The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (11 page)

“Now
what?” said Smitty.

“That was Cole Wilson,” said Nellie. “Anyhow, it was supposed to be.”

“What do you mean, supposed to be?”

Nellie looked thoughtful and a little grim.

“Cole went to hand that gunman over to headquarters. He should have been back here long ago. But he hasn’t showed up.”

“Look,” said Smitty, exasperated. “If you’d kindly tell a guy what happened—”

“When I picked that phone up,” said Nellie, “a whispering voice said, ‘This is Cole. Don’t say a word, just listen. And listen hard because I’m where I can’t talk loud.’ Then he whispered, ‘They got me. I need help bad. Come to the little park at Thornton Heights. Crescent Park, they call it. Hurry!’ ”

“Thornton Heights again!” growled Smitty. “I’m getting so I hate the sound of that name. Do you think it was really Cole?”

“He isn’t back, and he ought to be,” shrugged Nellie.

They tried to contact Cole Wilson on his belt radio. There was no answer.

“All right,” said Smitty. “The chief’s busy, so I’ll take care of this. I’ll go out to this Crescent Park and nose around.”

“We,”
corrected Nellie, “will go out. If you went alone, you’d surely get into some sort of trouble. You need protection.”

Smitty grinned, though the grin was a trifle subdued in view of Cole’s call for help. They went to the basement and climbed into a fast car.

“I hope,” said Nellie, “That that was really Cole calling, not somebody doubling for him.”

Smitty drove fast.

“I hope, if somebody’s got Cole, that he is still able to make phone calls; that he isn’t lying somewhere with a bullet through his head.”

Smitty drove faster yet.

The little park referred to was about half a block square and at the east edge of the big Thornton Heights oblong. It was a loafing and recreation spot for all the buildings, but there were few people in it at this hour.

It was just a little before the adults would be coming home from offices, and a little after the kids from school got through playing and were at home getting their ears washed.

Smitty and Nellie left the car and walked to the center of the thing. It was about as big as a football field, just the playing part. In the center was a fountain. Around this was a circular sidewalk, much marked with roller skating. And around the walk were trees and shrubs in a thick hedge.

It made a kind of glade in the center.

There was no one and nothing to see in the bulk of the cleared space. Nellie and Smitty wound up in this small bay with the fountain tinkling beside them.

Several benches were along the walk. A woman sat knitting on one. On another was a stalwart nursemaid in white. Her small charge was evidently beyond the trees, playing, for she sat alone.

“See anything off-color anywhere?” said Smitty in a low tone.

Nellie shook her lovely blonde head.

“Not a thing. Just an innocent, open park. I don’t see how anyone could be held against his will around here.”

“Maybe—” began Smitty.

At the east edge of the park, a siren sounded. It wailed from down the street, growing in volume as it approached the park.

“Squad car?” said Nellie.

Smitty just stared toward the sound.

So did the nursemaid and the woman with the knitting utensils.

A yell came from the edge of the park. The woman with the knitting bag got up and began walking hastily toward the sound, with the morbid curiosity that makes mobs grow.

“I don’t know what’s up,” said Smitty over his shoulder toward Nellie. “But it might have something to do with Cole. Let’s go!”

He began loping toward the still-wailing siren.

“The squad car—or whatever it is—seems to be going
away
from here!” he complained. “Maybe it’s just—”

He stopped. There was no sound of Nellie’s incisive little footsteps tapping in his wake. He whirled around. There was no Nellie.

He got back to the little enclosed bay with the fountain in the center in about four jumps.

Nellie wasn’t here, either. Nobody was. He could see the woman with the knitting bag still walking hopefully toward where curiosity-provoking sounds had rent the air. The nursemaid was gone.

“Nellie,”
yelled Smitty.

His voice echoed back from the surrounding buildings, and several windows opened and people stared curiously out. That was his only response.

The giant didn’t yell again. She’d have heard him the first time, and answered—if she could.

