House of Death

CHAPTER XII Dead Men’s Bones

With the silence of trained woodsmen, the three men slid among thickset trees toward the center of the island.

“I still don’t get that set-up back there at the dock,” Smitty said. “All the Haygars decided to meet on this island at the home of Goram Haygar. All right. Sharnoff came with a gang of white Russians, probably concealing them from Goram when he landed. Shan came with his own gang. The Russians jumped the Orientals, probably to get Shan’s golden disk, since everybody seems trying to get everybody else’s medallion. All right. But what precisely brought down that cliff?”

“The owner of the island, as proved by the dogs,” said The Avenger, “discouraged visitors. One of his little discouragements was the undermining of that cliff. Then the explosive was wired to the house, so that from there, at a touch, Goram Haygar could destroy a young army attempting to land and attack him. When the man fell from the stairs his body happened to break that wire, short-circuiting the current and setting off the explosive.”

Smitty nodded, and they went on now in silence, since they were nearing the black hulk of the house itself.

They kept a sharp lookout for more dogs. Had they known that there was now only one mastiff left alive on the island, and that that one was across from them on the mainland side, they would have been relieved.

Had they known, however, what the dog was doing at the moment, their relief would have died a sudden death. In fact, their hair would have stood straight up on their heads!

But they didn’t know; so they went on to the house.

Mac touched Benson’s shoulder and pointed to something. It was a thing they had seen a lot since leaving the shore.

There was a regular trench dug through the woods in front of them. It was about four feet deep and looked as if it had been dug for a pipeline. But there was no pipe in it.

There had been more of these trenches through the woods, criss-crossing each other in a regular pattern. Just empty ditches. They seemed senseless; yet that regularity of pattern hinted at a purpose.

They strode across this last ditch, went on a few steps and reached the clearing. They paused a moment to look over the house with the three turrets.

The place was not as big as it looked. The turrets gave it an appearance of hugeness; actually, there were probably not more than fifteen rooms in it.

There weren’t many windows. The windows were heavily barred, save for a small one high up in each turret. These were without bars and probably gave on little rooms that had no purpose at all; there was no excuse for the turrets in the first place, save for decorative reasons.

The Avenger nodded, and the three men ran lightly and soundlessly across the clearing to the house wall.

There was a basement window at the side, also barred.

Smitty went to work on it.

Sitting down, he braced his feet against the wall and took a bar in each vast hand. Then he heaved.

The necessity for making as little noise as possible hampered him. He couldn’t jerk; he had to exert a steady, even pressure. It was four or five minutes before outraged steel began to give.

There was a thin squeal, and the casement came loose. A little more pulling, and Smitty leaned back with the whole grating, somewhat out of shape, in his huge right hand.

He laid it down and slid downward into blackness. Mac and Dick followed him. As they did so, the wind suddenly increased its intensity from a moan to a low, but rising, howl.

A storm was coming up.

Mac’s flash lanced out briefly. It showed that they were in a small vault with an open door. Through this they could see still another door, partly closed.

“Try to find stairs leading up,” said The Avenger, voice low and vibrant.

They went through the two doorways and into a cell from which three doors opened. From the low, arched ceilings, moisture oozed, turning the atmosphere clammy. Festoons of cobwebs hung everywhere, beaded with moisture. Scurrying sounds on all sides indicated armies of rats, and several times the little red eyes of the loathsome rodents appeared in the distance like evil jewels.

“Mon, ’tis a ghastly place,” whispered Mac.

“Yeah, like a lot of burial crypts,” agreed Smitty, who had to bend his head low to keep it from scraping the cement ceiling.

They opened two of the three doors and saw only other vaults. The third showed a corridor. They started down that.

Dick’s arms swung wide and back, crowding Mac and Smitty backward again into the room they had just quitted. They shut the door save for an inch and peered through this crack, not yet knowing why The Avenger had retreated.

They heard steps down the stairs, then saw a light. The light was in the hands of a man so fat it appeared that he must weigh over three hundred. Beside him came a little wisp of a fellow who seemed to cringe with every step he took.

Obviously the big man was master and the little one servant. They went down the corridor.

“That fat boy must be Goram Haygar,” whispered Smitty.

Mac nodded, but did not speak. Another door had been opened far down the corridor, revealing light. The light was not intense, but it was steady.

They stayed there for perhaps five minutes before the man who looked like a rhinoceros and the servant who looked like a rabbit came back and went up the stairs. The Avenger started down the corridor, with Mac and Smitty following.

