The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action

I

Lincoln Street was deserted. The big clock in Park Street Church, uptown, had finished tolling midnight. In front of the Surety Building at Lincoln and West, Mr Loring Everett Newton leaned forward on the rear seat of his enormous car and nervously tapped his chauffeur between the shoulders, then clung to the upholstery as the car nosed towards the kerb.

The machine purred to a stop and with the assistance of the chauffeur Newton gingerly got out. “Better go home now, Andrews,” he said. “And remember — if my son or daughter should ask where I am, you drove me to the club.”

Loring Everett Newton was senior partner in the insurance firm of Newton, Hackler and Fern. Bony hands shaking and watery eyes wide in his white face, he let himself into the Surety Building and wearily climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, which was devoted in its entirety to the offices of the firm over which he presided.

He lit a light and left his topcoat and hat in the outer office. Thumbing a second light-switch in his own private sanctum, he closed the door and lowered his frail body into the chair behind the desk.

He was here to keep a midnight tryst with a woman who had died three months before, and he was quite unaware that his every movement was being observed by the keen grey eyes of Mr Martin Lane, investigator of the occult and supernatural.

For more than half an hour Martin Lane had been sitting very quietly in a straight-backed chair behind an ungainly, old-fashioned filing cabinet. He was hardly noticeable sitting there, his slender, wiry frame blended so easily with the shadows.

Finding him there, Newton might have thought him merely one of the office clerks who had gone to sleep, perhaps, and forgotten to go home. Newton would probably have made the fatal mistake made so frequently by others — the mistake of classifying Martin Lane as “rather ordinary”.

Only in appearance was Martin Lane ordinary, and only then because he desired to be. That studied colourlessness concealed a cobra-quick alertness, a mind keener than any microscope. That pale, thin face and those slumped shoulders hid hair-trigger muscles more responsive than those of a racing greyhound. Beneath the surface lightly slept a cyclone.

Men looked at Martin Lane, classified him as hardly worth remembering, and accordingly forgot him. That very lack of glitter was his major ace in the hole. It enabled him, time and again, to intrude where angels feared to tread; had helped him to face death without dying. It meant he could come and go without being labelled.

That, when one constantly poked one’s nose into the supernatural, was an accomplishment not to be lightly regarded.

Martin Lane was alert now — and Newton did not discover him.

Bony hands still shaking, Newton produced four rubber-banded packages of bills and placed them on the desk. Then he carefully counted the bills in each package, mumbling the count as he did so.

It was a lot of money. Twenty thousand dollars in all, and in cash. Perspiration gleamed on Newton’s high forehead as he paced nervously into the outer office and extinguished the light.

Returning, he darkened the inner office also, then seated himself at the desk again and waited.

Martin Lane, eyes narrowed and thin lips scowling, remained motionless behind the cabinet and knew that, unless something went wrong, the ghost of a dead woman would soon appear in the shadows.

Yesterday morning the attractive, twenty-two-year-old daughter of Loring Everett Newton had driven to Martin Lane’s Chestnut Hill home and begged Lane’s assistance. It was the first time she had come face to face with the famed investigator of psychic phenomena and she had seemed surprised to find him so utterly unglamorous in appearance.

He had been working in his photographic darkroom, and his hands were streaked with green dye, his slender stoop-shouldered body encased in an old rubber apron. Photography was only one of Martin Lane’s many hobbies.

“I’ve come to you because I’m desperate,” Ruth Newton said, “and because I’ve heard so much about you, Mr Lane. It’s about my father. Possibly you’ve heard of him.”

Most people had heard of her father, Lane told her with a smile. When a man controlled a mammoth insurance company and possessed several million dollars, his name became public property.

“For three months now,” Ruth Newton said, “my father has been acting strangely. We thought at first it was due to mother’s death. She was killed in that horrible accident, you know.”

Lane knew. The wife of Loring Everett Newton had been found dead in the charred wreckage of her foreign-made car at the foot of Baker’s Cliff on the lake road, six months ago.

“We thought he was brooding over her death,” the girl said. “Then he took to going out at night, every night, alone. He talked about mother continually. When Paul and I demanded an explanation, he said that mother had come back to him. Then I began following him when he went out at night.”

Lane, dye-streaked hands flat on his knees, peered at her and waited for the rest of it. The penetrating gaze of the girl’s eyes did not trouble him, nor did her sudden hesitation. He guessed that she was thinking what many another person had thought — that he was somehow too mild, too ordinary, to be equal to his reputation.

She had expected, perhaps, a creature with glittering eyes and a bristling beard, seated cross-legged upon Oriental rugs and gazing into a crystal ball flanked by columns of incense-smoke. Ah, well...

“Night after night my father went to his office,” Ruth Newton said at last, evidently steeling herself to go through with it. “He still goes there, Mr Lane. I can’t stand it! He’s not my father any longer; he’s a total stranger to me and Paul. He is surely going insane!”

“I shall be more than glad to look into the matter,” Lane said quietly.

That had happened yesterday.

Now, in darkness, Loring Everett Newton sat alone in his private sanctum, waiting for the arrival of his dead wife, while Lane watched from his place of hiding.

The office was a large one. In addition to Newton’s huge desk and the filing cabinet, it contained another large cabinet that extended from floor to ceiling on the far side of the room. Newton, rigid in his chair and breathing heavily, expectantly faced that second cabinet.