A sort of growl came from Smitty’s vast throat—an anxious, ferocious rumbling noise, like the warning of a mother elephant whose young is threatened. Smitty went awe-inspiringly crazy, when anything threatened the diminutive blonde.

But there was nothing around here to go crazy against. Just an empty little park.

A voice came. Anyhow, Smitty thought he heard it. He thought he heard the words: “If you try to make trouble, shell die!”

The voice seemed to have come from the fountain!

Smitty glared at this arrangement.

The statue in the center was a bronze cast of a big fish, balancing on its curved tail and spouting a fetching spray from its gaping jaws. Smitty jumped for it, splashing in the shallow stone basin up to his knees.

He listened. Nothing. He grasped the bronze fish in his two big hands and wrenched. There was no give to the thing, no sign that it was some sort of trick arrangement turning on its base and perhaps revealing a hole leading downward.

Smitty twisted harder. Something had to give, when pressure as gigantic as that was applied. The fish broke off at the tail. The giant threw the four-hundred-pound metal form from him and bent over the base.

Water from a slim pipe shot by his cheek in a peaceful stream, and that was all. There was no secret to this fountain, nor to the statue.

Nellie had been here, and now she wasn’t here. There was no place for her to go. But she
had
gone!

Nellie was too busy fighting the murderous noose to do or hear or see anything else.

She’d taken one step after Smitty, toward the wailing sound, when the thing settled around her slender white throat. She saw Smitty’s great back, like a wall before her; then she didn’t see anything but bursting colored lights.

Thin, unbreakable wire, or something of the kind, cut in deep toward her windpipe. She clawed at it and kicked backward but without results. Then she was being dragged somewhere, still fighting.

If the pressure at her throat had been made by strangling hands, she could have done something. In fact, with her knowledge of jujitsu and wrestling, she could have done a lot. But even the man who wrote the book couldn’t fight piano wire sunk so deeply in flesh she couldn’t get her fingers on it.

Then she stopped fighting and stopped thinking and everything else. She fell into an unconsciousness that was almost like death!

Cold dampness against her cheek was the first returning sensation she had.

It felt like a clammy, dead hand pressed there. The sensation was nightmarish, horrible; and the terror it inspired hastened her return to consciousness. Her eyelids snapped up.

She could see nothing. She was in blackness so complete that it seemed as if light had never existed. She thought she was blind for an instant, but her eyes felt all right. She reached for her little flashlight, tucked in a belt under her skirt. That is, she tried to reach.

She couldn’t move her arms.

Sheer panic reached for her. She gritted her teeth.

“All right, so you’re tied up,” she said aloud. “You’ve been tied up before. Don’t lose your head.”

“. . . lose your head,”
came a whispered echo.

She was in some black pocket that was rather large, it seemed, and had rock walls. Her cheeks had sensed a little more about the clammy pressure against them. It wasn’t a hand, it was damp, cold, stone wall. Her head was leaning against it as she lay slumped on more cold, damp stone.

She brought her bound hands to her lips. Whoever had tied her up hadn’t taken the trouble to bind her arms to her sides; he had just tied her wrists, which was a mistake.

She felt the bonds. They were slim and wire-strong. Insulated phone wire, or something of the kind, she thought. An end went from them to the bonds at her ankles so that the noose around each tightened if she moved much.

She arched her pretty but steel-strong little body to give the greatest possible slack to this connecting link, and got a strand of the covered wire between her teeth. She twisted her head back and forth, bending and rebending the wire. Her neck muscles felt as if they were on fire, before the job was done.

But finally it
was
done. The much-bent wire frayed and parted under its insulation. The insulation itself snapped without much pull.

Nellie stood up—and bumped her head. She crouched lower and got out the flash.

She was in a cave, about four and a half feet high and twelve or fifteen feet wide and an unguessable distance in length. It seemed to be a natural cave, too, with uneven height. It was the last thing on earth—or
in
earth—you’d expect to find here in New York.

“Hello, there,” she called experimentally.

From some wall in darkness ahead of her bounced the echo. “. . .
lo, there.”

