House of Death

CHAPTER XVIII Bent Walls

Fast as The Avenger was, he did not quite catch up to Smitty as the giant bellowed and raced for Nellie’s side. Smitty was sure that this time it was curtains for the little blond bombshell. It looked to him as if the sole purpose the big man had had in mind in letting the hogs loose was to create enough distraction for him to get back in and kill off Carmella, undisturbed.

Which would have meant killing Nellie, too.

But when Smitty reached the front hall, he was amazed to see the fat man shoving out the front door and into the night once more. He was also thankfully astounded to see the faces of the two girls at the hall doorway of the drawing room.

“I thought you’d be dead,” he said, running his flash over them. The Avenger and Mac came up.

“He didn’t do a thing to us,” said Nellie. “I’d have shot him, of course, if he had tried.” She was calmly waving her gun. “But he didn’t even try. He jumped into the hall and threw something in that big vase down there. I couldn’t see what. I wouldn’t even have seen that he did anything at all, except that a flash of lightning—”

“Out!” Dick said, voice, positively crackling. “Out of here at once! He must have set a time switch!”

Fast as Nellie’s brain was, this left her flat-footed for a moment. The Avenger didn’t stop to repeat.

His steel-cablelike arms went around the girl, and he raced for the door. After him came Smitty, with Carmella, and then Mac.

They got outside, ran about twenty-five yards, and then were thrown in all directions.

The thing that had scattered them was the apparent splitting in two of the whole island in an appropriate chaos of sound!

An explosion that made even the collapse of the cliff by the dock seem small. It had come from the house; looking back, they could see the grim and ghastly place doing a kind of ponderous dance in the glare of beginning flame.

Cracks spread all through it, from foundation to turrets as they stared. And then the walls collapsed!

The walls came down very curiously indeed. So oddly that everyone of them noted it, at least subconsciously, even at such a moment.

The walls were of brick and should have broken into a million fragments, with stray bricks flying every which way. And they did not. Instead of breaking, the walls bent! They fell to the ground, not in a heap, but in cohesive sections each of which was many feet square.

But, regardless of manner, fall they did. The house of Haygar literally had disappeared, as figuratively the House of Haygar had. That was why the fat man had maneuvered to get back into the house alone. It was not to get at Carmella, but to set a time switch of some kind that would bring the house down on all of them at once. Smitty remembered the wire exposed in the cellar wall next to the dead man’s bones. All the foundations, tunneled every few feet in a search for treasure, must have been studded with explosives when the concrete was replaced, so that the fat man could destroy the building whenever he felt too hard pressed by enemies.

“Curious,” Dick Benson said calmly. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a person with treasure in mind has only one thought: to dig for it.”

Carmella stared wildly at him. She was almost over the edge of hysteria, but the calm tone was helpful. Nellie was nearly as shaken, but had a much better grip on her nerves. The leaping flames from the ruins threw red on their faces.

“The fake Goram Haygar dug for the treasure he knew was somewhere on the island,” The Avenger said. “It never occurred to him that it was, in a manner of speaking, right out in plain sight — in the exposed walls of the house itself.”

“The walls?” said Mac.

“Yes! You saw how they fell, with the bricks clinging together in large sections, and those sections bending rather than breaking. Come, I’ll show you the reason for that.”

The group went back to the ruins, as close as the flame would allow. A large section of the wall of the right-hand turret had been flung far in its fall. In looking at it, they saw what Benson had meant.

The wall was made of a double layer of brick, with a space between about four inches wide. And that entire inner space, the whole inner wall sandwiched in between brick layers, was of gold!

The Avenger knelt, apparently to look more closely. His right hand touched the calf of his right leg.

“As each branch of the international Haygar clan sent a great gold shipment to America ahead of the political storm foreseen in its own country,” he said, “old Wendell Haygar secretly melted the bullion and poured it between the outer and inner brick walls of a new wing added to this house. Then he had a medallion made showing that wing, the amount of gold represented, and the date received. To that branch of the family was sent the medal, as a sort of deed to that amount of gold and as an identification disk for the bearer. Many of the clan had never seen the others and didn’t know them by sight.

