The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (17 page)

But as he was reaching for it, light cut the blackness. Some one of the gunmen either had a flash he’d finally thought to use, Or else some one of them had torn a little flashlight from the belt of one of the members of Justice, Inc.

The beam slashed over struggling bodies—and on Benson, Mac, Beck and Myra, at the end wall.

Also, it showed the crack of the partly opened slab.

Instantly, the full gang surged that way. “They’re gettin’ outta here! Stop ’em! Kill ’em!” The flash was smashed out.

Another sheet of flame, formed by a dozen lines of fire lancing from gun muzzles, swept toward the end wall. But with the yell, all there had fallen flat to the floor. And before a second, more deadly burst could come, The Avenger’s voice sounded out.

It didn’t seem loud; yet it vibrated through the cave like a paralyzing flood, stopping all there for an instant.

“I told you Kepper had planned your deaths as well as ours. Have you felt the water in here? Have you noticed how it was rising?”

One stray shot had punctuated his words, searching for his head. No more sounded.

“Pretty soon, this water will be up to your waists,” The Avenger’s vibrant, powerful voice rang out in the blackness. “Then up to your chins. Then solid to the roof. And you will be trapped in it. Kepper turned a valve from a city water main when he went out of here.”

“You’re stallin’ again,” came a voice. But it was a very troubled voice. Because you couldn’t dismiss the fact that the water in here was now almost knee high, and rising all the time.

“Stalling?” said Benson. “Try the oak door and see. You were supposed to follow Kepper out that door. And he locked it against you as he went out.”

There was a rush toward the oak door. And during it, The Avenger got the slab open enough for a body to squeeze through.

He’d remembered where each person was. He caught wrists, one after one, of Myra, Beck, Nellie and Cole and impelled them through the opening.

Then the gang surged back, squalling in terror. They didn’t think The Avenger was stalling now. That locked door had convinced them all.

“In with you,” Smitty roared in the darkness. “I’ll plug the hole after you.”

Mac and The Avenger went into the opening. Smitty backed after them.

There was a roar as somebody shot at the opening. The giant grunted as a bullet smacked against his chest and was stopped by the bullet-proof celluglass. Then Smitty doubled his colossal fists, smalled them straight forward like the pistons of a locomotive.

The end of the tunnel was suddenly clear. He caught hold of an ancient iron handle on the inside of the movable rock slab and swung it closed again.

And that was that!

“O.K.,” he called after the others. “Take your time. I can hold this door as long as you want it held. We got them bottled up good, chief.”

The rough tunnel that the rest went along slanted up, then ended in an overhead slab of stone. It was a rough stone, a flat boulder. It moved when The Avenger got under it and heaved.

The stars shone with the lifting of the boulder. All clambered out. The boulder was the one with the ancient surveyor’s peg set in it.

Off to the east, they could see a car parked, with police lights on it.

“Go to that squad car,” said The Avenger to Beck. “Tell them to round up the others near here and come prepared to take a dozen or more prisoners.”

Beck started off, with Myra beside him. Meanwhile, the screams of the prisoners sounded even through the rock door down there, and along the tunnel.

“Let them think they’re going to drown,” said Dick, colorless eyes narrowed. “It won’t hurt them at all.”

Nellie was shifting from one small foot to the other. She burst out: “This Dan Moran! I mean Kepper! He got away ages ago! Shouldn’t we try to catch him, too? You’re not going to let him escape, are you?”

“Escape?” said Benson. He turned toward Nellie, and even the little blonde felt disturbed and uneasy at the pale, impersonal stare. “You remember that cry of fear, just before I knocked the light out?”

“Why, yes,” said Nellie.

“That was Kepper,” Benson said. “In the path he chose there was a twenty-foot pit with a monster boar, mad with hunger, in the bottom. Kepper’s grisly murder weapon. His road lay over that pit, on a wide plank thrown across. Rather predictably, he stepped out where he thought the plank was, and fell into the pit. Because it happened that the plank was not there any more.”

“It happened?” repeated Nellie, a little pale. She could picture what had happened in that black pit, and she wished she couldn’t imagine it so vividly. “It . . . just happened?”

The Avenger said nothing.

Benson never took life. But always he maneuvered the master crooks he pursued into deadly situations where, if they went ahead with their plans to destroy innocent people, they only destroyed themselves. Thus, Kepper, plotting murders to conform to the bizarre details of the Wilder curse, had brought the same doom upon himself!

Another case was concluded.

The master plotter was dead in a manner satisfying savage poetic justice; the underlings waited in terror for the police to round them up.

Mac said, “And the remainin’ partners? The skurlies, Jones and Marsden? Are ye going to prosecute them?”

“Their swindle was legal,” Benson reminded him, voice cold and calm. “And they have already paid heavily for it. They can pay some more by listening to the sounds that now terrify them, the sound of the beasts of Wilder’s curse. We’ll leave Kepper’s hidden mechanisms where they are, in Jones’s and Marsden’s homes.”

He started toward the car he had parked when he raced here from the library. Following a few feet after the lonely, erect figure, Nellie and Cole and Mac realized afresh how much more of a flesh-and-blood machine than a human being was this dreaded fighter of the underworld.

A machine of vengeance that would go till death stopped it. Always The Avenger, taking toll against criminals for the great wrong criminals had done him years ago.

It would be war to the end. No single battle, like this affair of the Thornton Heights murders and the Wilder curse, would be more than an incident in it.

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