There had been a great deal of talk, Martin Lane remembered, about the gruesome accident that had claimed Mrs Newton’s life. The disaster had occurred late at night while the woman was returning from a camp near Spring Lake. The newspapers had subtly and suggestively wondered why she was returning from so isolated a place at so late an hour.

Through their scandal columns the papers had done a good deal of wondering about Loring Newton’s wife over a period of years. She seemed to enjoy seeing her name in print, no matter how shady the circumstances. There were rumours, for instance, that she and Mr Arthur Fern, her husband’s junior partner, had been very much more than casual friends.

Martin Lane watched and wondered. Then suddenly he had something more tangible to wonder about.

A creaking sound informed him that the door of the large cabinet had slowly swung open. Other sounds indicated that Loring Newton had stiffened convulsively in his chair and was leaning forwards one hand nervously pawing the edge of the desk.

Near the open door of the cabinet a thin, tenuous light undulated weirdly along the floor!

Martin Lane put his hands hard on his knees but otherwise sat still. The unearthly light wavered, grew larger, and began slowly to assume shape as it gained height. No flashlight was making it, that was certain; the weird glow possessed life and motion of its own. It wavered dimly in the room’s darkness and became an amazingly soft, vaporous glow, swaying sluggishly as it assumed the form of a woman.

Then Lane saw the face.

It came into view as slowly and weirdly as a photographic face emerging in a darkroom developer-tray. The luminous vapour blurred away from it, sinuously coiling, and the face itself was indistinct, nebulous, with an unearthly beauty that drew Martin Lane’s eyes forward in their sockets.

With a slow gliding motion the woman swayed forward, and then Loring Newton hoarsely whispered her name. “Marguerite!”

“You have brought the money, Loring?”

“I... yes — most of it.” Newton’s voice, issuing from lips that must surely be quivering, was a frightened whisper wandering in the room’s murk. “You don’t seem to realise how hard it is for me to raise more cash. I’ve given you so much!”

“You will give me much more, Loring, before your debt is paid in full.”

Martin Lane could see only the woman; the man was invisible in darkness. He took note of her amazing beauty and recalled that newspaper portraits had invariably revealed Marguerite Newton to be lovely beyond comparison.

But there was something evil in the ethereal, ever-changing luminosity of that lovely face as the woman came closer. Softly she murmured, “Where is the money you have brought for me tonight?”

“You should not ask for more!” Newton groaned. “My God, I told you that the last time! My money is gone, all of it. I’ve had to borrow. I’ve had to steal from my company. Now must I steal from our own children?”

“Would you have them know the manner of my death, Loring?”

“No, no!”

“Would you have me go to them and say, ‘It was not an accident, my children. When I left the camp that night, your own father was waiting for me and strangled the life from my earthly body while I screamed for mercy. Your own father murdered me and then set fire to the car and—’”

“No, no! My God, no! I’ll pay you! I’ll pay whatever you demand!”

Soft, mocking laughter answered him. “I have no love for my children, Loring. You knew that, even before you destroyed my earthly form and made me a wanderer in this dark world of death. I want this money because it is theirs. Because they love you, they too must pay for your sin.”

Spectral hands reached forward to the dim black outline of the desk, and Martin Lane guessed they were avidly closing over the bills that lay there. Then, slowly, the woman retreated.

The vaporous contour of her face was blurred again by undulating shadows and began slowly to dissolve. Her unearthly form lost shape, became a wavering, uncertain glow in the darkness. A voice whispered softly, “I shall come again, Loring. Be here tomorrow night...”

The last wavering thread of light vanished. The door of the cabinet creaked shut.

Martin Lane remained where he was, unmoving. For a while the darkness was full of low, throaty sobs emanating from the man at the desk; then the legs of a chair scraped the floor and footsteps were audible. A light-switch clicked under Newton’s groping fingers.

The man looked around him and shuddered, his face drenched with sweat, eyes wide with pure terror. He opened the cabinet door and peered into the murky interior. Finally, still sobbing, he snapped out the light and walked out of the office.

When the door of the front office had clicked shut, Martin Lane straightened and strode quickly past the desk. A flashlight glowed in his hand as he stepped into the cabinet. He examined every inch of the walls, gazed intently at the ceiling, and on hands and knees explored the floor. It took him a long time. When he walked out of the office, pulling the door shut behind him, a suspicion of moisture gleamed on his forehead and his lips were tight-pressed in a face darkly scowling.

The fourth-floor corridor of the Surety Building was a black tube of silence. Lane felt his way along it towards the stairs — slowly, because he needed time to think.

He had stumbled upon a secret tonight which if reported to the police would send a terrified man to the death-house. Loring Newton’s wife had not died accidentally; her own husband had strangled her, then set fire to the car and sent it hurtling over Baker’s Cliff, where the flames had effectively destroyed evidence of his guilt.

Martin Lane, hired by Newton’s terrified daughter to investigate this case, held the life of Loring Everett Newton in his own two hands.

Pondering his problem in ethics, Lane paced slowly past the row of elevator shafts. He was looking ahead, not behind, and the thing came without warning.

A hurtling shape crashed into him, slamming him off his feet. He had no chance.

The grilled door of the nearest elevator shaft should have stopped him, but the door was open. Lane frantically pawed empty air as he staggered drunkenly through the aperture. He tripped, sprawled headlong, and shot down horizontally with nothing beneath him to stop his fall. The elevator was at the bottom.

The blood in Lane’s body ran cold as he squirmed frantically to right himself. Cables tore skin from his face and burned across his writhing legs. Above him a soft feminine voice, hellishly familiar, laughed in vile triumph at his plight.

