House of Death

CHAPTER XVII Hell’s Host

Carmella’s screams kept sounding because she and Nellie had not plunged down with the rest of the stuff. And that was due to Nellie’s almost superhuman agility.

As had been demonstrated when she outwitted the mastiff, she was trained in traveling high among branches of trees. The cardinal principle of such training is this: if a branch cracks or sags beneath you, get to another one fast.

That training had developed into an automatic instinct with the high-powered little blonde.

With the first quiver of the collapsing floor, she had leaped for the window, straight across the room. No time to turn and try for the door again, but there was a good chance of reaching the window.

She did, just as the bottom seemed to drop out of everything. She caught the sill in straining fingers, her feet found an inch of protruding beam with a broken end, and she hung there.

And an instant later, Carmella’s wildly clawing fingers caught her!

The Spanish girl’s hands fastened around Nellie’s slim ankles like leg irons; her hundred and ten pounds became an appalling death weight.

Nellie knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep this up very long. But she didn’t scream. She decided to save her breath, because Carmella was doing enough screaming for both of them.

“Somebody better come in answer to those screams pretty fast,” she thought, as her fingers slipped a hundredth of an inch on the sill.

Somebody did!

There was a kind of bellowing like that of a mother elephant suddenly aware that its offspring had fallen into danger. There was a trembling of stairs, and a flash shot its beam over the two girls.

“Nellie!” yelled Smitty in anguish.

Nellie didn’t say anything. It was not a question of saving any breath any more; it was a question of not having any breath to save. Her whole body was trembling with the frightful strain of supporting Carmella. Her fingers were slipping with slow but relentless steadiness over the sill.

Carmella kept on screaming and Nellie kept on fighting to hold on just a little longer, and Smitty turned and went down the turret stairs in two jumps.

Nellie wondered dreamily what he thought he was going to do now, but couldn’t guess, and relapsed into a kind of pink fog where time stood still.

Fifty feet beneath was a jagged pile of beams and debris. Well, that was too bad. No matter how far the drop or onto what, she couldn’t hang on any longer.

With a tired sigh, she relaxed her grip! And through the window, a vast hand lunged and grabbed her by the right wrist as she was falling. Smitty, unable to get to her from the door, had raced outside and climbed the wall to the window.

“You big dope!” whispered Nellie. “You do have your uses.”

That was all she knew till she got to the drawing room on the first floor. She regained consciousness as Smitty carried her in. Carmella, on the giant’s other arm, was still out.

“You little feather-brain!” Smitty was raging in a trembling voice. “You haven’t any more sense than a telephone slug. You said you wouldn’t leave your room.”

“I said I wouldn’t for a human,” defended Nellie, feeling pretty much a fool. “And I didn’t. I followed a ghost.”

“Ghost?” snapped Smitty, putting her into a chair. “Ghost? What the devil—”

Into the room barged their grossly fat host, waddling like a human tank, eyes heavy-lidded and stone-dull.

Nellie glared at him. She didn’t like this man, to put it mildly. She would have liked nothing better than to pin the collapsing floor and the ghost business on him. But she didn’t see how she could. Their will-o’-the-wisp guide would have been swallowed up in this man’s bulk; he could have had nothing to do with the wisp.

He had heard her last words. He echoed them along with Smitty.

“Ghost?” he said. “You mean to say you think you have seen a ghost in this house?”

Carmella was stirring, but was not yet out of her fainting spell. Nellie looked at her, then at the fat man.

“Would it be impossible to have a ghost in this house any more than in any other house?” she snapped.

“I suppose not,” said the fat man. “In fact, this house has been said by many to have a ghost. But naturally I never took any stock in the tale.”

“What do you mean — supposed to have a ghost?”

The fat man hesitated a moment. Then, before speaking, he spread his pudgy hands deprecatingly as if apologizing in advance for talking at all.

“As you perhaps know, my father was eccentric on the point of burial. He insisted that, when he died, he was to be placed in an open coffin in the cellar vault. So it is to be expected that rumors would get around that he ‘walks’ now and then.”