She started forward, to see where the wall was, and if there was any way through it. Alongside her, the rock was steamy with moisture, and it was twenty degrees colder here than it had been in the open air.

Nellie found that the wall was a long way off. Just before she got to it, she stopped abruptly and listened. She had a hunch she was listening for her life. Chills crept up and down her spine.

She heard, very faintly, a kind of heavy snuffling, shuffling sound, as if a blind giant with asthma were nearby! For some reason, the sound was perfectly horrible. It was a thing to haunt you.

She couldn’t see where it was coming from. It seemed to be sounding at her right. She went to the wall there: rough, irregular, solid rock.

It did seem as if the noise was slightly more audible close to this wall, as if whatever made it was just on the other side. But that might have been imagination.

Her fingers felt lonesomely at her belt for the little radio. It wasn’t there. She’d found out this dismal fact when she got out her flashlight, kept right next to the radio. There was no way to call for help.

She was at the end wall, now. It looked as solid as the others. But there had to be at least one way into this amazing cave. Otherwise, how could she have found herself here?

She began tapping at the wall. There wasn’t much of a cross-section at the end to cover.

In less than a minute, her fingertips hit something that wasn’t rock at all, though in the light of the flash it looked remarkably like it. Probably, though, in a real light, she’d have seen that it was not stone like the rest.

It was thick fabric of some kind. Probably canvas.

Nellie pushed this up and crawled through the resultant hole. Something touched her ankle, and she stopped and trained the flash downward. She bit down a yelp.

The something that had touched her ankle was a man’s rib! At least, Nellie assumed it might have been a man’s. It could have been part of the remains of a woman, too, for that matter. The central fact was that a skeleton lay on the floor and she had almost stepped on it.

It wasn’t as fearsome as it seemed at first, because it was a very old skeleton. It was yellowed and crumbling. The skull lay a few feet away, and there was a round hole in the back. Nellie had seen skulls like that before in museums. Ancient flintlocks, or other primitive muskets, with power enough to send a ball through bone but not clear through and out the other side like a modern slug, made holes like that.

She stepped over the skeleton, picked her way around debris from several more, and went toward a hairline crack of light in still another wall. She saw that it came from a kind of crude door of ancient oak, set into the rock. She looked through the crack.

There was some kind of lighted area in there, but that was all she ever had time to see.

Something made a slight noise behind her. She turned fast, and her flashlight played for just a second on a stalwart figure in a nursemaid’s white garb. The face seemed heavy for a feminine face, though, and the voice that came from it was a male voice.

“Never satisfied, huh? Better for you if you’d stayed tied up where you were.”

Ferocious as a little wild cat, Nellie started it. Her arm flashed out for the throat over the white fabric. The figure ducked and she half tore off the white cap, revealing yellow hair.

Somebody grabbed her shoulders from behind. Somebody from the lighted compartment beyond here.

Nellie put up a fight that had to be seen to be believed. She threw the rear attacker forward over her bent shoulder as if he’d been a sack of meal. He thudded on the floor. One or more of his buddies back of her crooked an arm around her neck and one around her waist.

Her hand shot up, found just the right place over a main nerve in the forearm and pressed hard. There was a howl of agony and the arm disappeared.

But the arm around her middle tightened and twisted, and she fell. At least two fell with her, and her head banged against the floor. She clutched out and got a fistful of white nursemaid’s dress.

Somebody dragged her half a dozen yards and let her drop with a thump. Then, when she hit out, her hands found only empty air.

She heard a heavy door, or something, bang tight. And then she heard a voice say, “Nellie!”

She looked toward the voice.

She was inside the small chamber she’d seen through the crack in the door. Apparently, caves of various sizes were strung along here, like beads on a chain. This was one of the smaller ones. It was lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck.

The owner of the voice was Cole Wilson. He was bound with so much phone wire that he looked like a mummy.

“Always nice to see you,” he said, “but this time it’s a pleasure I’d like to forego.” He was obviously having trouble keeping the light tone. His face was paler than usual. He shook his dark head a bit. “It’s not a nice place, Nellie.”