The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (15 page)

“That’s an old surveyor’s marker,” said Benson. “It’s been there about a hundred years. Where is it?”

Smitty galloped to it with The Avenger. Benson oriented himself with the aid of the stars and began pacing straight west. He counted the paces carefully. At the end of the thirty-second, he was next to the fountain, in the center of the park.

In fact, he was standing squarely on the spot that rang an anguished bell of memory in Smitty’s brain.

“Hey!” he cried. “It was right here that Nellie vanished a couple of hours ago!”

“Yes,” said Benson. He flicked on his small flash, and in the backwash of light, his eyes seemed like pale holes in the thin, gray face which was still that of Andrew Sillers. “This is where she would disappear.”

Dick took from his belt a slim steel rod with a point on one end and a chisel edge on the other. He inserted the edge in the sidewalk crack nearest to where he stood.

“Thornton Heights used to be a farm, owned last by an old-timer named Wilder,” he said. “It had an interesting history as the Wilder farm, but its history before that is even more interesting.”

The steel edge was sliding and feeling inquiringly all around the sidewalk slab on which Benson knelt. It looked like any other slab to Smitty.

“Always, this farm has been used as a place to hide things. People hid in it when the Indians rose. Powder was stored in it during the Revolution. Slaves were concealed before the Civil War. Lately, the mystery of those murders has been hidden here.”

“Here?” said Smitty. “Where?”

“In the caves under our feet.”

“Caves? There aren’t any caves around these parts.”

“That’s the common belief,” said Benson. “But an old book in the library tells of them and gives a rough drawing of their location. The old entrance was thirty-two paces due west of that rusted-iron surveyor’s peg. Let’s hope there’s still an entrance. There must be, and Nellie must have gone down it.”

“If there were caves,” argued Smitty, “the builders would have bumped into them when all these buildings went up.”

“No,” said Benson. “Perhaps by accident—perhaps by someone’s deliberate design—Thornton Heights was laid out so that this open park covers the section of the caves. There aren’t many and they aren’t big, but— Ah!”

The sidewalk slab shifted a little.

“Held down from underneath,” said Benson. He pried hard. There was a rasping click, and the slab tilted on edge. Darkness showed beneath. Cold, clammy air surged up.

“This is it,” said The Avenger.

They lowered themselves into the cavern in which Nellie had dazedly found herself awhile ago. As Smitty went down after The Avenger, the sidewalk slab lowered into place again. There was nothing to prop it up with.

They started off unwittingly in the direction opposite to the one Nellie had taken. They bumped into a wall pretty fast, going this way.

Smitty started to turn back from what seemed a blind alley. But not Benson.

The Avenger had made a long and special study of concealed doors and openings. He went over this seemingly solid-rock wall, before turning back, to see if it held some secret portal.

Smitty didn’t see what hairline crack The Avenger’s pale, infallible eyes picked up, nor what slight projection Benson’s fingers touched. But he did see a ragged fissure grow and widen as Benson pulled open some sort of heavy, rock-faced door.

They went through this and found themselves in a tunnel that was man-made, not natural. Through this tunnel went big pipes, some covered, some not, and bundles of electric cable as big as a man’s thigh.

Thornton Heights was as big as a small city. It required the servicing of a small city. This was the tunnel through which passed the main steam and water pipes and the electric and phone cables supplying the buildings.

Smitty exclaimed suddenly and picked something up from a niche in the wall. It was a handset telephone. But it was just the phone, wires trailed loose from it.

“Our ghost phone,” said the giant. “Say, this may have been the phone Myra Horton used, when she hung up before saying anything to Nellie. The call we couldn’t trace.”

The Avenger nodded. “It has probably been used for more than one untraceable call to the partners of Thornton Heights, too,” he said.

Then they both began to hear the same noise. A soft, even roaring. The one Nellie had said she’d heard, which had drawn Smitty’s facetious remark about a lion with a cold.

“The roar of the furnaces,” said The Avenger. “Just on the other side of this wall is the basement of the main building. That explains how people can seem to appear and disappear down there. Some sort of entrance connects the two. Probably Sillers was led through here, to his death in that basement, from the basement of the nearby building he entered.”

