The Phantom (17 page)

Now that he was here, he headed directly to the crew quarters where he’d left his leather satchel with the silver skull. He spoke to no one as he raced through the ship, remembering that he’d stupidly left the satchel in plain view on a bunk.

He knew as soon as he saw it that it was empty. He hurried over to the bunk, ran his hands over the sides, unzipped it.

“Who the—”

“Hi, there, Quill,” Sala said.

Sala was sitting cross-legged on another bunk. The skull was in her lap, and she was cleaning it with a toothbrush.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” He snatched the skull from her.

“Hey, take it easy. It rolled out of your bag. I was just cleaning it up and keeping an eye on it.”

“It’s mine.”

“No it’s not. It’s the boss’s, and he wants it right away. I decoded the message myself. I’m flying you to New York as soon as you get cleaned up.”

“So everything’s okay,” Quill said. “I knew it.” He looked at the shiny skull. “Nice job. How about coming into the shower now and helping me clean up? Remember, we were going to do that before.”

“Forget it. I must have been momentarily out of my mind. I’ll meet you by the plane.”

TWENTY

New York City

D
iana Palmer breezed into the city library and passed row after row of bookshelves and tables until she reached the reference desk in the history department. Behind it were several carts stacked with books and magazines, but no one was around. As she waited, her thoughts drifted back over the last couple of days.

Her arrival at La Guardia Airport had been nearly as exhausting as the long trip back. She’d been met by reporters and photographers, as well as Uncle Dave and her mother, who was crying with joy and berating Uncle Dave at the same time. It was a scene that had been repeated more than once, but this time Diana had a distinct feeling that arriving home safely didn’t necessarily mean she was safe.

Uncle Dave was anxious to hear all the details. He and his reporters had gathered disturbing bits and pieces of the story after the Pan Am Clipper had been forced down into the Bangalla Sea. In fact, the
Tribune
had run a front-page article about it, prominently noting the kidnapping of the publisher’s niece.

Diana told her story, at least a tempered version. She said her rescuer was a stranger and that she’d never found out who he really was—which, in a sense, was the truth. It was better that way, better for her and better for the Phantom. Privately she’d told Uncle Dave about the Sengh Brotherhood.

Now, a day later, the hoopla was over, and she could get down to work. “Excuse me,” she said, waving a hand at a bespeckled young man who was prowling around in the stacks with a pile of books under his arms. “Can you help me with something?”

The librarian peered over his glasses at her, then carried his load of books up to the front desk where he set them down. He was thin and pale and his shoulders slumped, as if he’d been carrying too many books. He looked like he didn’t want to be bothered. “What is it?”

“This is the reference desk, I believe,” Diana said, annoyed by the man’s attitude. “I’d like some help with research I’m doing on an organization called the Sengh Brotherhood.” She spelled the name for him.

Diana was sure that whatever was available would cross-reference the material that Xander Drax had been studying. Somewhere in those documents would be a description of the supernatural force that Drax wanted to control.

“Well?” Diana asked impatiently.

The librarian, whose tiny, cheap name tag read Henri, said, “Recent or historical?”

“What?”

“I said, do you want recent or historical reference material?”

“Oh, both. I want everything you have.”

Henri nodded and slipped away, as silent as a ghost. He returned a few minutes later. The subject she was asking about was located in special collections and required her to fill out a request form that could only be approved by the director of the library. Then, after a pause, he added: “The director is not available today. I’m not sure when he will be available, either.”

“My uncle, David Palmer, is a good friend of Dr. Fleming’s. Maybe if I call him—”

“You mean, Mr. Palmer, the publisher of the
Tribune?”
Awe crept into his voice.

She nodded.

“I think you should speak to your uncle about Dr. Fleming. The
Tribune
is doing a story on his disappearance. It’s really something of a mystery.” He leaned forward. “We’re really in the dark here. We don’t know what’s going on, except that the police are now involved, and they’ve been poking around here.”

Diana remembered her uncle mentioning Xander Drax’s secret research to the police commissioner and the mayor. “I’ll tell you what, if you get me the material from special collections, I’ll find out everything I can about the disappearance.”

