The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (16 page)

He and Smitty started untying the four.

“We know who’s behind this, Muster Benson,” growled MacMurdie. “ ’Tis the last person ye’d ever think. That lightweight, Clarence Beck!”

Dan Moran looked at the still unconscious Myra Horton, whom Smitty had carried in here, not wanting to leave her out of sight even for a minute. Moran’s eyes flashed, and he let out a couple of phrases.

“Sorry,” he said to Nellie. “But when I think of what that yellow-haired devil has done! Just a harmless playboy, eh? So friendly with Myra—and all the time planning to kill her!”

“Yes,” said The Avenger evenly, “that’s a pretty nasty thing to do, isn’t it, Kepper?”

“It certainly is,” said Dan Moran.

Then his breath caught audibly. And Nellie and Cole and Mac and Smitty stared first at The Avenger and then at Moran.

“I . . . er . . . what did you call me?” he said to Benson.

The colorless terrible eyes were like diamond drills.

“I called you ‘Kepper,’ ” The Avenger said.

“I don’t think . . . I quite get you.”

“Yes, you do. You’re Sam Kepper’s son. Your father owned this section for a little while when it was still the old Wilder farm. You must have played around it as a little boy. You must have learned about those caves then.”

“You’re crazy!” Dan Moran said.

“You must have been about twelve when Thornton Heights came into being. You must have gone somewhere else to live with a relative when your father died, after losing his interest in the property. You could come back, grown up, and get a job as bookkeeper, without Jones or Marsden or Sillers or Carl Foley even recognizing you.”

“I tell you that Clarence Beck is responsible—”

“Beck has no motive,” The Avenger’s calm words cut across Moran’s protest. “You have. Revenge! You must have planned your revenge from childhood, Kepper. The four partners had cheated your father. They would die for that. And then the Wilder curse came to your mind. Old Wilder, the original owner, had cheated a neighbor. The neighbor had laid a curse on him, saying Wilder would die of the very thing he had cheated to get. A giant pig. Wilder was killed; was almost torn to pieces. Why not terrify the partners before they died, with the same curse?”

“Frighten them with pigs? In crowded New York?” said Moran. But his eyes were losing their bewilderment and taking on a mocking look.

“A boar,” said Benson. “One of nature’s most ferocious fighting machines. Kept hidden in these caves. The crooked partners felt that it was something of the kind that killed Foley and then Sillers, just as Wilder, that earlier swindler, had been killed before them. Meanwhile they kept hearing noises: the sound of pigs—a terrible sound to them—produced through tiny amplifiers wired in the electric-light circuits of their homes, I should imagine, since an ‘electrician’ went to the residence of Foley and then of Sillers, after their deaths, to remove the evidence. Pretty effective, too. Marsden and Jones will probably either commit suicide or die of fright if those noises keep on in their homes much longer.”

Moran abandoned all pretense of innocence.

“The noises will keep on, all right,” he said. “Hidden in the basement of each house is a small phonograph hooked to an electric clock. Every half-hour, as long as the current is on, or till the mechanism happens to be found, they’ll hear the evidence of the Wilder curse at work against them.”

Myra Horton stirred and opened her eyes. She glared at Dan and shrank back.

“He brought me down here!” she said shakily. “I started to phone. He hit me and took the phone away. He threw me in that pit. And I thought he loved me—”

Nellie silenced her. She and the rest were staring at Dan “Moran” Kepper in loathing and horror.

“What would you have me do?” snarled Kepper. “These men swindled my father out of every dollar he owned. My father died of the shock. They killed him as surely as if they’d shot him. So I decided they must die, too, and die in terror. It was just revenge—righteous execution.”

“And the murder of Tim Phelan?” said Benson evenly.

“He found the door from the basement to the caves,” snarled Dan Kepper. “And he kept wanting to babble about the look of Foley’s body. Naturally, he had to die.”

“And Carter?”

Kepper shrugged.

“He blundered in while Sillers was being given what he deserved. Could I let him live to put me in the chair?”

“So you started out in righteous anger—and shortly became a ruthless killer—just another murderer.” The Avenger’s voice had a snap in it like that of a steel whip. “And you tried to palm your murderous work off on me! You signed notes, ‘The Avenger,’ and got Sillers and Jones so frantic that they hired gunmen to kill me and the rest of Justice, Inc.”