The roar of the furnaces was suddenly blotted out by a roar a hundred times greater. And with the sudden sounding of this second roar, a great cloud of swirling white began to fill the small tunnel.

“Steam!” yelled Smitty suddenly. “Somebody’s turned a valve on a big steam pipe! Beck!” he howled in conclusion.

Benson saw it at the same time: just a glimpse of a man’s face and head beyond the steam. And the face was the too good-looking one of Beck, under Beck’s thick yellow hair.

Then white mist sponged it out.

Already, the first fringe of the steam had reached them, spouting out in solid sheets from a little way down the tunnel. Smitty began leaping forward toward the source.

“Smitty!” snapped The Avenger. “Stop!”

The giant stopped. “Have to turn that valve off,” he cried urgently.

“For these long runs, that will be superheated steam,” said Benson. “Dry steam. Hot enough to melt lead. If you try to wade through it, it will strip the flesh from your bones!”

“If we stay here it’ll burn our lungs out, too,” panted Smitty. Already the tunnel was almost unbearable. “It’s die if we do and die if we don’t. I’m going to—”

The scream sounded then! It was a shriek of insensate terror, faintly heard, coming not from ahead of them or from behind them, but, it seemed, to their right. Although, to their right, there was what appeared to be nothing but solid wall.

Blind instinct urged that Smitty and The Avenger run down the tunnel away from that steam, get anywhere away from it. The great majority of people would have obeyed the wild call and would have been trapped at the tunnel’s end and parboiled alive like a couple of Christmas turkeys.

Dick Benson didn’t obey the blind panic. Expressionless face shielded by a handkerchief, he put his forehead to the wall. Another blood-chilling scream—a girl’s scream—sounded faintly.

“That’s Nellie!” moaned Smitty. He gathered his huge shoulders for a plunge against the solid concrete block with which the tunnel was lined.

Dick’s upheld hand stopped him. His other hand went over the tunnel wall, sensitive finger tips almost like separate little organisms in their intelligent quest.

It was agony to breathe. A bath of fire covered them. Their senses swam so that the giant thundering of the escaping steam seemed low and far away.

Two of the big cement blocks fell inward as Benson pushed. He pushed more loose, making a door big enough to squeeze through. They fell out of the tunnel, sobbing for air. But The Avenger, even as his lungs labored for oxygen, was replacing the blocks, to keep the deadly superheated steam from following them.

This time they hadn’t come across a regular door—it was just a spot in the wall where the blocks were loose—but Benson’s sensitive fingers felt many chips in the edges of the blocks, indicating that they had been taken down and put up again quite often.

His flash lanced through darkness ahead of them. At the same time, he sniffed.

“Smell anything?” he said.

“Nope,” said Smitty, after a minute.

The Avenger wasn’t entirely sure he had, either. He went forward, hunting for whoever had made that screaming plea for help. The screams, ominously, did not sound any more.

He barely kept from walking over the edge of a chasm and into nothingness. He halted just at the brink, arms like steel bars suddenly thrown out to save Smitty, too.

There was a pit here, maybe twenty feet deep by fifteen in diameter. It looked like an old cistern, crudely rock-lined.

Benson’s flash lit on a girl’s face, straining, wild, eyes blind with horror. It was Myra Horton’s face. She stared at the white light without seeing it, or without realizing that it was there, while her mouth strained to let out the screams that were blocked in her throat.

She was halfway up the side of the well, clinging by finger and toe tips alone, like a fly. Only an extreme of terror could have lent her the strength to hang on there.

“Look!” Smitty gasped. “Below her—”

Something vast and sickly white surged and snuffled below the girl, with flashes of ivory, foam-flecked, shining in the flashlight like short, terrible swords.

One of Myra Horton’s hands slipped as they looked, jerking her down several inches toward the horror underneath!

Benson moved like flowing light.

There was a wide plank, thrown like a drawbridge across the old cistern. He kicked an end loose so that it clattered down to the bottom of the pit. It formed a ramp up. He leaped two paces down this and held out his arms toward the girl.

“Jump! Backward!”

