by Harold Ward
Drip!... Drip!... Drip!
The water was running from his sodden clothes in a tiny stream. It reminded him of blood dripping. He shuddered in spite of himself. The movement caused the wire to close about his windpipe spasmodically, cutting off his breath almost completely. Death laughed hoarsely at his struggles.
“I must not let you die now; it would be too easy,” he said.
“No, he moos’ not die yet,” the Egyptian echoed excitedly. “We moos’ have heem for the torture.”
Death adjusted the fine wire so that Holm breathed a trifle easier.
“Leave me alone, you brute! I—”
It was a woman’s voice screaming somewhere above them. The words were cut off as if from a blow. A man growled something unintelligible. Her screams were drowned in a babble of maniacal shrieks and gibberings as the other patients joined in the cacophonous discord. Bars were rattled...
Then, as if at a command, there was silence again.
“I love thees place,” Charmion said, half to herself. “Eet ees so excitement.”
Death rubbed his bony fingers together gleefully. He removed his surgical garments, tossed them onto the instrument table and pressed a button in the wall.
The door on the opposite side of the room opened and several brutal-faced, black-jowled men entered. They glanced from one to the other of the bound prisoners questioningly.
“Somebody gettin’ tough, boss?” one of them, who appeared to be the leader, inquired.
Death shook his head and jerked his finger in the direction of Holm.
“Bind him and bring him along to the torture chamber,” he snapped. “He is another one—like the last—who came here uninvited. But he is welcome, nevertheless. Do not loosen the wire about his neck until you have his hands securely fastened. He is dangerous, vicious. The most dangerous man in the world to me.”
The low-browed leader of the guards drew a blackjack from his pocket and hefted it in the palm of his hand.
“I have a persuader here which usually quiets ’em,” he leered at Holm.
The other men had stepped forward. In an instant Holm’s hands were securely tied. Not until then was the horrible pressure released from his windpipe so he was able to take a full breath again.
With a man on either side, he was escorted through the door and down a long ramp. Death, meanwhile, jerked his finger in the direction of the others.
“Bring them,” he snapped.
The old man took the lead. It was like the march to the execution chamber in some great prison, so ominous was the silence as they paraded slowly down the steep ramp into what was apparently a huge sub-cellar. The corridor reeked with chemical odors. Occasionally the old man paused to snap on lights as they proceeded through a dimly-lit hall.
Behind the scientist was Holm, a guard holding each arm, the huge leader with the blackjack held in readiness a pace behind. In the rear came the operating tables, on which were Nina and Ricks, wheeled by attendants.
On either side of them as they progressed Holm caught a glimpse of barred doors. Now as they progressed the silence was broken. Through the cage doors came the savage chatter of voices—weird, maniacal whisperings. Behind the iron gratings horrible shapes looked out at them. Some were naked, their hair hanging down about their filthy bodies in disarray. Others were but half clothed.
They shrank back fearfully as the little procession passed them. All but one. He was a huge, broad-shouldered giant, his swarthy body covered with hair like of a gorilla, the muscles showing through the flesh in great knots. He was pacing ceaselessly back and forth like a caged animal. As they reached his cage, he leaped forward, his long arm darting out like a snake in an effort to seize one of the guards.
The leader struck at him through the bars with his blackjack. The weapon crashed against his head with a dull thud.
“Get back, damn you!” the chief guard snarled.
The maniac in the cage shook his cage until it rattled.
“Some day I’m going to get you!” he howled. “And when I do, I’ll kill you!... kill you!... kill you!...”
He was still chanting his horrible refrain when they rounded the corner and were out of sight.
THEY entered a small room, brilliantly lighted by a small inverted lamp in the ceiling. The walls were of steel plates, as was the ceiling. The floor was of concrete. Death snapped commands. The guards breathed deeply as they lifted their burdens from the operating tables.
Holm was fastened by shackles to a ring in one of the walls. Across from him Ricks was being secured to a similar ring. In the center was a third ring to which Nina was fastened. Only her hands were unbound at Death’s command.
This completed, Death dismissed his hirelings. Then, while Charmion, a cigarette between her full red lips, looked on, her beautiful face wreathed in smiles at the suffering she was about to witness, the old scientist hurriedly made his preparations. They were simple. Merely the adjustment of two lines of small, rubber hose. Then he placed what looked like a double-action bicycle pump in front of Nina.
“You are right,” he said in answer to Holm’s unspoken question. “Listen.”
From a great distance they heard the low hum of a distant motor.
“This is the location of my underground power plant,” he went on. “I established one of my dupes, a man named Doctor Daniels, here a number of years ago. And, at the same time, I commenced the work of gradually enlarging these underground crypts—caverns—call them what you will.
“Inquirers believed that they were to be the cells where the most savage of the patients were to be confined. Those with a homicidal mania. When I was ready to assume charge, Doctor Daniels was dismissed—you can probably guess how.
“From here I am filling the earth with electric currents which are causing the decomposition of the great steel beams and girders in the government buildings. But you, my pig-headed young friend, will not be here to witness their destruction. You have heard of carbon monoxide? Yes? Then attend me closely.”
He pointed to a small opening in the floor a yard away from Holm’s feet.
“In an adjacent room I have a small machine for the manufacture of carbon monoxide,” he went on. “I have been experimenting with it of late on some of my patients. It is one of the simplest, yet least known, of all poison gases.
“Through that tiny opening,” he went on, “carbon monoxide will be allowed to filter into this room. Carbon monoxide is a blood poison. When inhaled it displaces loosely bound oxygen in the oxyhaemoglobin of blood and then combines with reduced haemoglobin forming carboxyhaemoglobin.”
The old man pointed to the double pump.
