The Avenger 15 - House of Death (14 page)

The first gust of rain batted down at her as she reached the window. Torn by wind and beaten by rain, she stared in.

And the first thing she saw was the person she’d had principally in mind on coming here.

Carmella Haygar.

The girl was lying on the floor of the otherwise empty little room in the turret. She was bound, but not gagged. A single candle in a bottle illuminated the room.

The place wasn’t empty long. Another came in—a dapper man with a tiny gray mustache and a trim little goatee. It was Sharnoff Haygar, though Nellie didn’t know that.

What she did know was that she hated this man on sight, and that he was precisely the type to whose extermination she had dedicated her life. She knew that by the way he approached Carmella.

He had a little bottle in his hand. Evidently, he had gone out to get the bottle, which was the reason he had not been in the room when Nellie first looked in.

With her tiny knife, Nellie had pried up the window an inch. She could hear through that crack as she clung to the brick ridges outside.

“Now,” said the man with the trim goatee, “I think you will talk. This, my dear, is sulphuric acid! It does curious things to faces. As you shall certainly find out if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”

He shook the little bottle, then drew out the moistened stopper.

“First,” he said, almost gently, “we’ll press this to your right cheek. Then just a drop on the left. After that, if you are still stubborn, there will have to be a bit of attention paid to the eyes—”

Nellie dropped the knife, not having time to put it back in her belt. She snapped out her gun and smashed the window with it. Sharnoff whirled, hand going for his pocket. But the hand stopped and stayed very still as he saw the gun.

Nellie did not dare come through the window. She stayed where she was for a moment, gesturing toward Carmella, whose black eyes were enormous with horror—and relief.

“Untie her,” Nellie said, cold fury in the tone that came through her small, set teeth.

Sharnoff turned to Carmella and untied her. He didn’t even try to stall. The acid vial, which he had set on the floor to work on the bonds, was his death warrant, Nellie’s flaming blue eyes told him, if he didn’t obey implicitly and swiftly.

Carmella stood up, rubbing shapely ankles and flexing slim arms.

“Now tie him,” said Nellie, nodding to Sharnoff. “But keep behind him! Don’t let him grab you and use you as a shield.”

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned—or a woman whose beauty has just been wantonly threatened. The blaze in Carmella’s black eyes matched that in Nellie’s blue ones. By the time Sharnoff was tied, the cord bit into his flesh so deeply that he sunk his teeth in his upper lip with the sting of it. But he made no sound.

Nellie knocked jagged glass out of the window sash and crawled into the room at last. The storm outside was at its height now, with wind howling, rain hitting like bullets, and occasional thunder rattling the universe. Nellie had to pitch her voice high to be heard.

“He was after your medallion?” she said.

Carmella hesitated. Gratitude to her rescuer fought with reluctance to say anything about the golden disks.

“In a way,” she said finally.

“What do you mean—in a way?”

“He wanted to know the message on the medal.”

“Well,” said Nellie, annoyed by all the mystery in the affair of the golden disks—a mystery which she still couldn’t make head or tail of, “what is the message?”

Carmella pretended not to hear because of the storm. Nellie said something to herself, shrugged, and went to the door.

“What are we going to do now?” Carmella said.

“Is everyone in this house your enemy?” asked Nellie. “Or only this rat here with the acid?”

Carmella hesitated again, but this time in real, instead of pretended, indecision.

“I think they’re all enemies,” she said at last. “But they pretend not to be. And this one is the only one who has openly attacked me.”

“We’ll have to take a chance on the others and go downstairs,” said Nellie over the storm’s roar. “Can’t roost up in this turret forever.”

And besides, she added to herself, she wanted to see how things went with Mac and The Avenger and Smitty.

The turret room was a full four stories from the ground. They went down a lot of stairs. Then Nellie thrust out her small white hand to make Carmella stop.

Nellie had heard voices in a room to the right. She went to the door.

The room was a sort of library, but there was a hole in the floor at the moment. Down through this was peering a monstrous fat man. He had a smile on his face that the devil himself could have been proud of. His puffy, huge right hand was on the lever at the side of the hole, and he was slowly pressing the lever down.

Nellie hadn’t any idea what this sight meant, but she was willing to bet it meant trouble in some fashion. She was debating what to do, when the sound came.

It was a very peculiar sound, barely to be heard over the storm’s roar outside, and yet unmistakable.

The sound of pigs. But not just a barnyard noise; it had a quality, somehow, to chill the blood!

Nellie saw the man’s huge head jerk up as he listened, saw him scowl instead of smile. Then he waddled toward the door, and Nellie ducked across the hall and into an opposite room.

He was hardly out the front door of the place when she was back in that library, jerking up the lever. She still didn’t know its meaning, but she could look down the hole in the floor and see something like a moving platform that had still been settling downward when she got in, and which stopped when she threw the lever back up.

It began to rise again. There was a momentary lull in the gale outside, and she heard a voice clearly under the movable platform.

“It’s stopped!”

Smitty’s voice!

Nellie raced to find stairs leading down.

A grin was on Nellie’s lips. For once, it was not Nellie who had gotten into difficulty and had to be rescued. It was the other way around. If she hadn’t taken matters into her own hands and come to the island, and if she hadn’t thrown that lever upstairs, Mac and Benson and Smitty would have been pressed flowers by now.

But she did not rub it in; and The Avenger only thanked her profoundly with his colorless, icy eyes, and that was that.

She had unbolted a door under what she judged was the location of the library, and the three men had hastened out, with the ceiling rising behind them. Then Mac had stopped, with an exclamation, and turned his flashlight on a section of wall near the door.