“And you believe that?” snapped Smitty.

The fat man shrugged.

“I never have.”

“You’re implying that you do now?”

“Well—” began the fat man.

Carmella came out of it. She regained consciousness with a cry that was almost as lusty as her former screams. She stared up wildly, then sank back as she saw where she was.

“The ghost!” she whispered.

The fat man looked at Smitty.

“You see? Your little blond friend says she saw a ghost. This girl says she saw one. Perhaps there is something to the tale, after all—”

He stopped, and became very still, staring unblinkingly past Smitty. The door was in that direction. The giant turned.

In the doorway stood The Avenger.

His black hair seemed to crackle with electrical force. His eyes were like colorless holes in the depths of which were fog and ice — and doom.

Over his arm, Dick Benson had a curious garment. And it was at this, more than at the man himself, that the fat man was staring.

The garment was a sort of rain cape with a hood. Cape and hood were black. But down the front of it had been roughly sewed a wide, uneven strip of white rubber from another raincoat.

Benson spread the cape wide. The white strip assumed the approximate shape of a small human. He turned the cape and revealed a similar strip on the other side. The whole garment, by the way, was streaming wet.

Dick’s voice was calm, vibrant, certain. He stared at the fat man as he spoke.

“Yes, it seems there is something to the ghost tale. There was a ghost. But not from the land of the dead. The ghost was you!”

The mountainous master of the island didn’t make a move. His face was almost as impassive as Benson’s. His eyes, heavy-lidded, were blank.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you, Benson.”

“Nellie,” said The Avenger, “when you and Carmella saw this ghost, did it seem to appear and disappear?”

“Yes,” said Nellie, nodding slowly.

“Of course!” Benson’s tone was as cold and calm as his colorless eyes. “From front or back, you could see a white strip on the black cape. But when the ‘ghost’ turned sideways, the cape disappeared into the blackness of the night, and you saw nothing.”

“That would be a silly business to go through,” said the fat man. “Easier to wear a white coat and be done with it.”

“That would have given you away because of the size,” said Benson. “You are not small. Your size, by the way, brands this cape as yours, and yours alone.”

He spread the thing. It looked like a tent.

“You’re accusing me of trying to kill my cousin, Carmella, and your friend, Miss Gray,” complained the fat man mildly. “Why would I want to do anything like that?”

“For the wealth of all the Haygars,” Dick said. “For that, you would kill Carmella. For that, you killed Shan and Sharnoff and would have killed von Bolen if he had not removed himself from the game by blundering into your sinister hog pen.”

Benson turned to Nellie.

“Apparently the same ruse tried on you and Carmella was worked on Shan — successfully. He was led to the turret and pushed over. But the thing that led him said it was leading him ‘to that which he desired.’ Did your ghost say anything?”

Nellie nodded. “Why, yes. It said about the same thing to us. Carmella said she knew what she desired and didn’t need to be led anywhere, but I told her to shut up because I wanted to follow and—”

She stopped. The Avenger’s pale, deadly eyes were like burnished agates.

“Carmella said that? That she needed no guiding?”

“Yes,” said Nellie. “Something like that. But—”

“Good! I needed very much to know that. Till now, I have not been sure.”

He didn’t say what it was that he hadn’t been sure of. The fat man, in a milder tone than ever, went back to the former theme.

“You mention the ‘wealth of all the Haygars,’ Benson. I repeat, there is no such thing. In country after country, our family had everything taken from it. Everything! Indeed, only one or two in each country were left alive. Revolution and war have beaten us—”

“In revolution and war your family lost what each had in its country at that time,” corrected The Avenger. “Eh?” The fat man’s eyes were not quite so blank. “Branch after branch of the Haygar family,” said The Avenger, “foresaw expropriation. Branch after branch, before the start of violence, shipped all their liquid wealth, in the form of gold, to the American Haygar, old Wendell. Then they stayed on till their tangible possessions — lands, factories, and securities — had been seized. After that, they meant to come to America and claim their gold. But they never reached here.”

Carmella said cautiously, “What makes you assume there is gold?”