Myra was too far gone in terror even to hear. She just clung there, mouth writhing. Her dress had been ripped by the rough rock wall, and the long white pattern of rigid muscles stood out sharply.

In wordless co-operation, Smitty jumped to his side. The Avenger grasped his huge wrist with his left hand, and Smitty leaned far out, till Benson’s right could catch the leather belt at Myra’s waist, above and below which was ripped and tattered fabric.

Chancing everything on the strength of the costume belt, The Avenger pulled the girl from the wall. She hung in his grasp, with the ripping ivory fangs underneath almost grazing her face. Then Smitty doubled the tremendous muscles of his arm, bringing up both Benson and the girl, like a rising derrick, till both were on the ramp.

They leaped up the ramp, and at the edge, Dick shook the board, then pulled it out and threw it to one side. It was done just in time. The monstrosity down there had already started to charge up the thing at them.

“Phew!” panted Smitty, wiping at his forehead. “W-what is that nightmare?”

“A boar,” said The Avenger, voice calm and emotionless, even at such a time.

His light played over the raging hulk in the pit. It was gigantic—systematically starved till its ribs showed—and still probably weighing four hundred pounds. It was dirty white, with mad red eyes, either albino, or colorless from having been kept in the dark.

“I have never seen such a giant of its kind,” said Benson. “Nor have I ever seen such tusks. They must be ten inches long.”

“A boar!” repeated Smitty.

“Yes. This is our murder weapon. I got an inkling of it when I saw Phelan’s body, and I was sure of it when I saw Carter and Sillers. I’ve seen men killed by boars in Malaya; the boar is one of the most savage of all animals, you know. And those bodies looked like these. Phelan, who has been in the Orient, probably caught the resemblance, too. Probably he was phoning to Justice, Inc. to tell that, and perhaps other vital information, when he was killed.”

“But how could anybody lead that thing around? Control it?” demanded Smitty.

Then he saw for himself. There was a ring in the insane giant’s nose. It could be handled, as a bull is handled, by that ring.

Smitty had his coat over Myra’s body. It covered her like a tent. He held her as though she’d been a weightless baby in his vast arms.

The Avenger closed his eyes for an instant. He was recalling to his cold, clear brain all the details of an old drawing he had seen in the book at the library. He had printed that crude map indelibly in his memory, even as death peered over his shoulder.

“There should be another way out, on the opposite side of the pit,” he said. “Can you make it around there with the girl? Take it easy.”

The last words were unnecessary, as far as Smitty was concerned. These was an uneven rim around the well, from eight inches to a foot wide. Inching around that, with the snorting, squealing horror underneath slavering for a chance at them, Smitty took it very easy indeed.

The opening across the pit from where they’d entered required no seeking; it was a heavy canvas flap, about the color of the rock, but readily located.

They walked through this.

Smitty muttered something and stepped gingerly away from the spot he’d hit, after crowding under the canvas flap. He had brushed against the same ancient skeleton Nellie had touched. By a different circuit they had come to the same destination.

Ahead of them was the same oak door, through a crack in which Nellie had looked and seen Cole Wilson. The Avenger clicked off his flash and went to the door. He peered through the crack. At the slight tensing of his shoulders, Smitty laid Myra down and went to look, too.

More than Cole and Nellie were in that next room now. The light from the candle played on four people.

Nellie, Moran, Cole and Mac were in there.

Tough phone wire bound them all. Nellie and Cole, free of their bonds for a little while, had been tied up again—though, as far as Dick and Smitty knew, they’d been tied up right along.

“Well,” said Smitty. “We’ve found them, anyway. Now, all we have to do is get them out of here.”

He started to force the door, but The Avenger, trying it, found it unsecured. They opened it and walked in, reaching those they wanted to rescue with almost too much ease.

“Ye’re sight for sore eyes, Muster Benson,” Mac said.

“Thank Heaven you found us!” breathed Moran.

“Didn’t I say he would?” Nellie exulted.

Cole said, “Why the gray hair, chief?”

Benson’s facial muscles were no longer gripped by the paralysis of the drug. They delineated his own face again. But his hair was still gray in imitation of Sillers’s hair.

“Never mind the hair,” he said evenly. “Our job is to get out of here. Fast!”