The Avenger 15 - House of Death (15 page)

Shan and Sharnoff glanced at each other with veiled eyes. There was hatred for each other in their eyes, hatred for the dark girl from Spain and for the fat man. But there was truce in their eyes, too.

“About impostors,” Shan said, as he and Sharnoff put away their guns. “You were saying?”

“That it’s time we judged identities once and for all. Come along!”

He started toward a front room.

“We, too?” blurted Smitty, amazed.

The fat man shrugged. “Yes, if you like. We are all honest men here. We have nothing to hide from Mr. Benson.”

“Chief!” cried Nellie. “Goram Haygar—he’s the man who was pressing that lever down to kill you.”

“You must be mistaken, miss,” said the fat man, heavy eyelids raising just a bit. “I didn’t even know that anyone was downstairs.”

Biting her lips in anger and perplexity at Benson’s odd impassivity in the presence of a murderer, Nellie went with the rest into the room.

It had been a drawing room and still held tarnished traces of magnificence. The fat man went to a cabinet, opened a drawer, and took out five small pieces of metal.

They were little tuning forks. With them came a stand a bit like a cribbage board. The fat man thrust the five little tuning forks in this and set the whole on a table.

Benson’s colorless eyes glittered a bit. There were tiny letters at the base of each fork. They were, in order:

H H, v B H, S H, Sh H, F H

“Gentlemen, your medallions,” said the gross host of this uneasy meeting.

The men hesitated a long time. Then, wary as hawks about it, they reluctantly handed a gold disk apiece to the fat man.

“You, too, Cousin Carmella,” said the fat man.

Carmella turned bright pink. There was an Oriental screen at the end of the room. She retired behind that for a moment. There was a rustling sound of dainty silks. She came back and handed a gold disk to the fat man.

He placed them in a line on the table. And, now, some of their meaning could be instantly seen.

Each disk showed, in addition to letters and figures, a part of a wall. It could be seen now that that wall was the front one of this house, itself.

The disk lettered v B H showed the left-hand turret; H H, the wall next to that; Sh H, the central turret; S H, the ensuing wall; and F H, the right-hand turret.

The fat hand picked up the disk with F H on it, which was Carmella’s. The coin dropped ringingly on the table.

All the little tuning forks vibrated a bit, but one echoed the tone of the ring quite distinctly.

That was the tuning fork with the same letters, F H, on its base.

One by one, the fat man dropped the coins. And one by one, each rang just a little differently from the rest and set its particular tuning fork droning.

The fat man nodded, and handed the disks back, each to its owner. The dead von Bolen’s and Harlik’s medallions he kept himself.

“There will be a final metallurgical analysis of each coin,” he said expressionlessly. “But already I am satisfied, and I imagine each of you also is, that medallions and owners are all genuine.”

“So then?” said Mac, sensing that this was all there was going to be, and outraged by it.

“Why, then,” said the fat man, giving the Scot a heavy-lidded stare, “the family of Haygar is provenly reunited. We have never seen each other before, so we had to devise a proof that each representative of a Haygar branch was what he seemed to be. The proof has been met.”

The Avenger’s cold, agate eyes silenced Mac. The fat man turned with indifferent politeness to Benson.

“There will be no possibility of contacting the mainland till tomorrow, possibly not even then,” he said. “So, meanwhile, we might as well get what rest the elements will allow us.”

And, as emotionlessly as though The Avenger and his three aides had been invited guests, he led the way upstairs to rooms for them all.

“Am
I
nuts, or are these assorted Haygars?” demanded Smitty. He and Mac and Dick were in the room turned over to The Avenger. Nellie was down the second-floor hall in a room with Carmella.

“Murder has been done for those medallions,” the giant went on. “Everybody killing everybody else. Torturing, as Nellie saw Sharnoff start to do to Carmella. Everybody lifted heaven and earth to get the things. And what good are they? They prove that the holders are—or ought to be—members of the Haygar family! And the Haygars are all as poor as church mice! It’s insane.”

“It does seem insane, stated like that,” said Dick Benson evenly.