“It was a positive method of identifying gold hoards with medallions, since each metal would have precisely the same ring, and precisely the same analysis, as the bigger bulk from which it was taken. Thus, no forged disk could ever go undetected. But it was a very poor method of identifying the bearer of the coin. Because anyone getting hold of a medal could claim to be the member of the Haygar family whose initials were on it. Could and did! Four out of five medal-bearers who got through to the island were impostors, and no one will ever know how many other impostors were murdered by those four before the medals came into their hands.”

“Wait a minute!” gasped Nellie. “You say the amount of gold and the date received here were lettered on the disks. Carmella’s, for instance, has 19 and then 33 on it. The 33 would probably be the date. You mean the 19 has to do with the amount?”

“That’s right,” said Benson, pale eyes going to the Spanish girl’s face. “Nineteen tons of gold, received in 1933.”

“Tons?” said Nellie faintly.

“Tons,” said The Avenger. “The other disks call for quantities ranging from that up to thirty tons. Isn’t that right, Carmella?”

Carmella was still shivering, but was fairly calm, now. She nodded.

“Yes, that is right. You have guessed everything. There is no use trying to conceal things from you any more.”

“In addition,” said Benson, “there must be some of old Wendell’s wealth here. It could not have evaporated as completely as it seemed — to the point, indeed, of leaving him in absolute poverty in a decaying estate. Perhaps the side or rear walls are his. In any event, there must be close to a quarter of a billion dollars here — the entire wealth of a family almost the equal of the Rothschilds. And it is all yours, Carmella—”

Something like a human tank waddled around a blazing, head-high clump of debris to their left. A last flare of lightning whitened the red glare that illuminated the big bulk.

It was the phony Goram Haygar. In his hands was a submachine gun, and in his stone-dull eyes was coldly triumphant murder!

Smitty rumbled an exclamation of complete disgust. He had felt safe because of the clearing around the debris. He had thought it impossible for the gross fat man to get near them unseen. It hadn’t occurred to him, or apparently to any of the others, that the hulking killer had ducked to left or right on leaving the front door, instead of going straight ahead, and that as a result he had been nearer the ruins than they, when the explosion occurred.

But it seemed he had tricked them in this way, and had hidden to one side of a blazing barricade till they came within a few feet of his gun.

Mac and Smitty and The Avenger stayed stone still. Nellie was foolhardy enough to let her hand drop an inch toward her belt. The muzzle of the submachine gun swayed a very little. Her hand froze.

The Avenger was still on one knee, hands on the ground to support his weight. The fat man grinned coldly at his tense, strained position, which he was aware The Avenger knew without words he’d better keep if he didn’t want to be instantly annihilated.

“I heard your neat explanations,” the fat man said. “They sound pretty correct, in the main. The location of the gold is particularly interesting. I should have thought of the upper walls myself, but I was too intent on looking underground. If I’d known it was the walls, I would have blown up the place long ago.”

They all stared, rigid, breathless, at the death represented by the machine gun. Whether it would speak at once or would delay its deadly chatter a few more seconds, there was no telling.

It seemed there was to be a delay. Apparently, it gave the hulking murderer a fine sense of power to hold them moveless here, and he didn’t want to lose the pleasure too soon.

“You were wrong in only one particular,” the fat man went on to Benson. “That was in saying the gold belongs to Carmella. It doesn’t. It belongs to me — as soon as I rid myself of a few witnesses, as I have rid myself of intruders before now.”

Smitty and Mac glanced swiftly at Dick Benson.

There was only one thing to do. That was for all to rush at once. Certainly most of them would die before they could get to the gun. Probably all of them would. But such a course was better than simply staying still and taking it.

So they flicked a glance at the man who was chief, to get his imperceptible nod that should start them all jumping forward at the same instant.

And they saw that The Avenger was staring past the fat man instead of at him. Staring with agate eyes that seemed to have little lights smoldering behind them.

Behind the gross killer, another figure had appeared from around the blazing ruins and was creeping close. And at sight of this, Mac and Smitty breathed raggedly and felt their jaws go slack in astonishment.

It was the figure of the man in the coffin. It was the corpse of Wendell Haygar, who had chosen to be placed in a crypt in his own estate rather than be normally buried—

Either that or a ghost of mist and shadow.