Kepper turned mocking again. “Are these all clever guesses,” he said, “or do you know something?”

“I knew you were Kepper’s son the moment I laid eyes on you,” said Benson. “You should have found some way to get the picture of Thornton Heights’ founder, Sam Kepper, off the wall of the general office. Save for the old-fashioned cravat and beard, it could be a picture of you. Also, I knew you were the murderer when I saw the ring in your murderous pet’s nose: The curious hook on the end of the window pole in your office—I’d never seen a window pole like that before—was to lead the boar around with. If you want more knowledge—”

Kepper stood up, with the phony “bonds” dropping to the rock floor.

“That’s plenty,” he snapped. He raised his voice. “All right, bring Beck in. The show’s over. They know too much. They’ll have to die—all of them!”

From the ancient oak doorway came half a dozen men. The Avenger recognized one or two; they’d been Sillers’s gun toters.

From the opening on the opposite side of the little cave came eight or ten more. All were armed with sawed-off shotguns and automatics. The latter group half carried Clarence Beck.

Grinning, two of the men shoved Beck forward. He lit at the feet of Benson and his friends.

Beck was in bad shape. He had been knocked around a lot. There were lumps on his head and bruises on his face, and his mouth was battered and swollen.

But he didn’t get much sympathy from Dick Benson.

“I overrated you considerably,” The Avenger said to him, his pale, icy eyes, and his voice and face, expressionless.

Nellie stared. She wondered if Benson hadn’t meant underrated. But it developed that he hadn’t.

“I thought that if we let you go along with us, you’d see we were for you and not against you,” Benson said. “But you didn’t. All you did was help try to get us killed.”

“Sorry,” said Beck through thick lips. “If you’d seen the note Uncle Carl Foley got before he was killed, and if you’d heard him talk, you’d have been convinced, too.”

He went to Myra Horton’s side; and the tall, pretty girl clung to him in a way that made Kepper sneer. Kepper was edging toward the oak door.

“Give me five minutes,” he said to the gunmen. “Then you can join me in the basement of the main building. I’ll have the steam out of the tunnel by then.”

The unspoken part of his command was only too clear.

One of the men, a little younger than the rest and, apparently, a little less callous, said huskily, “You want us to bump all of ’em? All seven of ’em? Gosh, that’s a pretty nasty order.”

Kepper’s cold gaze settled on this man’s face.

“Do you want any of them to live to put you in the electric chair? This way, no one will ever know. They’ll never be found down here.”

“The result,” said The Avenger somberly, “of taking the law into your own hands. You start out to kill four men in ‘righteous execution’ and end by being forced to kill a dozen.”

“Shut up!” snapped Kepper. He looked at his men again. “Give me five minutes,” he repeated.

He went out and closed the oak door behind him.

The grim executioners faced their victims, guns tensely leveled. There were about two guns aimed at each of the ones to die—Smitty, Mac, Cole Wilson, Nellie, The Avenger, Myra and Beck. Not much chance to try anything.

Clarence Beck showed up pretty well. He had good stuff in him; the feather-brain act had been a phony. He cracked very little, kept his arm around Myra and was still.

The members of Justice, Inc., of course, didn’t crack at all. They all knew that in one of their fights against crime they were going to die. You can’t risk death daily forever, without having it catch up to you, eventually. They were used to looking death straight in the eye.

The Avenger said calmly, “Kepper’s tricking you. You’re to die down here, too. Don’t you know that?” He stared at the gang.

“Shut your face!” snarled one of the men. “And keep your hands absolutely still. We know about all the junk you got in your pockets and up your sleeves. Don’t try to palm something on us.”

Benson kept his hands still. He seemed to be listening, listening for something besides the words of the gunman.

“Kepper doesn’t need five minutes for anything but your destruction,” he said, voice as even as if he were telling Josh Newton to get a car out for him. “Why shouldn’t you shoot us at once and go right along with him? Why meet him in that basement in five minutes? It doesn’t make sense.”

Several of the men looked a little uneasy, but most of them just sneered.

And The Avenger kept listening.

