The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (14 page)

Part of this was due to a more exhaustive study of the subject than most men had made. But part was due to something that no amount of work and study could ever duplicate.

That was the character of his face.

There’d been a time when extreme grief and nervous shock had paralyzed the muscles of Benson’s face. At that time the flesh of his features had taken on a queer consistency almost like that of living putty. Where he put them, in whatever way he shaped them, they stayed.

Now, he was over that shock, and his face was entirely normal. But he had discovered that an injection of a harmless drug, with one of the commoner local anesthetics as its base, would deaden the facial nerves and give him once more, for a few hours, flesh with the eerie consistency of modeling clay.

The Avenger turned some of his rare leisure hours to modeling. He was one of the world’s best sculptors, though this was little known because he’d had little time to demonstrate it. However, several works of his were at the Metropolitan Museum; and that skill was illustrated now as his marvelously learned fingers shaped his living flesh till it became an exact duplicate of Sillers’s pictured face.

In the make-up box were dozens of pairs of tissue-thin cupped lenses that fit over eyeballs so that no one could see that lenses were being worn. Dick Benson put over his pale orbs a pair that were mates of Sillers’s light-gray eyes.

The face was done. He whitened his thick black hair and pushed it up at the sides so that what showed under the edge of a hat would resemble Sillers’s lank, scant hair.

The body was different. It was beyond even Dick’s ability to make his explosively powerful frame and muscular neck resemble Sillers’s wasted body and scrawny throat. But the night was chill, and Sillers customarily bundled up well; rows of overcoats of all varying weights, hanging in a closet, indicated that.

The Avenger swathed himself in a light topcoat, buttoned the collar up right under his chin and went out.

He went to Amos Jones’s home.

Sillers’s residence, the shell of a dead man, was deserted; but there was plenty of life around Jones’s house. Two burly men stopped Benson at the door.

“Can’t come in here, buddy—” One man said.

Then he saw the face of the man in the tight-buttoned topcoat. Light from an ornamental lantern beside the door shone on thin, unhealthy gray skin and sharp, miserly features; on the acquisitive gray eyes and the deep, fearful lines in the forehead over them.

A hoarse whisper came from the guard’s lips. It was probably meant for a shout. He leaped back.

“It’s . . . it’s old Sillers!” he gasped to the other. “It’s— Sillers is dead! And here he is—walkin’ around!”

Both the men burst open the door and retreated through it to get away.

The man in the shrouding coat walked after them.

The two guards had given some sort of alarm, because, inside, all was confusion. Some were running when the muffled figure walked through the doorway; some—with a shred more courage—stood their ground, but stared in horror at the invader and made no move to stop him.

“Where’s Amos Jones?” they heard the muffled figure inquire in a hoarse whisper. Dick Benson, of course, did not know the sound of Sillers’s voice; he’d never heard it.

A man in butler’s livery had barely enough life in him to nod to a closed double door. The muffled figure went there, opened the door and stepped in.

Amos Jones was sitting in the library here, at a big desk. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting, twisting his hands, now and then, and looking very worried. He was still a rather plump little man, but he was no longer a blank and pink little man. His face was the color of parchment. Something had been gnawing at him for quite a while, it appeared.

He looked up, and went all to pieces. He had to hang onto his chair arms to keep upright.

“Andrew!” he squawked. “But you’re dead! Andrew! B-back . . . from the g-grave—”

“Don’t be silly,” said the thin, acquisitive lips in the thin, gray face. “All I have is a cold. Can’t talk well.”

“You are too dead! Everybody s-says so!”

“If someone is after you, to kill you, do you know of a better way to keep safe than to play dead?”

“You mean y-you just p-played dead? You aren’t r-really— It’s just a scheme to throw the m-murderer off your track?”

Amos Jones leaned back in his chair. He laughed, high and shrill and close to hysteria with relief.

“You’re smart, Andrew. Wish I’d thought of that. But I don’t mind admitting you gave me a shock. What a smart way to throw The Avenger off the track!”

There was a pause that lasted perhaps a second longer than was natural. Then the man in the swathing overcoat said, “I’m not so sure it’s The Avenger we have to face.”

“Well!” said Jones, staring. “What made you change your mind? Didn’t you get one of those untraceable phone calls with a voice saying that the Wilder curse would be visited on you by The Avenger? And didn’t you get a note that was the mate to . . . this?”

With the last word, Jones dug in his top desk drawer and got out a sheet of note paper crumbled as if in fear and rage, then straightened again. He handed it to The Avenger.

The note stated:

Your time is very near. The curse of Wilder is to be visited on you for your gross betrayal of an innocent friend.

The Avenger

Benson said, “I’ve never been quite clear about this Wilder curse.”

Jones put the crumpled missive back in his desk. “Why, I thought you knew every last detail of the old Wilder farm,” he said.

“I know most of them,” said the man standing in Andrew Sillers’s shoes. “And what I didn’t know I looked up in some old books in the library—”

Amos Jones interrupted with some first-class, though shrill, profanity.

“The library!” he said bitterly. “You say, all of a sudden, you’re not so sure this Avenger is behind these murders. I’ll tell you how sure I am. When your fine collection of thugs failed to get him, I offered my equally choice crew two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to . . . to liquidate him. A quarter of a million, Andrew.”

Jones mopped his forehead.