A man more susceptible to terror would have screamed until his plummeting body crashed in a mangled heap on the roof of the elevator. Lane silently got his hands on the cables and clung to them despite the agony that burned into them.

Like slippery serpents they slid through his fingers until he braked the speed of his descent. Then between the second and first floors he came to a full stop, wrapped his legs around the cables, and hung there with blood streaming down his corded wrists.

Minutes passed before he was able to move again.

Gently, then, he lowered himself until his feet found the roof of the elevator. One hand groping, he searched for and found the grill-work of a door just above him and pulled it open. Miraculously still alive, he stepped up into the building’s second-floor corridor.

With an automatic pistol gripped in his bloody right hand, he tiptoed silently up the stairs to the landing from which he had been pushed.

He searched the darkness first, then found a light-switch and explored every inch of the insurance company’s labyrinth of offices. His assailant wouldn’t be there, of course, but he had to look, to make sure. Undoubtedly by now the owner of that mocking voice had vanished.

Vanished where? Back into the nameless dark world of death from which she had apparently come prowling?

II The Second Attempt

Miss Ruth Newton looked anxiously into Martin Lane’s sombre face the next morning and said falteringly, “Must I answer your question?”

“I assure you I had good reasons for asking it,” Lane murmured.

“Very well then, it is true that Paul and I had no love for our mother. She hated us, and I suppose we also hated her. She was a wicked woman who abused Father terribly. Now will you tell me what happened last night?”

“Your father has told you his version?”

She shook her head. “Andrews drove Father to the club last night and returned here without him at half-past one this morning. That is, he says he drove father to the club. But I know father wasn’t there, because I called to find out. I don’t know where to turn, Mr Lane. I thought I could trust Andrews when he came to us three months ago, but now—”

“Andrews returned here at half past one?” Lane asked, scowling.

“Yes.”

“Where is your father now, Miss Newton? At his office?”

“No. He said he had a number of errands to do and would return here for lunch.”

Lane nodded, wondering whether Loring Everett Newton were at this moment endeavouring desperately to raise money to meet the demands made upon him. He looked around him. Here in Newton’s home he had talked for a long while with the son and daughter of the man he was trying to help. It was a pretentious home but an unhappy one. Dread had taken possession.

“What happened last night is of little importance, Miss Newton.” Lane shrugged, rising. “Tonight may tell a different story.”

In the hall he again encountered the girl’s brother, and the young man glared at him without even a nod of greeting. There was something strange here, Lane thought. The girl was almost fanatically anxious to help her father. Paul, on the contrary, seemed bitterly resentful of intrusion by strangers. Less than half an hour ago he had angrily requested Lane not to meddle further in the family’s private affairs.

Lane drove downtown to the Surety Building and got there in ten minutes, took an elevator to the fourth floor and asked for Mr Henry Hackler. “Please tell Mr Hackler,” he said to the girl, “that Dr Philip Washburne wishes to confer with him in the interests of Mrs Newton.”

“Dr Philip Washburne?”

“Yes.”

It was a chance he had to take, a chance he had taken dozens of times before with few disastrous results. At times like this, his facility in self-effacement was invaluable. Men who had met him less than twenty-four hours earlier — men Who thought themselves discerning — frequently accepted him as a total stranger upon encountering him again.

He was ushered with some ceremony into the private office of Newton’s partner and realised presently that one listened a lot and spoke little while in Hackler’s presence.

Big, red-faced Henry Hackler enjoyed the sound of his own booming voice.

“Dr Philip Washburne? I haven’t the honour of knowing you, sir, but if you are here in the interests of our senior partner I’ll do all I can to help. Absolutely all I can, and gladly. Mr Newton has been ill for some time. We’ve noticed it, I assure you. He seems upset, worried, on the verge of a breakdown, I’d say. That mustn’t happen, doctor. That simply must not happen. We need Newton and can’t do without him.”

“Mr Newton is a very taciturn man,” Lane said patiently. “I find it difficult, Mr Hackler, to get inside him and discover just what is worrying him so. Perhaps you can help me.”

Hackler made a business of puffing his cheeks and gusting breath from his generous mouth. “Well, doctor, he began losing his grip on things when Mrs Newton was killed in that ghastly accident. Yes, that started it, I’d say. Wait a minute, though. I’ll get Mr Fern. Our junior partner knew Mrs Newton better than any of us.”

“So I understand,” Lane murmured.

“Eh?”

“I understand they were... ah... very good friends.”

“Oh, that. Newspaper talk, doctor. Nothing to it, I assure you. They were friends, of course, but why not? I’ll get Fern, let you talk to him.”

Arthur Fern was younger and better looking than Hackler. Exceptionally handsome, in fact. He looked Lane over carefully, listened indifferently to Hackler’s elaborate introduction, then sat and took a cigarette from a monogrammed silver case and said with an exhalation of tobacco smoke, “I prefer not to be drawn into a discussion of this sort, doctor.”

With a murmured, “Thank you, gentlemen, thank you,” Lane went out and drove to his own home on Chestnut Hill.

It was an unpretentious home amid trees and shrubbery on a short dead-end street. Woods crowded close on two sides. Neighbours, of whom there were few, never pointed the house out to visitors and said, “There lives Martin Lane.” Driving past, they might possibly notice the slender, uninspiring figure of Martin Lane puttering about in his garden, but they knew little or nothing about the man himself and few had ever set foot over his threshold.