“Five gold coins, and they all ring different,” Mac mused. “They must each be of a slightly different run of metal.”

“They are,” nodded The Avenger, “so they will ring just a little differently. And a metallurgical analysis, such as our host referred to, would also yield five slightly different results. A clever way to insure against a forged medallion.”

“And all that is cooked up for the same crazy reason—to prove membership in a family that has lost all its power and wealth in country after country,” Smitty said. His ponderous shoulders moved as he gave up the problem. “Another thing: Why this hospitality on the part of a man who tried to kill us and can’t help but hate our guts for being here?”

“It’s the easiest way to dispose of us for the moment,” said The Avenger, pale, flaring eyes like polar ice. “He tried to kill us and failed. It will be harder, now that we are on the alert. The next attempts will have to be more studied and carefully timed.”

“Funny he didn’t try to lock us up, at least.”

The Avenger’s black-cropped head shook.

“You saw the expression in the eyes of all. They hate each other, cousins or not. So our fat host would hesitate to jail us for the simple reason that one of the others, wanting to enlist our aid, would release us again.”

“Enlist our aid for what?” said the giant.

The colorless, deadly eyes were narrowed.

“That will come out, unless I am mistaken, very soon.”

Mac said, “There’s one thing. Goram Haygar might have turned polite and given us rooms because there was nothin’ much else for the mon to do at the moment. But he certainly doesn’t intend to let us go on livin’ any longer than he has to. If he didn’t mean for us to be buried on this island, he wouldn’t have let us see that rigmarole with the medals and the tuning forks. Though I must admit that I didn’t get any meanin’ out of it—”

It was then that the shriek came!

From out in the black storm, just riding over the scream of the gale itself, came the cry: long, tortured, as if the night had cried out for help.

That one long shriek—then silence.

The three stared at each other with bated breath, then ran out and down the hall and into the darkness. That cry had come from someone in the last extremity of despair.

The gale had now settled down into the worst storm in years along the Maine coast. They could hear the roar of the surf, even feel spray at that long distance. The trees were bending double under the burden of the gale. It was hard to stand up under its violence.

The three battered through the storm to the edge of the clearing, in the direction from which the one tragic cry had come.

And they found the crier.

Sharnoff Haygar would never again try in his daintily fiendish way to apply acid to a girl’s face. It was Sharnoff who had screamed.

The man lay on his side in the mud, with the wind and rain lancing at him out of the blackness. He was dead—must have died almost as he was crying out. For he had been shot squarely in the heart.

Shot, but not by a gun!

Protruding from his chest was a thing carrying one back to the days of the early settlers when stockades were the only barriers against constantly threatening death. An arrow!

There the simile ended, however. For this was not an Indian arrow. It was a modern archer’s shaft, designed for hunting, that had come from some fine sporting-goods store. Though the maker could not, of course, have had human quarry in mind when turning out the thing.

“Somebody,” said Smitty, speaking loudly to be heard above the wind, “must be an excellent hand with a bow. There seem to be no prints in the mud anywhere near the guy except our own. So he was drilled from some distance. And with only lightning to reveal him, that takes some shooting.”

The Avenger nodded, colorless eyes like ice chips.

“He was shot from the direction of the house,” he said.

They turned back that way, and after a little while they found where the archer had stood. The footprints were quite distinct. But they could never be used for identification. The rain had made them only ragged little pits.

“After our archer shot, he ran,” said Smitty, pointing to the wide spaces between the ragged little prints that led back to the house from the clearing. “The prints seem to go around the house, so I guess he beat it for a rear door— Hey! What’s this?”

“More trouble,” said Mac.

Another body lay out there in the rain. This one was right against the house wall, at the foot of the turret that Nellie had climbed to enter the house.

But this man was not dead. As they went toward him, they heard moans.

They hastened their pace and knelt beside the man.

It was Shan Haygar, dark eyes glazed with suffering, face almost green in the recurrent lightning flashes.

“Broken back,” whispered Mac.

Smitty nodded. Even he, unversed in such things, had known that.