“The golden disks,” said Benson. “There was mention of metallurgical analysis. For what reason? There could only be one: for comparison with a similar analysis of other gold. Each Haygar, on presenting his medallion and having it checked, was to be able to claim the gold hoard from which it had been run. A sure scheme, since no two runs of metal would be quite the same: the gold from Turkey would be just a little different in analysis from the gold from Germany, and so on.”

“You say the Haygars never reached here,” said the fat man, looking honestly bewildered. “Shan and Sharnoff and von Bolen and Carmella reached this island, and Harlik got as close as New York—”

“All were impostors!”

They all stared at him.

“Every one of them, save Carmella, was an impostor,” Dick said. “That is proved by the fact that no one of them knew exactly what the treasure was that he sought, or where to find it. Only Carmella did not need to be led ‘to that which she desired.’ The rest only knew that the medals were priceless, without being able to decipher their meaning.”

“So I was taken in by pretenders!” scowled the fat man. “I called them cousins. I, Goram Haygar, was about to accept—”

“Don’t concern yourself so much,” said The Avenger, glacially. “After all, you’re an impostor, yourself. You’re no more Goram Haygar than I am. You, too, are in ignorance of the hiding place of the gold. You methodically trenched the island trying to find it. You sounded all through the basement walls to dig it up. Perhaps the bones concealed down there could tell where the real son of Wendell Haygar could be found—”

The lights snapped out!

It had been superlatively done. The fat man’s calmness, which hadn’t really deceived anyone there as to the logic of his guilt, had finally thrown them all just a little off guard. His mildness had given him just a half-second head strart. And it was enough.

A sudden kick at a lamp wire, a break and a short circuit — then darkness.

Darkness, and the slam of a door as the fat man shot sideways into another room.

“Whoosh!” came Mac’s voice from somewhere near the rear. Then there was the sound of a fall and the slam of a back door of the house.

“After him!” bellowed Smitty, racing through the side door with his flash splitting the darkness.

He got into a small rear hall, through a butler’s pantry, and into the big kitchen. Mac, posted as guard there, was just picking himself up off the floor.

“The skurlie jumped me so fast and so hard that I missed stoppin’ him,” he said shamefully to The Avenger.

Then he went out into the night with Benson and Smitty after the fake Goram Haygar.

They didn’t go far.

The stone enclosure for the hogs was back there. And, suddenly, from the opened door of the enclosure, the giant, half-starved brutes surged forth! A fortunate lightning flash revealed that. The fat man had wrenched the pen door open as he dashed past it.

It was a deadly mess!

The big beasts were berserk in the darkness. And when four or five hundred pounds of maddened boar rushes you, there isn’t much to do but try to keep out of the way. If you can!

It began to look as though Mac and Smitty and Benson couldn’t. There were too many of the brutes. Mac managed to shoot two, and Benson one, and then they were surrounded.

The Avenger’s voice rose in a piercing yell. He rushed toward the converging ring of death and leaped. He reached a tablelike back, feet barely missing gnashing tusks, and leaped toward the enclosure.

The hogs streamed after him, all of them drawn by the outcry, and stampeded by a running quarry into a deadly chase!

Dick raced into the empty enclosure, and the hogs crowded ferociously after him.

“The chiefs a goner!” yelled Mac in anguish.

“No, he’s not,” corrected Smitty, who had seen the head with the shock of black hair for an instant above the ten-foot edge of the enclosure.

The giant rushed to slam the pen door shut and shoot the staple home. Dick swung down from the top of the wall, to which he had leaped a bare inch ahead of a dozen savage sets of tusks.

Benson’s face was unbelievably calm. He had just undergone an experience that would have twisted any normal face into despair, horror, hopelessness, triumph. His countenance made a beholder shiver at its entire lack of any of these expressions.

He didn’t give Smitty or Mac time to reflect on the weirdness of it, however. His slim forefinger pointed.

“There! Going back into the house!”

Mac and Smitty turned in time to see the elephantine mass of their host just disappearing back through the rear door. And in there alone were Nellie and Carmella!