He closed the door behind him now and softly called, “Jonathan!”

From the kitchen at the rear a diminutive English servant came hurrying in response.

“Whisky and soda, please, Jonathan,” Lane requested. “In the living room.”

He strolled into the modestly furnished living room and slumped into his favourite thinking-place — a large club chair near the fireplace. Jonathan appeared quietly with the desired refreshment.

“I want you to call Dominic Corsi,” Lane said, “and ask him to pay me a visit this evening about eight.”

“Yes, sir.” Jonathan turned to walk to the telephone but didn’t get there. A double blast of gunfire smothered the soft whisper of his slow footsteps and sent him spinning backwards like a startled antelope. Martin Lane clapped a hand to one shoulder and groaned, pitching sideways in the big chair.

Outside, visible through an open window, a long-legged figure raced at top speed across the lawn.

The face of the servant was a study in terror as he frantically flung himself forwards and pawed at Lane’s crumpled body. “Are you injured, sir? Are you hurt?” His voice was a high, thin wail.

“I’m all right, I think, Jonathan.” The words came with an effort from the wounded man’s lips. “Get after him, will you? Find out who he is!”

“But you’re wounded, sir!”

“I’m all right, I tell you. Get moving!” Lane struggled to sit up. “If he has a car, take mine and try to follow him!”

Jonathan departed, slamming the door behind him. Martin Lane, groaning, groped erect and stared down at the chair in which he had been sitting. Two shots had been fired through the open window. One bullet had caught him in the left shoulder; the other had tunnelled the chair’s upholstery, missing its human target by the breadth of a hair.

“Out to get me,” Lane muttered. “Second attempt, that was. Next time I might not be so lucky.”

The wound was more painful than serious. Before a full-length mirror in the bedroom he stripped off his bloodstained shirt and undershirt and carefully doctored the gash, using instruments to remove the bullet.

When Jonathan returned an hour later, Martin Lane was again sitting complacently in the big living-room chair.

“The gentleman drove to a large house on the other side of the city, sir,” Jonathan said excitedly. “I noted the address as one-thirteen Eastern Avenue.”

Lane nodded. One-thirteen Eastern Avenue was the address of Mr Loring Everett Newton. “You got a good look at him, Jonathan?”

“Yes indeed, sir.”

“Well?”

Omitting nothing, the competent Jonathan described the man he had trailed.

“Newton himself,” Lane muttered. “I thought as much. Get Miss Ruth Newton on the phone, will you?”

The servant did so. Lane took the instrument, spoke for some time in a low, unruffled voice to the daughter of the man who had attempted to murder him, but did not mention the attempted slaying.

“Eleven o’clock tonight, then,” he said finally. “You’re sure you can make it? That will give us an hour — ample time, I’m sure — to finish our little programme before the other show begins.”

He put the phone down, turned. “You were about to call Dominic Corsi, Jonathan,” he said gently, “when we were interrupted.”

At twenty minutes past ten that night Martin Lane let himself into the insurance company offices on the fourth floor of the Surety Building. With him was Mr Dominic Corsi, a tall, swarthy Italian to whom for the past half hour Lane had been carefully issuing instructions.

Lugging a suitcase, Dominic Corsi entered behind Lane and carefully closed the door which, with master-key and pick-lock, Lane had laboured to open.

At eleven o’clock to the minute, Loring Everett Newton and his daughter climbed the stairs and entered Newton’s private sanctum. They found Lane seated there at the desk.

Newton stopped short with a spine-jarring jerk and stared with eyes that swelled to amazing proportions. “Martin Lane!” he whispered hoarsely.

“And very much alive,” Lane murmured.

Apparently suspecting he had walked into some carefully prepared trap, Newton looked wildly around him.

Lane said softly, “I seldom go to the police with my personal problems, Mr Newton. You’ve nothing to fear. Unless, of course, you repeat your clumsy attempt to kill me.”

“To kill you?” Ruth Newton whispered, horrified.

“This afternoon, through an open window of my home. Just why did you attempt it, Newton?”

Newton’s face, twitching, was the colour of chalk. He knew he was trapped and evidently feared the worst. “I... I was ordered to,” he mumbled. “I had to obey.”

“Last night?”

“No, no. A letter this morning from my — from—”

“From your dead wife?”

Newton wearily nodded.

Lane stood up. “Later, I’d very much like to see that letter,” he said. “We haven’t time now before your appointment here. I want you to sit at the desk, Newton, just as you did last night. Ruth, you may sit here.” He pushed a chair against the filing cabinet behind which last night he himself had remained hidden. “And now — let’s have the room in darkness.”

Pacing forwards, he put a hand on the light-switch but turned before snapping it. Newton, rigid at the desk, was bewildered and apparently terrified. His daughter nervously watched Lane’s every movement.

“No matter what happens,” Lane said softly, “I want both of you to sit absolutely still.” He glared at the girl’s father. “If you’ve a gun on you, Newton, leave it in your pocket. I see rather well in the dark and have no intention of being shot, so don’t try it. Just sit still.”

The room was suddenly in darkness. Martin Lane paced to the far side of it, stood flat against the wall, and waited.

A soft creaking sound informed him that the door of the large cabinet was slowly swinging open. A thin, wavering glow materialised near the door and grew larger.

That weirdly undulating luminescence increased in size and assumed human form precisely as it had the night before during the ghostly resurrection of Newton’s dead wife. It became the vague outline of a woman — a gloriously beautiful woman with translucent features, body outlines wavering as if composed of mist.