Henri pushed up his glasses, then looked to his right and left, making sure no one was listening to them. Then he smiled. “I suppose I can make an exception, especially since Dr. Fleming is unavailable.”

Uncle Dave told her about Fleming. He was last seen leaving for a visit to Drax’s office. Drax claimed he never showed up for the meeting, and the investigation was at a standstill. But one of his reporters had just talked to a clerk in a nearby cigar shop who had seen two men carrying something that looked like a body wrapped in a blanket to a Packard that was parked in an alley behind the building.

Diana passed on the information, taking care to avoid identifying the witness. She was all too well aware of Drax’s ability to make witnesses and informers disappear. Henri looked disturbed by what he heard, but Diana was even more disturbed by what the librarian told her.

“I don’t have very much for you,” Henri confided. “Most of it is gone.”

“What do you mean gone? Where is it?”

“Last night Police Commissioner Farley confiscated all the material that Xander Drax had requested during his visits. He said it was part of the investigation into Dr. Fleming’s disappearance.”

Or part of the coverup,
Diana thought.

Henri pushed a cart over to a nearby table and carefully laid out three aged journals and several bound volumes of old newspapers. “This is all I have for you. Some of it dates back to the sixteenth century, so be very careful with it.”

For the remainder of the morning and into the early afternoon, Diana studied the material. As she suspected, there was no mention of an ancient artifact of power. However, her research was not without some interesting discoveries.

The Sengh Brotherhood, she learned, was more than four centuries old. In the early fifteen hundreds, it was a well-trained fraternity of outlaws that attacked merchant ships. The Brotherhood was encountered on the Spanish main, the West Indies, and off the coast of Africa. But their headquarters and primary hunting grounds were believed to be the coastal region of Bangalla.

One newspaper article from the seventeenth century surprised Diana so much that she had to reread it twice. According to the report from the office of the governor of Jamaica, the Sengh Brotherhood had been destroyed by the legendary Phantom—and disbanded in 1612.

The same Phantom? Impossible, she thought. Maybe the Phantom she’d met was just someone imitating him. The other alternative was that “her Phantom” was a descendant of the original one. In other words, the Phantom could be a one-man tradition of sorts. One man, but also many men.

She prided herself on her knowledge of history, but more and more she was realizing that history was filled with obscure episodes that had faded into legend. Until a few days ago, she had never heard of either the Sengh Brotherhood or the Phantom. She probably never would’ve heard of them, either, except for one odd fact that seemed to contradict the article. Both the Brotherhood and the Phantom had survived to this day.

She sensed someone standing beside her and jerked her head around to see the librarian. “Oh, Henri, you startled me,” she said, placing a hand below her throat. “I’m just about done here.”

“Take your time. I won’t be leaving for another hour and a half. Meanwhile, is there anything else I can get for you?”

Gee, after his slow start, Henri had become impressively cooperative. “No, I don’t think— Wait a minute.” She showed him the article that mentioned the Phantom. “Can you look for something about this Phantom?”

He pushed up his glasses and read the article. “The Phantom, hmm. Sounds like a legend. But I’ll see what I can find.”

Diana continued reading and found out that the report from Jamaica had been inaccurate. Later records referred to acts of piracy by the Sengh Brotherhood in the early eighteenth century in east Africa, in 1818 near Suez, and the final recorded sighting was off the coast of China in the spring of 1898.

“Well, I did find something for you,” Henri said. “I hope this helps.”

He handed her an oversized book called
The Mythical Heros of All Times.
The Phantom was included in a chapter entitled “Modern Legends.” She read that the legend originated in the early part of the sixteenth century and was about a mysterious masked hero whose face was never seen. The Phantom’s father had been killed by pirates, and he had grown up vowing to fight worldwide piracy.

Diana read on. “The battle against this nemesis to civilization, though, was so vast that it necessarily extended beyond one lifetime, and so the Phantom was also known as The Ghost Who Walks and The Man Who Cannot Die.”