They came to the vault at the end, in which the two had gone for a moment. At the doorway, The Avenger stopped for an instant. His colorless, infallible eyes had picked out something in the wall of the corridor.

There was a line there, and when he looked harder he saw more like it. The line was about six inches across and went all along the corridor wall. Somebody had trenched out both walls and ceiling at regular intervals — just as trenches had been dug all through the woods. Then the trenches had been filled with cement again.

It took sharp eyes to see the difference in texture of the fresher cement. But once seen, it was easily distinguishable.

The three went on in, and Smitty gasped.

Two great tapers, burning on and on and filling the vault with an eerie, yellowish light. Between the tapers, an ebony trestle. On the trestle — a coffin with a glass lid revealing a corpse.

They went to the coffin and peered down. The dead man seemed rather asleep than dead. He was a dapper little elderly gentleman with a thin, high-arched nose and a thin line of gray hair on the upper lip forming a neat mustache.

Benson had studied a lot of old records on the American branch of the Haygar family and had seen pictures.

“Wendell Haygar, father of the present owner of this place,” he said. “There was an account of his eccentricity in choosing to be laid to rest in his own vault in an open coffin rather than buried.”

“Maybe he was afraid of being buried alive,” mused Smitty. “You know — lots of people fear falling into a cataleptic trance and then being buried for dead and coming to in a coffin six feet underground.”

“Looks almost as if he could get up and walk,” Mac whispered. “But he won’t — not with embalmer’s fluid in his veins.”

“What was that?” It was Smitty’s startled whisper.

“What was what?” said Mac peevishly. The giant had scared him into jumping a foot.

Smitty didn’t answer. He thought he had heard a low laugh in the corridor outside the vault.

The Avenger went toward the door, not seeming to strive for fast movement, but getting there in an incredibly short time. He knew he had heard a laugh. No question about it.

Mac and Smitty crowded after. And then, where there had been solid floor, there was only emptiness, and they were falling!

“Whoosh!” exclaimed Mac.

He had bumped so hard it had knocked the breath half out of him. He got it back and stood up and looked around.

The Avenger was on his feet and raying his flashlight around.

Smitty was sitting on stone floor rubbing his head. Above them where a section of the floor had swung to plunge them down into a subcellar, was now, apparently, solid rock.

The three men abruptly stopped their methodical survey of their surroundings and their own injuries.

All round the floor, at the base of the walls, were ragged little holes. And these holes suddenly began spewing things out.

Rats!

Hundreds of rats, gaunt, starved-looking, black, brown, big, little. In a swarm they made for the men.

“Whoosh!” breathed Mac, beginning to do a sort of Highland fling as he tried to step on some and still avoid the others. He was joined by Benson and Smitty. The three seemed to be executing a weird waltz. But there was nothing funny about it. It was a dance of death!

Smitty yelled as a rat found his ankle in spite of the frantic stamping and jumping. The pale eyes of The Avenger were little chips of stainless steel. They’d be fleshless skeletons in a very short time if they couldn’t escape.

“Smitty, give me your hands. Mac, keep the rats off Smitty as much as possible.”

The Avenger leaped from the giant’s cupped hands to his vast shoulders. Standing there, he was about four feet under the ceiling. He crouched with bent legs while his pale eyes sought the crack around the stone block that showed which square of floor they’d fallen through.

Smitty moaned a little as tiny teeth ripped at his legs.

“Mac, you Scotch squarehead, keep those rats off!”

Mac, jumping and stamping and swinging at Smitty’s legs with his coat, let go a large, round oath.

“What d’ye think I’m tryin’ to do, ye ten-foot dimwit!”

The Avenger’s eyes had stopped at a certain spot in the line around the stone block. The thing swung on a pivot in the middle, evidently. That meant there had to be a steel bar at one side to catch the block and keep it from swinging when it was not supposed to. He thought he had located the significant bolt.

“I’m sorry, chief,” moaned Smitty, “but I’m not going to be able — ouch! — to take this much longer. Mac, gas the damned things.”

“Sure, and gas us, too,” snapped Mac. “Shut up and stand still.”

The Avenger whipped out a thin blade, toothed like a hacksaw but much thinner and finer than any regular saw ever was. He hadn’t used this on the basement window bars because the rasping noise might betray them. Now noise was meaningless; it was speed that counted. With all the phenomenal strength that lay in his average-sized, slim fingers, he leaned on that saw.