Loring Newton’s quavering voice rode on wings of terror through the darkness. “Oh, my God, it’s... it’s—”

“Yes, it is Marguerite,” the woman answered softly.

Martin Lane, smiling, said triumphantly, “Well done, Dominic. Very well done indeed. Now we’ll have a light and show Mr Newton just how—”

The words died to a whisper as Lane’s eyes widened. The woman had turned slowly to face him and was staring straight at him. Something in that sluggish movement was hostile, sinister. About to step forward, Lane held his ground and stood stiff as wood.

“Why have you brought this man here, Loring?” the woman asked harshly. “I told you never to bring a companion! I warned you what would happen!”

Martin Lane waited for no more. As if shot from a sling he hurtled forward, both arms outflung, head lowered like that of a charging ram. He heard Loring Newton wailing an answer to the woman’s threat, heard a shrill scream of abject terror from Newton’s daughter.

Then, too late, Lane saw the outline of a gun in one of those spectral, luminous hands!

He tried to hurl himself sideways but the momentum of his charge was too great. A streak of flame spewed amid reverberations of ear-splitting thunder from the gun’s muzzle. Lane staggered, bent double with agony as the bullet gouged into him.

As he crashed to his knees, the gun-barrel descended with skull-splintering force to the back of his head. A spectral hand stabbed down towards him, fastened in his hair, and dragged him towards the cabinet.

Loring and Ruth Newton, both paralysed with terror, made no move to come to his assistance and the woman from hell, facing them, was saying in a husky voice pregnant with hate, “Before many hours have passed you will pay for this, Loring Newton. You will learn what it means to disobey the commands of those who return from the farther world!”

Then Martin Lane lost consciousness.

III Corpse Twin

He came to — slowly, with a pounding torment in his head and a burning pain in his thigh where the bullet had seared tender flesh. The darkness was black as soot because the tight, agonising weight around his eyes was a blindfold. A gag filled his mouth. His wrists, crossed behind him, were caught in heavy shackles.

Below him a woman’s voice was faintly audible.

Lane listened dully, realising he must be in a room above Loring Newton’s private office. Intuition told him he had been unconscious for a long time; no man could recover immediately from so vicious an assault. The voice of the spectral woman in the room below him spoke words that were grimly significant.

“...at once, Loring, and be sure you are not followed when you come here. You will find Martin Lane in your office, handcuffed to the chair behind your own desk, and this time you must not blunder in performing the task assigned to you. Unless Lane dies within the hour, your son and daughter will be told the truth about my death. Do you quite understand what I mean?”

The woman was evidently using the telephone on Newton’s own desk. Had time enough elapsed, then, for Newton to return to his own home? Probably it had. After Martin Lane’s inexplicable disappearance from the office, Newton and his daughter had undoubtedly fled in terror. Now the man was being told to return here.

“If you disobey me or fail again in carrying out my orders,” Lane heard the woman’s voice softly threaten, “you know what the penalty will be. That is all, Loring. I shall be here waiting.”

The phone clicked into its cradle and Lane heard soft scraping sounds as of someone slowly ascending a short flight of stairs. He feigned unconsciousness again. In a moment strong hands seized his legs and shoulders and raised him from the floor.

The woman’s voice said softly, “You have been asleep a long while, Martin Lane. Death will be easier if you remain that way.”

Lane felt himself being lowered carefully through space into upstretched hands that were waiting to receive him. Again he was carried forward, this time but a short distance before he was dumped onto a chair. The chair, he guessed, was the one behind Loring Newton’s massive desk.

Strong hands held him while others, strangely cold and damp, removed the bracelets from his wrists. His arms were jerked then through the slats of the chair and his wrists secured again with the same steel cuffs.

Then he was left alone, knowing that in a very short while, perhaps less than an hour, Loring Newton would come to murder him.

With grim determination he went to work.

The blindfold received his attention first. Judging from the feel of it, it consisted of a long strip of bandage wound tightly around his head. It could be moved, then, by clever and persistent manipulation of the facial muscles.

He laboured mightily for ten minutes. At the end of that time the bandage was high enough for him to see through a tiny slit beneath it. His head ached fiendishly from the torment of his efforts, and his ridged forehead was sleek with sweat.

The room was dark. He was safe then in continuing his attempts to free himself. But his hands, manacled behind the slats of the chair, were growing numb from lack of circulation.

Every muscle in Martin Lane’s lean body suffered agony as he coiled his legs around one side of the chair and brought one foot within reach of his hands. The pain of it sickened him, and the task required all of fifteen minutes when minutes were terribly precious.

Working slowly, with perspiration dripping like water from his convulsed face, he removed the lace from one shoe. Handcuffs — those of regulation pattern, at least — could sometimes be opened with a strong shoelace if one knew how. The primary requisite was to use both hands with equal dexterity, and Martin Lane was master of his own lean body.

Laboriously he looped the shoestring, forced it into the lock, and coiled it around the end of the screw. A dozen times then he exerted sudden pressure, yanking the string with all his strength while both arms maintained a cramped, nerve-numbing position that produced agony all but unendurable.

When the bolt finally yielded, he had to steel himself against a return of unconsciousness. The ordeal was finished, though. He was free.

Then before he could capitalise on that hard-earned freedom a door lock clicked in the darkness. With horrible abruptness he was aware of the doom-march of advancing footsteps!