He had seen a dog run over once. After the truck had rolled on, the dog had lain in the street with hindquarters down and forequarters up, muzzle pointing rigidly to the skies, and yelping out howls as sharp and staccato and regular as something ticked off by a metronome.

This man lay like this. From the waist down, he was turned sharply sideways. From there up, he lay on his back, face up.

“The skurlie must have fallen off the turret,” said Mac. “Or else, he jumped—”

Benson threw out his hand for silence. The man’s lips were moving, trying to say something. The Avenger bent low to hear, his face within a few inches of the lips, pale, deadly eyes intent.

“Didn’t jump!” gasped the man. “Ghost led me to turret. Said . . . ‘Lead me to that . . . which I desire—’ ”

The lips stopped while tortured breath panted out. Then:

“ ‘That which I desire’ . . . led me to death . . . instead—”

That was all. The eyes closed and the words stopped.

“He’s done for,” said Mac to Smitty. “He might live for hours like this, but we could never move him. The least jar to that broken spine might be fatal—”

The end came even as he spoke.

Evidently a paroxysm of unendurable pain swooped on Shan Haygar, for he twisted convulsively on the ground. The convulsive move stopped; then he screamed and died.

He had killed himself with that uncontrollable spasm.

The big front door opened as Mac and Smitty and Benson reached it. Light streamed out, silhouetting the huge figure of their host.

The fat man stood blinking and looking sleepy as they entered the hallway.

“What’s all the commotion?” he asked. “There have been yells outside and the sound of this door banging. And, just now, there was another scream. What—”

“Two of your cousins are dead!” said Dick.

“What?” exclaimed the fat man.

“Somebody shot Sharnoff with an arrow,” blurted the giant Smitty. “And either a little before or a little after that, somebody led Shan Haygar to the top of one of the turrets by a ruse and shoved him over. He broke his back when he landed.”

The gross owner of the island didn’t blink. He just stood there, staring with heavy-lidded eyes at the three who had come in out of the night.

“I will go with my servant and bring the two in,” he said at last. And that was all. He faced the stairs.

“Morgan!” It was unnecessary to call twice.

The servant had evidently been on his way down. He appeared at the upper landing, looking hastily dressed, and came on down as fast as uncertain legs would carry him.

He stared fearfully at The Avenger, then turned quickly away again. He went out the front door with his hulking, phlegmatic master.

“Shan dead,” said Smitty somberly. “Sharnoff dead. That leaves only Carmella and Goram of the once-great and once-numerous Haygar family.”

“My bet is that Goram killed those two,” ventured Mac, looking sideways at The Avenger as he spoke.

“Well, they certainly didn’t kill each other,” was Smitty’s retort. He stared at Dick, too.

But Dick Benson did not have much to say at the moment, it seemed. He only said, “Back upstairs. Smitty, your room is next to the girls’ room. Keep a sharp watch. As you have said, of all the owners of the gold medallions only Carmella and our host are left alive. I would not like to be Carmella at this moment.”

Smitty went upstairs in a hurry, not so much because of danger to Carmella—though of course that entered his thoughts, too—but because of accompanying danger to Nellie.

Where the five-foot-nothing blonde was concerned, Smitty was a three-hundred-pound mother elephant.

He tapped on the girls’ door before opening his own. It was Nellie who poked her pretty golden head out.

“Smitty! I was waiting for some news. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Carmella, I’d have gone out and dug up my own news! What happened? We heard screams.”

“Sharnoff and Shan,” said the giant somberly, “have met with—accidents.”

In the room behind Nellie, he heard Carmella gasp.

“Don’t go out of here for any reason whatever,” Smitty said. “And don’t open the door to any one but one of us. Promise?”

“I won’t open the door for any human being but you,” promised Nellie.

She didn’t know how that promise was going to fail to bind her, a little later.

“Good night, then. Try to get some sleep.”

Smitty went next door to his own room, with some of his fears laid at rest. At a single word from Nellie, he could be there. He could hear a call easily through the wall.

Even knowing Nellie as well as he did, it did not occur to him that there might not be a call to hear!