When that metal ceiling had come down, it had caught on a slight projection formed by one of the innumerable fresh strips of cement lacing through all these walls. It had broken out some of the stuff and revealed human bones!

The bones of dead men! Was this whole house built on dead men’s bones?

They went to the stairs. Nellie told of what had happened since she had set foot on the island, ending with the account of the fat man rushing out into the night after the sound of—of all things—pigs.

“Pigs?” repeated The Avenger. His icy eyes were almost frightening as they rested on Nellie. “Pigs!”

Upstairs, he raced for the front door, with Smitty and Mac after him. The two didn’t know what had put that extra grim light in the basilisk eyes, but they knew Dick Benson had sensed some occurrence of great importance.

Nellie stayed in the hall. Carmella came from the rear stairs, where she had been hiding since the little blonde had thrust her back wordlessly on hearing the voices from the library—voices filtering up through that dreadful moving ceiling.

The two girls waited tensely for Benson to get back.

Out in the night, The Avenger circled the house till he saw the hulking owner of the island. The fat man was up on a ledge peering down into an enclosure and fishing for something with a rope that had a running noose on the end of it.

Benson leaped up on the ledge, too, having decided that since their presence was known, now, anyway, there was no use in trying to remain out of sight any longer.

The mountainous master of Haygar’s Island did not even look at him. Benson peered down.

There were the pigs mentioned—gigantic hogs, gaunt, hungry, fierce, as no purely wild animal could ever be fierce. They were mauling something it was best not to look at. But a glance showed that the fat man had better hurry and get that loop on arm or leg or neck or there wouldn’t be anything left to get it on.

He caught an ankle with the noose and hauled. The hogs followed ferociously, leaped as high as they could at the rising thing, then subsided with furious grunts.

The fat man drew the thing over the wall and let it rest on the ground under the ledge he stood on.

“Von Bolen Haygar!” said Smitty, staring down.

It was just possible to recognize the Prussian with the straight-backed head. But the fat man didn’t waste much time on looking. His hands were darting over the mutilated form, and in a moment he grunted, not unlike the huge things in the enclosure, and drew out two gold medallions.

Two! Not just one. There was a flashing glimpse of them as he played his light on them. Then he had calmly pocketed them.

But not before The Avenger’s camera-quick eyes had seen the letters H H on one of them.

H H. Harlik Haygar. The spidery old fellow for whose murder Benson had been named. Von Bolen Haygar had done that bloody little job. But he would never answer for it now. Somehow, perhaps in an effort to get into the house unseen, he had sneaked onto the island and had blundered into the sty. His death had been worse than that dealt by any electric chair.

For the first time, the fat man seemed really to look at Benson.

“Who the devil are you?” he said. “And what the devil are you doing on my island?”

“The name is Benson,” said The Avenger, his voice for once expressing a shade of emotion—the emotion of irony. “Though the name was unknown to you, I’m sure the face is not. Since you tried twice to kill me and my two friends.”

“Kill you?” The fat man’s face was as blank as a sheet of fresh paper. His heavy-lidded eyes were stone-dull.

“In the rat pit,” reminded Benson, “and in the comfortable little vault with the falling ceiling.”

The fat man shrugged.

“Oh, I see! You must have been prowling my basement. Too bad! My father, when he built this house, put in a lot of curious traps. Evidently valuables were kept here at one time, and that was his idea of protecting them. Of course, I knew nothing of your presence in the basement, or of your near accidents.”

“Oh, of course not!” said the giant Smitty, sarcastically. The fat man paid no attention to him.

“I believe I have heard of you, Benson. Informally with the police, are you not? So I presume you are here to investigate something or other.”

“I’m here on the trail of several murders,” said Benson, eyes as unrevealing as the fat man’s own.

“I see. Well, I’ll be glad to be of any service I may.”

“Smooth as the grease he’s made of,” murmured Mac to the giant, glaring at the hulking owner of the island.

“What would you suggest doing now?” the fat man said.

“We should get in touch with the police,” Benson replied.

The fat man shrugged.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to do that. This storm must have put the communications system out of order for the time. Yes, I can see the radio tower is down.”

“Radio is your only way of talking with the mainland?” said Benson.

“Yes.”

“Then if the tower is down, I suppose we are marooned until the storm lets up.”

Mac kept his face straight. There wasn’t a radio repair known to science that Smitty couldn’t make with a couple of hairpins and some wire. And Dick Benson was a genius at it when he chose to exert his mind. Dick was only being marooned because he wanted to be.

“There’s no sense in staying on out here in the gale and the rain,” said the grossly fat man phlegmatically. “Shall we go in? I’ll send my servant out to tend to Cousin von Bolen.”

Such was the Prussian’s epitaph.

They went in.

The Avenger had left two girls in the hall. Carmella and Nellie Gray. There were four people in there, now. Shan Haygar and Sharnoff, whom Shan had evidently found in the turret room and untied, were with the girls.

The two men had guns out and leveled. Carmella was cowering, face ashen; Nellie was standing small and straight, with eyes blazing.

“You’re just about courageous enough to shoot down a couple of women,” she was saying when the door opened.

The opaque eyes of the fat man didn’t blink as he took in the scene. He waddled toward the four, not fast, not slow.

“No one will shoot anyone!” he said. “That would be a mistake.”

“This girl,” snarled Sharnoff, gesturing toward Carmella, “is an imposter! She—”

“We shall soon see who is or is not an impostor,” the fat man cut in. He nodded his heavy head toward Benson. “This man is unofficially with the police. So, I judge, are the two men with him. We are all very glad to have the law with us during this trying time. You understand?”