Lane sat rigid, wrists still resting in the open shackles behind him. With head tilted back he stared through the thin slit beneath the blindfold. The slow march of footsteps began again as the unseen intruder paced sluggishly towards him.

A light-switch clicked. The sudden glare stabbed Lane’s eyes and momentarily blinded him. When the blindness passed, he saw what had happened. Loring Everett Newton had returned in obedience to the murder-command issued by the veiled woman from the grave!

Standing there against the opposite wall, Newton peered at his intended victim. Terror had brought him here. Terror was apparent in his bulging eyes, in the convulsive twitching of his whole big body. His right hand, holding a small automatic pistol, trembled violently at his side.

Martin Lane sat motionless, feigning unconsciousness.

Newton slowly advanced towards him, never once ceasing to stare. Halfway to the desk he stopped, and a low, liquid sob drained what little determination was left in his warped soul. He looked fearfully at the gun in his trembling fist, raised it, lowered it again, and moaned, “I can’t do it. Oh, God, Marguerite, I can’t do it! It would be cold-blooded murder...”

Martin Lane did not move a muscle.

It would be over in a moment, Lane was certain. The gun in Newton’s fist would wobble into firing position and that trembling trigger-finger would tighten. The man would do it because he was too utterly terrified to disobey the hell-woman’s command. He had already committed murder once — perhaps in good cause — and now his mind was twisted and torn by dealings with the dead. He was on the verge of insanity.

He would come closer to the desk and then take aim. And then Martin Lane would lunge sideways in the chair, leap erect and grapple with him before the gun could again blast out its murderous chant.

But Newton was retreating. Still staring with horribly wide eyes, still mumbling to himself, he paced slowly backwards towards the door. Lane watched every move and saw the man’s left hand reach to the light-switch, saw the right hand, holding the gun, come slowly up for action.

Lacking courage to do the job in a lighted room, Newton was going to plunge the office into darkness and then squeeze the trigger!

With palsied fingers Newton pressed the switch.

Martin Lane went into action.

Shielded by darkness, Lane slid both arms through the slats of his chair, lunged forward, and began crawling. When the gun roared its death chant he was a full ten feet from the desk and slowly straightening to his feet.

The echoes of the blast crashed and jangled around him, choking the office with thunderous reverberations. No need now to creep soundlessly! No need for caution! Loring Newton was lurching forward, sobbing like a frightened child.

Lane leaped with catlike quickness, extended both arms, and slapped a two-foot length of bandage across Newton’s mouth. The bandage had been a blindfold. Now it provided an effective gag and kept the man from screaming.

With one hand Lane held the twisted ends. With the other he wrenched the gun from Newton’s fist, then pushed an upthrust knee into the man’s back and jerked him to the floor. The whole thing was done so swiftly the echoes of the gun-blast were still alive in the room when Lane hurled himself down upon his struggling victim.

A single well-placed blow stifled the terrified man’s attempt to put up a fight. Gun in hand, Lane dragged him across the floor and thrust him behind the filing cabinet. When Martin Lane straightened, the office was once again a sinister abode of silence and darkness.

Swiftly, soundlessly, Lane strode to the cabinet on the opposite side of the room.

He knew what was coming and set himself to wait for it. Only one shot had been fired. To the veiled woman that shot could mean only one thing — that Loring Everett Newton had obeyed her instructions.

Footsteps were audible in the depths of the cabinet. In there someone was cautiously descending a flight of stairs or a ladder. Hidden hands pushed the door open. A crouching shadow-shape stepped into the room.

The gun in Martin Lane’s fist crashed solidly down on the intruder’s stooped head, and without a sound the shape crumpled to the floor at Lane’s feet. In a half crouch Lane pushed the door shut and scratched a match.

The face that gleamed yellow in the flickering light from his cupped hand was the hard face of Andrews, Loring Newton’s chauffeur.

Martin Lane’s lips curled in a thin smile of triumph. He waited a moment, then quietly drew the cabinet door open again. With Newton’s automatic still gripped in his right hand, he groped with his left and felt the shafts of a ladder. Light spilled down through an open trap in the ceiling.

As he slowly ascended, Lane heard voices in the room above.

He gripped the gun harder. A man and woman were doing the talking, and he thought he knew who the man was. Evidently the pair had not expected Andrews to complete his mission for quite some time and were patiently awaiting the chauffeur’s reappearance.

Lane took the last two rungs of the ladder at top speed and telescoped erect on the floor above. A man and a woman whirled to face him.

The woman, young and attractive, was a stranger. The man was Mr Henry Hackler of Newton, Hackler and Fern.

Lane stepped forward, thinking that in his wrinkled blue suit he probably looked like a helpless, middle-aged clerk holding a gun he did not know how to use. It was not to be so easy, though. While anticipating trouble, he was startled by the suddenness of its coming. Obviously he had underestimated Mr Henry Hackler’s potential.

Without a word of warning, Hackler leaped!

The man showed his true character in that leap, or at least demonstrated contempt for his slender, unsmiling adversary. Had his fear of Martin Lane been greater — had he known the dynamite that lay dormant beneath that apparently unimpressive exterior — he might have made for the door and chanced a bullet. With the room but dimly lighted, his chance of escape might even have been a good one.

Instead, he chose to reach for his attractive female companion. His big hands gripped her shoulders and swung her around. She made a good shield.

With a sneer on his lips then, Henry Hackler backed slowly to the door, dragging the girl with him. And when Martin Lane jerked forward to halt him, the big man abruptly changed grips.