Three terrible minutes passed. Terrible for Smitty, anyway, and only to a slightly lesser extent for Mac.

“Chief — I can’t… much longer,” panted the giant. His ankles were something to keep from looking at.

“All right, Smitty.”

Benson pocketed the fine saw. He put his shoulders up hard against the block at the catch side.

“Heave!”

The Avenger’s body became a bent gray steel bar. His wrists went chalk-white with effort. And under him the huge Smitty pushed, too.

There was a loud crack as a partly sawed bolt gave. And then the stone block pivoted in the middle, with no catch to keep it secured any more.

Benson was up through the opening in one fast move. Smitty, hanging onto arms that were not overlarge but had all the strength of steel cables, followed.

“Hey!” yelled Mac, leaping up and down. “Me, too!”

Smitty’s hamlike hand came within reach, and with one arm the giant hauled him up so fast that he popped out of the hole in the floor like a jack-in-the-box.

They stood there, panting. Then they forgot the rat bites and the nasty death they had just escaped and all the rest of the deadly dangers of the night, forgot them in a sudden glimpse of something supernatural.

Ahead of them, down the corridor from the vault of death in which was the coffin of old Wendell Haygar, was a tenuous, dim white figure that seemed to waver like mist.

“ ’Tis a ghostie,” whispered Mac, appalled.

“It can’t be!” Smitty whispered back. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Try an’ disbelieve that one away!” Mac rapped out. “Look, it’s movin’—and it wants us to follow.”

“I’m following — the other way!” Smitty vowed, whirling.

But behind them was only the end wall of the crypt. They could only go ahead, toward the white thing.

The Avenger had already stepped across the hole in the floor and was going down the corridor. With their flesh crawling, Mac and Smitty followed in his wake.

The misty white thing had a face. They got glimpses of it as they caught up to it a little. It had a face, and a purpose. They found out the purpose in about twenty seconds.

The white figure stopped at a section of corridor wall. One misty arm went out toward a certain spot in the wall. So that was the purpose — they were to look here for something.

Then they really saw the face.

“Land o’ livin’!” jerked out Mac. “ ’Tis old Wendell Haygar, risen from his coffin!”

There was the delicate, small face, with a neat gray line of mustache. There were the sunken eyes, open now, and the dapper body.

Then there was nothing. The white shape disappeared utterly.

“Smitty, after him,” snapped The Avenger.

The giant raced on down the corridor, flash boring a thin white line into darkness. But only darkness. The white figure had vanished like mist, though it would seem there was no place to vanish to.

With the giant’s footsteps hastening down the corridor, Benson turned to the spot in the wall indicated by the white thing. He saw one of the many trenches gouged from the concrete and later replaced by fresh cement.

But this spot, for six feet, was larger, almost two feet wide instead of six inches. And it was cracked a little as if the base for the cement had settled behind the stuff.

The Avenger took out Mike, and four slugs whispered from its silenced little muzzle. The impact was not very heavy since the caliber was so small, but the cracked cement did not need much of a kick to break loose.

Half a dozen small fragments fell out, revealing the reason why it had cracked in the first place.

Back in there, a part of a bone could be seen. At sight of it, Mac looked significantly at The Avenger.

“Human tibia,” said Mac.

They knocked out a few more chips, and more bones were exposed, some not completely bared. The shriveling of a body had cracked the concrete. A few wires were exposed, too.

“A dead mon’s bones,” whispered Mac. “Pointed out by a ghost of Wendell Haygar, or else by his perambulatin’ corpse—”

He stopped. Down the corridor Smitty’s little flash was waving a come-on sign.

“Smitty’s found something,” said the Scot.

They joined the giant at the end of the corridor.

“I’ve located the stairs,” said Smitty. He gestured with the light. “See? There. Through that one door—”

Too late. The Avenger noticed that the roof of this low vault was not arched as the others had been; it was flat. Also, that it was constructed of dull metal instead of stone, and that there was a line all around the edges of it.

The two doors — one to the stair well and the one through which they had just come — banged shut with a sound like vault doors. There were heavy clicks as big bolts crossed outside, where they couldn’t be reached.

Then the ceiling jerked a little and began coming down!

Smitty banged one door and then the other. Neither moved a fraction of an inch. The ceiling lowered a foot.

“Out of the rat den into the wine press,” said the giant with grim humor.

His smile was only too apt. This cell was like a giant wine press, with the three men like grapes, to be squeezed practically into nothingness when roof met floor!