“He was followed to a library, late this afternoon. I guess he wanted to look through those old books, too. With such a handsome reward at stake, my men went right in after him. They practically tore the place down. And they didn’t get him! All they got was this ghastly little souvenir.”

He held up a slim throwing knife with a hollow tube for a handle.

“Could I have that?” said the man in the tight-buttoned coat. “Thanks. Too bad about the library failure. Now, on the Wilder farm stuff:

“I know, of course, that the land forming Thornton Heights was once a farm belonging to a man named Jed Wilder. I know that he sold it to a man named Samuel Kepper, after people had started building all around here. Kepper held it till long after the city had circled the open land. Then he formed the corporation, and Thornton Heights was born. After that—”

Jones mopped his pallid forehead again.

“Don’t go into that,” he pleaded. “We got Thornton Heights away from old Sam Kepper in a perfectly legal way. Perfectly legal and you know it. Nobody could touch us, including old Sam. He and his family could say we swindled him, but nobody could prove it.”

Jones lighted a cigar and laid it down after a single puff.

“I’ll tell you something, Andrew. Now, I’m damned sorry we chiseled the property away from old Sam. That’s why The Avenger is on our trail. He goes after people who pull crooked stunts but can’t be touched by law. The dirty murderer. The—”

Some more shrill profanity followed.

“This Wilder curse,” interrupted the muffled figure before Jones. “You were going to go over that, just in case I don’t know all of it.”

“I guess you know it, all right!” snapped Jones. “But if you insist on having it thrown in your teeth—

“Old Jed Wilder had a farm neighbor, Calvin Burlowe. Wilder cheated Burlowe out of a prize pig. Anyhow, that’s what Burlowe always insisted. So Burlowe, crazy mad, went to him one time and raved out that Wilder would not live to cheat anyone else. He promised Wilder that that pig would be the death of him.

“Only a little while later, just after he’d sold the farm, Wilder stumbled home drunk one night. And, according to the old stories, he staggered into the pig pen. He must have fallen. And he hadn’t tended his pigs for two days—probably drunk all that time. Anyhow, they found him next morning, and all the local fools swore it was Burlowe’s revenge. They swore it was the curse Burlowe had laid on Wilder, and they called it ‘Wilder’s curse—’ Oh, come now. I know you know all about it. You told me some of it yourself—”

Jones was suddenly very still. He whispered:

“It’s just because I’ve been talking about it. It isn’t really—”

He strained, tense, still as stone. Only his lips moved.

“Do you hear it?” he whispered.

“Hear what?” said the man before him.

“I don’t hear it!” screamed Jones suddenly. “I know I don’t!” He covered his face with his hands. “I’ll die if I keep on hearing it! The Wilder curse! The Wilder curse! He tricked Burlowe. We tricked old Sam. Never live to—”

The muffled figure turned and went out, leaving Amos Jones still screaming there.

Dick Benson went to the big main building and started into the office. Something like a ten-ton truck seemed to smash into him. It was Smitty.

Smitty, drawing back, started to mumble an apology. Then he stared, goggle-eyed.

“Holy jumping—” he began. “Sillers! But Sillers is dead—”

The Avenger threw off the hampering topcoat. A glance at that cable-steel body, erect and pantherlike, told Smitty his mistake. Give that muscular structure any face you wanted to, and you couldn’t mistake it.

“Chief! You made me believe in ghosts for a minute.” Smitty began hopping in rage, mystification and fear.

“There’s been another,” he howled. “Another disappearance! They got Moran this time.”

“Moran?” The Avenger’s hand clutched Smitty’s huge arm so hard that even the iron-thewed giant winced.

“Yes. He vanished. Just like Nellie. I . . . I was phoning Bleek Street, just on the chance that Josh or Rosabel had heard from the doggoned little half-pint. I had my back to Moran for about five seconds. In that time, they got him!”

“They? You saw someone?”

“I didn’t see a thing,” stormed Smitty. He had been told to protect Moran, and he’d slipped up on the job. Added to feelings that would have been chaotic, anyway, was fury at his own carelessness. “I turned from the phone, and there was no Moran. Just as in the park I turned and there was no Nellie. How can people vanish like that?”

“Go on,” said The Avenger, tone clipped and urgent.

“That’s all there is. Moran was gone. Without sound or sign. I ran to the office and looked in. No Moran. Then I thought I heard him yell. Sounded like he was in the basement. It wasn’t a very pretty yell, chief.”

The giant’s big hands clenched till the knuckles crackled audibly.

“I beat it down there. No Moran. He must have yelled from just outside the building. But by the time I got up and out, there was no sign of him or anyone else.”

“So, now, Moran’s gone,” said Benson. He started toward the door and started fast. “We have little time, Smitty. Come on.”

One by one, Nellie, Mac, Cole, Myra Horton and Dan Moran had disappeared in the devilish net of mystery and murder cast over sleek Thornton Heights. Only Smitty was left to accompany Benson.

But saying that only Smitty was left was a little like saying that you were left to face battle only in a twenty-ton tank. “Only Smitty” was as good as a regiment, particularly when he was stirred up by a threat to Nellie.

The Avenger led a rapid way to Crescent Park. On the way, he removed the tinted lenses from his eyes.

“In all your searching around here,” he said, “did you come across a granite outcropping, with an iron stake about six inches high embedded in the center?”

“Yes,” said Smitty sourly. “I fell over the thing. It’s in a little cement circle, and there’s a bronze plaque of some sort over it. So I guess I should have seen it,” he added grudgingly.