His thick right arm coiled around the girl’s throat. His left hand leaped to a pocket of his coat. Lane, halfway across the room, faced failure unless he chose the alternative of shooting through a squirming, terrified target.

“Stop right where you are!” Hackler snarled.

Lane obeyed, even when the gun came out of Hackler’s pocket to menace him. Retreat was impossible, and the chances were about even that Hackler would squeeze the trigger. Even so, with a squirming woman in his grasp Hackler could easily miss.

Twice before, the insurance man had made arrangements to have Lane put out of the way. Of that Lane was certain. Now, though, he evidently felt that Martin Lane was not worth shooting at. Sneering, he said with extreme self-confidence, “You’re quite the meddler, aren’t you? Quite the famous meddler! I ought to kill you, but you’re not worth the effort. I’ll let Andrews do it for me.” Then, savagely: “Walk backwards to the opening in the floor!”

Lane took a slow step backwards, his gaze fixed on the man’s face. His own gun was still gripped in his fist. So far, Hackler had overlooked that. Given time enough, the man would surely thrust some part of his beefy body out from behind his human shield. Then—

But Hackler’s next words annihilated that hope. “Drop the gun!” he snarled.

With no alternative, Lane let his weapon fall to the floor.

“Now do as I told you! Walk backwards to the trap!”

Lane took two more backward steps. Then something unforeseen interrupted Hackler’s grim programme. Behind him the door of a closet clattered open and, like an uncaged wild man, Mr Dominic Corsi stormed from the closet’s depths!

IV The Silence of the Grave

Corsi had been confined for some time in his dark little prison and now was livid with anger. He emerged with his arms flailing the air, his face crimson, his mouth spewing a lurid blast of Sicilian vituperation.

He looked extremely formidable — much more so, of course, than did Lane. Henry Hackler, startled, swung to confront him. “Get back!” Hackler yelled.

Dominic Corsi was far too angry to think of obeying any such command. Cursing, waving his arms, he advanced. The gun did not scare him until he was almost on top of it and Hackler had screamed again, “Get back!”

Unobserved, Martin, Lane stepped forward. In the presence of such an outraged Vesuvius he seemed even less obtrusive, more harmless, than before. A sudden panther-like leap closed the gap between him and Hackler.

Hackler’s right hand, brandishing the gun, was suddenly caught in a grip of steel fingers.

Martin Lane whirled with his knees bent and, with an enormous heave of shoulders more muscular than they seemed, jerked the amazed Hackler off his feet.

Like a flung side of beef the big man’s body hurtled through space. The wall stopped him with a bone-splintering crunch that made Lane wince. Hackler thudded to the floor and lay still.

The girl stood numb with terror as Lane scooped up Hackler’s gun. Turning, Lane took her by one arm and curtly ordered her towards the trap door, while Dominic Corsi stood with mouth agape, torrential outburst of oaths silenced by amazement.

Then abruptly Lane stopped, and the smile of triumph that had begun to form on his lips was suddenly gone again. A man’s head had lurched into view above the trap’s opening, and the snarling face into which Lane stared was one he had forgotten. It belonged to Andrews, the chauffeur.

The gun in Andrews’s big fist was aimed squarely at Lane’s chest and, behind Lane, Corsi shrieked a warning.

One savage thrust of Martin Lane’s arm sent the girl stumbling out of danger. He himself spun sideways as the weapon belched thunder.

Twice within the past few hours the gods of luck had deflected bullets from the vital parts of Lane’s anatomy. This time the potential death that sprayed towards him came in a triple dose as the gun barked three times.

Reeling in a wild sidewise leap, Lane went unhit while his own gun roared its staccato challenge.

Andrews screamed. With a shoulder shattered by Lane’s bullet he staggered on the ladder, clawed for an instant at the edge of the floor and then crashed down into the cabinet. Martin Lane descended after him.

The man was groaning on the cabinet floor when Lane reached him. Roughly Lane jerked him erect, dragged him to the chair behind Newton’s desk, and propped him there.

When Lane reached the top of the ladder a moment later, Dominic Corsi was bending over the sprawled body of Henry Hackler.

“He is shot,” the Italian said.

Lane stared. Two of the three bullets fired by Loring Newton’s chauffeur and intended for Martin Lane had found a final resting place in Hackler’s big body. Either would have been fatal.

“I should call the police?” Corsi asked.

“No.” Lane frowned. “I think not.”

Downstairs in Newton’s private office Lane pushed the girl into a chair and shook Loring Everett Newton out of a terror-induced stupor. “Now listen,” he said softly, “and get this straight, Newton. It may mean a lot to you.”

Newton listened, staring.

“In the beginning,” Lane declared, “Henry Hackler somehow found out the truth about your wife’s death. Have you any idea how he did that?”

Newton was slow in answering. “I... can only guess,” he said finally. “He may have been driving along the road that night, or walking along it, when—” He shuddered. “You see, he owned a cottage on the lake. It is just possible he may have witnessed the... the—” He bogged down again, staring hopelessly at Lane. “You see, my wife went there with Arthur Fern that night, to Fern’s camp.”

“I’m convinced,” Lane said, scowling, “that Fern had nothing to do with what happened after your wife’s death. Hackler played his game alone. He wanted your money and control of the company, and reasoned correctly that you’d be nervous and high-strung enough to be an easy victim for anything that seemed the least bit supernormal. He began by planting Andrews in your home as your chauffeur. Recall how he did that, do you?”