“Kepper can’t let you live,” he said. It was his perfect calm, as if he were in no danger at all, as if he knew something important that they didn’t know, that was unnerving most of the gangsters. And they were really being a little unnerved, too, before the glacial, deadly eyes and the level tone.

“Kepper can’t allow you to live,” he repeated. “You know as much about him as we do. And we are to die because we’re dangerous to him. Don’t you realize that you are to die down here, too? That we’ll all rot in these caves together?”

“Look,” said the younger man, the one who had found such a mass murder difficult in the first place. “You don’t suppose this guy’s really got something, do you?”

“Naw!” said the man who had told Benson to shut up. “The guy’s stalling, that’s all. We know he’s smart. Don’t let him bluff you—”

A yell sounded from beyond the closed oak door! Benson’s pale eyes narrowed till they were like chromium slits in his masklike face. He had seemed to be listening for something. It appeared, now, that he was hearing what he had expected.

It had been a dreadful sound, that hoarse shriek. It had been packed with all the fear man ever felt. Shaken, pale, the gunmen stared at each other.

“What,” mumbled one of them, “was that?”

The hideous sound came again—the cry of a man in the last stages of horror. This time it was sliced off in the middle, and the ensuing silence was even more horrible than the sound had been.

The cave was suddenly plunged into darkness.

Benson, moving like a streak of light while the attention of everyone was on the terrible cries, had plunged toward the bottle in which the candle guttered. He had smashed bottle and candle and all with one lash of his hand.

Instantly the cave was a bedlam of shouts and curses.

“Cut ’em down!” one clear cry sounded out. “It’s them or us!”

A little sheet of fire cut toward the wall where the prisoners had been when the light went out, as at least a dozen guns let go. But, not unnaturally, the prisoners weren’t there any more. Nor was The Avenger near the spot where the candle had been. Half a dozen slugs whistling in that direction hit only rock wall.

Dick Benson made his way to the oak door. It was securely barred from the outside, as he’d known it would be. Kepper had told his men to follow him, in five minutes, through that door; then he had fixed it so no one could get out! It confirmed the conviction that gunmen as well as prisoners were to die down in this hole.

His feet splashed in water as he made his way back.

There’d been no more shooting. In such close quarters, and in the dark, the thugs couldn’t shoot without accidentally killing each other. They could only feel savagely around for enemies and swing clubbed guns when they thought they’d found one.

Evidently, a couple got hold of Smitty and recognized him by his great size. There was an annoyed roar from the big fellow, then a dismal snapping sound. It was a sickening sound, as if someone had stepped on a berry box. Something gave, when those huge hands clamped tight, and it was never the hands that gave!

“All right, take it, then,” Nellie’s voice whipped out. Right after that, there was a yell and a thump. Someone had laid hands on her, then had been tossed expertly over her dainty shoulder to land with a violent thud on the floor.

The Avenger sought to avoid a fight rather than join in the action. He stood in the darkness for an instant while, once more, he recalled the diagram of the caves which he had studied at the library.

Someone brushed against him. His steely fingers instantly caught a throat—and as instantly released it. There was no mistaking MacMurdie’s ponderous Adam’s apple.

“There’s still another way out of here,” The Avenger whispered into the Scot’s ear. “Possibly even Kepper didn’t know of it. It’s at the far end of the cave. As you touch the others, lead them down there.”

“O.K.,” Mac muttered back. “Say, Muster Benson, there’s water in here—”

Benson moved away, toward the far end of the cave. Two men got in his way and were identified as the enemy. Benson’s incredibly strong hands went out, and each got a neck. He brought his hands sweepingly together with a surge of those amazing arm and shoulder muscles.

The two men dropped. Benson went on. He was ankle deep in water now.

Somebody yelped, “Hey! What’s all this water doin’ in here?”

The yelp was followed by a smack as Cole Wilson or someone located a thug by his big mouth and got in a good swing.

The Avenger had threaded through the blind melee to the far end of the cave. His hands felt the opening that yawned to the next cave. It was not what he wanted. The next cave was the last, a blind alley, leading nowhere.

His hands touched the wall to the left of the regular opening, and his fingertips outlined a crack raggedly forming an oblong about three feet by four. He got two fingers in one part of the crack and pulled with gigantic strength. The oblong became a slab, swinging from the wall enough for him to get a full handhold.