of a bone could be seen. At sight of it, Mac looked significantly at The Avenger.

“Human tibia,” said Mac.

They knocked out a few more chips, and more bones were exposed, some not completely bared. The shriveling of a body had cracked the concrete. A few wires were exposed, too.

“A dead mon’s bones,” whispered Mac. “Pointed out by a ghost of Wendell Haygar, or else by his perambulatin’ corpse—”

He stopped. Down the corridor Smitty’s little flash was waving a come-on sign.

“Smitty’s found something,” said the Scot.

They joined the giant at the end of the corridor.

“I’ve located the stairs,” said Smitty. He gestured with the light. “See? There. Through that one door—”

Too late. The Avenger noticed that the roof of this low vault was not arched as the others had been; it was flat. Also, that it was constructed of dull metal instead of stone, and that there was a line all around the edges of it.

The two doors—one to the stair well and the one through which they had just come—banged shut with a sound like vault doors. There were heavy clicks as big bolts crossed outside, where they couldn’t be reached.

Then the ceiling jerked a little and began coming down!

Smitty banged one door and then the other. Neither moved a fraction of an inch. The ceiling lowered a foot.

“Out of the rat den into the wine press,” said the giant with grim humor.

His smile was only too apt. This cell was like a giant wine press, with the three men like grapes, to be squeezed practically into nothingness when roof met floor!

In Nellie Gray had been left out of this. The Avenger, with a theory about the affair of the golden disks already complete in his coldly flaming brain, had looked forward to too much violence on Haygar’s Island to want a girl—even the amazingly capable Nellie—to experience it.

So he had left Nellie out of it. And Nellie didn’t want to be left out.

In the first place, she thought Carmella was on that island. And she had not yet gotten over her self-fury for allowing the regal brunette from Spain to give her the slip at Bleek Street. The chief had put Carmella in her charge. She had let Carmella get loose.

All the other Haygars seemed to be bound for that island. Probably Carmella was, too. Nellie wanted to take up her charge over the girl again, particularly in case danger threatened.

In the second place, Nellie just wasn’t used to being left out, and didn’t like it at all. So she was horning in again.

She had taken a small fast plane to Maine, waited for night, then slipped into the water and headed toward the island six miles away.

Nellie was an expert distance swimmer, and she reached the island, scarcely breathing hard. She slipped fairly dry clothes over her swimming costume, which consisted almost entirely of her own lovely white skin, and started for the house in the clearing.

She almost fell into one of the innumerable trenches crisscrossing the island, leaped the next, and then became the reason why the one mastiff left on the place had not scented The Avenger and his two aides.

It was because the brute scented Nellie first.

It was when Nellie crossed the second trench that she became aware of that and froze in her tracks.

There was a whipping of underbrush, a snarl that chilled her blood; then she saw a dog that looked, in the dimness, as big as a lion.

Nellie knew dogs. She could see at a glance that this one had been trained to kill—trained for that and nothing else. No one but its master could ever approach the brute; probably even the master would have to depend on clubs and whips.

It was less a dog than a man-killing machine!

Nellie took to a tree with a promptness of movement that The Avenger himself could scarcely have beaten. From a branch fifteen feet up, she stared at the mastiff.

The dog was making no outcry. Only the low, hideous snarling came from his throat. Nellie didn’t know whether she was glad or not for the silence.

She was glad because there wasn’t a commotion letting everyone on the island know that a stranger had landed. She was dismayed because it is about the worst sign of all when a dog attacks silently: it means that nothing but a ripped throat will make him go away again.

Nellie was as good a woodsman as any of the men in the little crime-fighting band. She had accompanied her father, murdered finally to get his secret of the hiding place of a great store of gold, on many of his archaeological expeditions into jungles. She began to travel as only a supreme woodsman can.

That was ape fashion among the tree limbs.

The trees were close enough so that she could leap and clamber and swing from one to another on overhanging branches.

It was a perilous task, not nearly as easy as it seems in the movies, where an aerial path is selected before the camera turns. She had to descend in places to a point where the snarling brute beneath could almost leap up and get her. In others she had to climb high, hold her breath, and swing for ten feet through thin air.

She reached the clearing around the house, and there she seemed to be all through. She sat in an uncomfortable fork and considered.

She had a gun, but she couldn’t shoot the dog without rousing the island. And she didn’t know what that might do to the plans of The Avenger, who, she was sure, was on the place. But she couldn’t stay here all night, either.

A dangerous native trick occurred to her, one she had seen a guide in Central America work on a jaguar.

In a belt under her trim dress, Nellie carried a little knife. She got it out and cut two short branches about an inch thick.

With her two shoelaces tied together, she fastened one short wooden length to the other, making a T. The handle of the T was about a foot long, and the top of it about six inches. She sharpened one end of the top to as fine a point as the wood would take.

She tossed the leafy end of the limb she had whittled to one side. The mastiff, snarling, swung to stare as it landed, and Nellie leaped down.

“Oh, dear!” she said. “If this doesn’t work—”

The dog was already springing toward her. If it did not work, she would have a hand chewed to a mess of bone and flesh. But then, if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t care what happened to her hand because she wouldn’t be around to use it anyway.

The dog left the ground and seemed fairly to soar at her in one long, bloodthirsty leap! She extended the T.

Into the gaping, slavering jaws she jammed the top of the T, sharp end up. She could feel the froth from the brute on her fingers as the jaws snapped like the jaws of a steel trap; the dog’s breath was hot on her wrist!

And it worked!

The sharp point burst up through the roof of the brute’s mouth and into the brain with the savage force of the jaws. The mastiff fell without a further move or sound, with the end of the stick protruding from its clenched fangs.

Nellie sat down for a minute, feeling sick and shaking all over. Then she got up and went on toward the house, a lovely, flying wraith as she crossed the clearing.

A little while before, the wind had begun to rise, and a storm had started growling in its beard out at sea. It struck, now, with all the fury of a summer squall, only with a steadiness that indicated much more persistence than a squall.

Screaming wind almost knocked Nellie flat, but she reached the house wall. And, there, she was glad for the racket of the gale.

Up the side of this repulsive-looking, decayed building were splotches of vines. Light as she was, she could climb them; but without the wind the sound might have been heard by those inside.

Now she could make as much noise as she pleased. She started climbing, with the right-hand turret window as her goal. There were no bars over that window.

She found that she could probably have made it even without the vines, for the bricks of the house wall were set in uneven rows to make a tapestry design, and her fingers and toes found good holds.