“He... he said Andrews was a deserving fellow out of work.”

“Ha! I can’t swear I’m right, but I believe Andrews is a former professional medium who worked under the name of Swami Sandrana.” Lane turned to the girl. “Is that right?”

She nodded.

“Hackler hired Andrews to put on a show for you,” Lane declared, “and the young lady here was brought into it by Andrews to impersonate your wife. Hackler probably intended to carry it just so far and then wind it up by sending you to jail, Newton, charged with the murder of your wife and perhaps of me as well. He’d have the company under his control then, and your ghost-story alibi wouldn’t have convinced a jury of morons. You were an easy victim because you were scared half to death even before he began working on you. Are you beginning to understand?”

Loring Newton wagged his head up and down slowly but then gazed at the girl and mumbled, “I... don’t know what you mean about this girl and my wife. Surely—”

“I’ll show you. Or, rather, Corsi will. Corsi, you see, is a member of the Society of Magicians.”

Dominic Corsi, nodding, went quickly to the room upstairs and returned with a cardboard box which he dumped on the floor.

“This,” said Lane quietly, “is what might be called a property box. I brought equipment of my own tonight when I invaded that upstairs office, but found this stuff already there. With Corsi’s help I intended to duplicate the psychic phenomena you’ve been witnessing night after night in this room. Something—” he gazed ruefully at the Italian “—went wrong with my plans.”

“Something went very wrong indeed!” Corsi corroborated vehemently. “I waited up there for the lights to be turned out in this room. This man Andrews crept up behind me and slugged me, then he and Hackler threw me most ignominiously into a closet while this girl took my place for the performance! They tied me with ropes, but ropes are poor things with which to ensnare a magician, no? What I wish to know, Mr Lane, is why you did not inform me what to expect. Nothing did I know except my instructions. Nothing was I prepared for. Never was I—”

Lane put a stopper on the flow of words by saying softly, “I think we know the rest of it, Dominic.” Then, turning to Newton, he said, “The equipment in this box is really rudimentary. It consists of a face-mask and rubber gloves sprayed with a dilution of Balmain’s Luminous Paint, and a robe of finest French bridal veiling, thin as gauze, which has been dyed with the same preparation. After exposure to bright light, this stuff will glow with a soft, weird luminosity in the dark.

“Undoubtedly you investigated that cabinet in daylight, Newton, and found it empty. You explored the floor and walls but neglected to pay much attention to the ceiling, which was less accessible. Through the trap-door in the ceiling Andrews was able to lower a padded ladder by which the young lady could descend into your office.

“She came in darkness. She herself was invisible until after clever manipulation of the luminous gauze fabric she finally draped the veil over herself and appeared in human form.

“So you see, Newton, it was really quite simple. Professional mediums have used that stunt, or variations of it, for years.”

Newton nodded slowly. He was sitting on a chair near the door, and the expression of utter despair on his face indicated the nature of the thoughts crawling in his dazed brain. He was a murderer. He faced the ultimate penalty. Martin Lane, staring at him, felt sorry for him but felt sorrier for the man’s son and daughter, who would bear the brunt of it.

“Well,” Lane said finally, “it’s time to go, Newton. Time to—”

He didn’t finish. Andrews, the chauffeur, silent for a long while behind the desk, chose that moment to lurch madly to his feet. He, too, would have a penalty to pay when his fate was weighed on the scales of justice. Evidently he feared it.

With one hand he scooped up the gun that Martin Lane had placed on the desk. It was not Lane’s weapon; it had belonged to Henry Hackler. Lane’s own gun, seized long ago from Newton and retrieved from the floor in the room upstairs where he had dropped it at Hackler’s command, lay now in Martin Lane’s pocket. It came out with alacrity.

But Loring Everett Newton was erect, blocking Andrews’s escape.

The gun in Andrews’s fist whipped high as the fleeing man hurled himself at the door. Newton had no chance.

The girl and Dominic Corsi stumbled out of the way, both screaming. Martin Lane’s trigger finger, ready for action, curled a fraction of a second too late. Not intentionally too late, not deliberately, but at the same time not of necessity. It could perhaps have curled in time. It didn’t.

In that split second Martin Lane’s agile mind had flashed to the only merciful solution of the entire problem. Instinct held his hand.

The gun in Andrews’s fist roared, sending a bullet into Loring Everett Newton’s heart. Then, almost but not quite at the same instant, the gun in Martin Lane’s hand spewed a bullet, and Andrews, leaping wildly for the door, twisted in mid-air, cried out in agony, and fell across the sprawled body of his victim.

Martin Lane strode forward, made a careful examination of the two lifeless bodies, then turned to the girl.

“I’m going to give you an even break,” he said grimly, “even though I personally owe you something for pushing me into an elevator shaft. Undoubtedly you’ve heard a lot, but just as surely you know nothing. You could talk until doomsday and get no one to listen to you. However—” he gazed coldly into the girl’s terrified eyes “—just remember that the charge of extortion is a serious one, and too much talk will bring it crashing down on your head. You’re free to go now. I’ll personally escort you to the nearest railroad station.”

He turned to Corsi and held out his hand. “Thanks, Dominic, for what you’ve done.” Then, gazing at the sprawled body of Loring Everett Newton, he said softly, enigmatically, “For what I’ve done, Newton has a very lovely daughter who will in the end, I’m sure, be much happier. She need never know now that her father was anything less than she believed him to be.”