The author suggested that the legend was based on an actual person who lived in the latter part of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. “In 1612 the Phantom battled a band of vicious pirates known as ‘the Sengh Brothers.’ He succeeded in killing their leader, Brunel de Gottschalk, then he blew up the powder magazine in the band’s castle, destroying their stronghold.

“While there is no historical figure known as the Phantom, the remains of the castle he destroyed can still be found on the coast of Bangalla, where the native peoples are convinced that the Phantom remains alive deep in the Bangalla jungle. ‘The Phantom is dead; long live the Phantom’ is a popular saying among the primitive tribes of Bangalla.”

Diana repeated the saying to herself as she closed the book. She thought about her time with the Phantom in his Deep Woods hideout and wondered if she would ever see him again. She felt that she would, but perhaps that was nothing but wishful thinking.

“Did that help you?” Henri asked.

She looked up. “Yes, but I think the article needs to be revised and updated.” She thought about what she’d read and about what she knew. “Then again, maybe it’s best just the way it is.”

She stood up, thanked Henri, and left. She felt intrigued by what she had discovered, but disappointed by what she had not. She headed directly to the
Tribune
building. She needed to tell her uncle that Commissioner Farley had confiscated the critical records.

TWENTY-ONE

X
ander Drax felt like a little kid at Christmas. He couldn’t take his eyes off the leather satchel. What he really wanted to do was run his hands over it, feel the shape of his precious cargo, but he wasn’t alone in his office. Seated opposite him were Quill and Sala, two recent additions to his entourage of loyal workhorses.

Drax finally leaned forward and reached into the satchel. His hands slipped over the smooth dome of the silver Skull of Touganda. What a texture it had, he thought, a silken coolness, a kind of vibrancy.

He lifted the skull out of the satchel and held it up in the light. “Oh, baby. Come to papa. It’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”

“I used a little toothpaste. It polished up real nice,” Sala said.

Drax gave her a cold look that made it clear she wasn’t to touch it. She had no idea, no idea whatsoever, of what she was dealing with. But he decided not to comment. He put the skull back in the satchel.

“I’m in such a good mood right now, I almost hate to mention this minor matter, but . . .” He picked up the newspaper and turned it around so they could read the top headline:
EDITOR
’
S NIECE ESCAPES KIDNAPPERS
—
DIANA PALMER RETURNS HOME
. Below the headline was a photograph of Diana being embraced by David Palmer.

“The happy homecoming. Brings tears to your eyes, doesn’t it?” He looked from Sala to Quill. “So, what went wrong?”

They both started talking at the same time. Then Sala let Quill speak: “Something we didn’t count on. It was a total surprise.”

“And what was that?” Drax asked, tapping a pencil against his desk.

“The Phantom.”

Drax frowned. “I thought that nonsense was just a superstition—native bugaboo.”

“Oh, no. He’s real,” Quill insisted. “And he won’t die. I know. I killed him once, I mean twice . . . and he isn’t dead.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Drax’s impatience leaked into his voice. He dropped his pencil and rested his chin on his folded hands as he stared at Quill. “Start at the beginning.”

“Look, I brought this to prove it.” Quill opened his coat, revealing a skull-head holster around his waist, exactly like the one the Phantom wore. He unbuckled it, slid it off, and held it up.

“See this hole? This is where I stuck him ten years ago with a twelve-inch blade.”

“You stabbed him in the back?” Drax smiled. “I’ve underestimated you, Quill.”

Quill beamed. “Right to the hilt.”

“It’s not the story I heard,” Sala said dryly.

“That should’ve done the trick, all right,” Drax said, reassessing the situation. “So what happened the second time?”

Quill told him how he’d stabbed him in the side, about the rope bridge, and the gorge. “I saw the truck fall, and I never saw him get out of it. I was there. I tell you, he’s invincible.”

“The Phantom helped Diana to escape,” Sala said. “I think he’s in love with her.”

Drax rolled his eyes. “Really, this is getting more interesting by the second. Maybe he’s not quite so invincible. Love is a great weakness. We can always take advantage of it.” He looked at Sala. “What makes you think he’s in love?”