But in the right hand of the creeping thing was held a most material object. A knife! And as the figure stole ever closer to the fat man’s back, the knife raised inch by inch for a downward stroke.

A croaking moan came from Carmella’s lips.

The ghost they’d seen in the hall had been explained away as the fat man himself, in disguise. But here were both the fat man and the ghost. No explaining away that ghastly white figure, now!

The fat man heard the moan and saw the appalled expression in the girl’s dark eyes.

The trick most to be expected in such a situation was that some of this group would try to make him turn around on the pretext that someone was behind him. So the man only grinned coldly, while his finger tightened on the trigger.

Not till the final leap of the figure behind him did he start to turn. And then it was too late!

Carmella screamed, and Nellie cried out. The men stared with dilated eyes.

And the knife went home!

A roar came from the fat man like the bellow of a mortally hurt beast of the jungle. But it seemed he had vitality like that of a jungle beast, too.

A running man has been known to go on for fifteen feet after a bullet has lodged in his heart. With cold steel in his, the fat man dragged the gun around. Red flame lanced from its muzzle at the white figure, then went on for a second in a rising arc before dead fingers fell from the gun.

And if a corpse or a ghost cannot feel bullets, then this sheeted form was neither ghost nor corpse. For it lay writhing on the ground with red coming from its middle.

The Avenger slid Mike back into its holster.

Before the fat man had rounded the corner, Benson’s miraculous hearing had picked up the sound of a step. Kneeling and ostensibly looking at the gold, he had drawn the little silenced revolver so stealthily that even his own followers hadn’t known. And over the fat man’s head had hung that whispering menace all the time he had the machine gun on them.

But The Avenger had delayed till the last because of his tremendous desire never to kill with his own hands.

From a kneeling position, and without aiming, even he could not have suddenly snapped a shot at the fat murderer with any assurance of the eighth-inch accuracy that creased instead of killing. He could have hit the head, yes. But he had been delaying such outright execution—

And then the figure had appeared and made unnecessary the gamble of such a shot.

The others were crowding around the figure now and staring at the chalk-white, ghastly face. Benson joined them.

It was a person every one of them had almost forgotten existed, in the crowded last minutes.

“Morgan, the servant!” said Smitty.

The man’s lips moved as if he were smiling. The Avenger said gently, “Not Morgan, the servant. But the real Goram Haygar, son of Wendell and owner of this island. His features prove it.”

The dying man nodded.

“That is right,” he whispered, with the subsiding wind and the crackle of flames making it almost impossible to hear. “Wendell’s son. I came home after… absence… to find my father dead and the servants missing. I managed… get employed by that man as servant. I meant to expose or trap him.”

He closed his eyes, seeming to try to gather strength out of darkness.

“I am a… coward. I was afraid of the man. I didn’t dare to tell authorities of men he killed who sneaked to island… fear he’d kill me. When you… caught in rat pit… I went down to release you. You were out… I played ghost and led to bones of victims.”

“Why didn’t you kill the guy when you found what he’d done?” said Smitty. “No one would have blamed you.”

“Too afraid—” whispered Wendell’s son. “So… played ghost… easy because I resemble father if expression right. Just now… all lost if couldn’t overcome cowardice. I got the knife and… and—”

He fought suddenly for air.

“Knife—”

He was dead!

“The one I could really call cousin,” said Carmella softly. “The only one. And he—”

Tears dropped from her dark eyes. Nellie put her arm around her. She blinked rapidly and looked at The Avenger.

“If it is true, the hugeness of the amount of gold here that you say, you shall have as many millions as you like for what you’ve done.”

The rest knew the answer to that, but Carmella didn’t. So The Avenger patiently replied.

“We need no money. We have all we can use. You are welcome to the help, because that is our job.”

The wind had almost gone down. The clouds were breaking in the far sky. The fire was dying. There would be a residue of gold from the flames as big as a mother lode.

“I’ll use it to help others like myself,” said Carmella, like a person taking a vow. “It will feed and clothe refugees of all nations.”

The Avenger nodded and went off a few paces to be alone. His own vow he did not speak of.

The vow to fight on and on against crime, wherever it reared its hideous head. The vow to go on, till death stopped him — The Avenger!