“There is both an intake and an outlet in that pump,” he said. “In plain terms, it sucks a certain amount of air from this room and replaces it with clean, pure air from out of doors. When I close the door, this little cell is practically air tight.
“In a moment my charming Egyptian friend and I will leave. We will close the steel door behind us. It is bound with rubber to make it tighter. I will then turn on the spigot which empties the carbon monoxide into this room.
“The pump has the same capacity as the hose. I have tested them frequently, so I know whereof I speak. As long as Nina, traitoress that she is, continues pumping, just that long will the air be kept free from the deadly poison. The moment she stops, even for a second, it will commence to creep in.”
He leaned forward and chuckled diabolically.
“Eventually she will become weary,” he said. “Her muscles will become cramped and tired. She will be forced to cease her efforts occasionally in order to catch her breath. Each time she does so, she knows that all of you are that much closer to death.
“Soon—I trust that she is feeling in excellent trim so that the agony may be prolonged as much as possible—you will begin to feel the poison creeping over you. First will come a slight headache. It will increase in volume as the air becomes more impregnated with the deadly gas. Then will come a throbbin
g of the temples, a sickness of the stomach, nausea...
“As these symptoms come over her, she will be forced to slow down on her pumping. Yet, as she slows down, she will know that death is creeping that much closer, ready to seize her in his cold, icy hands. I am hoping that toward the last the strain will be too much on your brains and that you will give way to it and become, for the nonce, like these gibbering things outside.
“It will be up to her—to Nina—how long you live,” he went on. “She saw fit to give me up, and all that I stand for, for you and what you stand for. She can prolong her own life and yours, or end it within ten minutes.”
“You inhuman monster!” Holm shouted.
Death pointed to his twisted left arm, then to several contusions yet unhealed on his face.
“Do you think that Death forgives this easily?” he snarled.
HE leaned forward, his eyes glaring malevolently.
“Listen, fool!” he shrieked. “Up to now my apparatus for producing the electrolysis has been idling. I was not ready for the end. But now, with you in my power, the time has come. This minute I speed up the great machines in my underground cellar. They will impregnate the earth for miles around with electricity. Great buildings will totter—fall!
“And I—I will rule the world. And you, sealed in this air-tight room, will be bloated corpses. Nina will pump—pump until she is exhausted. The deadly gas will gain on her little by little. You will feel it creeping over you, feel your head throb from its effects. For I, Death, can punish even as I can reward.”
He stepped to the door, the Egyptian at his heels.
“There is a tiny glass peep-hole in the steel door,” he chuckled. “Perhaps Charmion and I will look in on you occasionally. My charming little companion has Sadistic tendencies, I am prone to believe. She loves suffering. I, on the other hand, care not for pain unless it is a means to an end.
“But we will not debate the matter now. I have other work to do. I must speed up my generators so that the government buildings will fall as per schedule. It will be a pleasure seeing Nina when she has reached the point of exhaustion, eh, Charmion?”
“Eet weel be good,” the Egyptian smiled back at him.
The door closed behind them.
An instant later an almost indistinguishable hiss told them that he had turned on the deadly gas.
Chapter XVIII
“Mine to Kill!”
AS the door swung shut before the sinister scientist, locking them in the death cell, Jimmy Holm’s spirits dropped to their lowest ebb.
“What an accursed fool I was to plunge into this affair without an army at my back!” he exclaimed. “It is when he is least expected to strike that Death darts forth his fangs. I had intended only to reconnoitre a bit; if I saw anything suspicious, to go back for help. Instead, the cellar window was so invitingly open that I took a step farther than I expected—”
“Right,” said the matter-of-fact Ricks. “We were both fools. We are constantly on the lookout for this man to do something colossal. And he, wise as a serpent, catches us with some little trick like the one he pulled on you or on me. I received a hastily written note from Nina telling me that she was in deadly peril and asking me to come at once. Without waiting to investigate, I hastened to her apartment—”
“Where you found me bound and tied,” Nina interrupted bitterly. “Death caught me when the housekeeper had gone to the store for a few moments. The buzzer rang and I imagined that she had forgotten her key. Like a fool, I released the catch and found myself facing a gun. You know the rest.”
“Finding the door to Nina’s apartment unlocked, I charged in without making a preliminary investigation,” Ricks said, taking up the thread of the story. “As I stepped inside the door something crashed against my head with force enough to stun an ox. I was half way here by the time I recovered consciousness.”
“It was brutal, the way they struck him down,” Nina said angrily, her black eyes snapping. “They bound the housekeeper when she returned and left her there, trussed up like a fowl. I hope some one discovers her before she strangles to death or dies of starvation.”
Holm nodded sagely.
“For the nonce Death seems to have forsaken the supermundane and the scientific for the bludgeon and gun,” he said thoughtfully.
He turned his head to the brave girl who, weak and exhausted though she was, was working the pump with regular strokes, her slender shoulders moving up and down in perfect rhythm.
While he talked he had been trying to free himself from his shackles. Every trick in his repertoire was brought into service, but to no avail. Nor could Ricks do any better. The guards who had fastened their shackles knew their business. Not for naught had they handled hundreds of cunning madmen—creatures whose brains were twisted and warped and whose only thoughts were of a single trick—to kill. The lives of the guards depended upon their ability to tie knots and to fasten chains that ordinary methods would not break.
Both Holm and Ricks tried to reach Nina—to assist her at the pump. But their bonds were too short to allow them to reach her, nor could she push the pump to where they could get at it. She was forced to keep it working without assistance.
“No use, sweetheart,” Holm said finally, giving up, and leaning back against the steel wall, a look of despair in his eyes. For the first time in his long career as a manhunter he admitted himself defeated.
“This is the end,” he added. “We, at least, have the satisfaction of dying together—the three of us who have gone through so much in company.”
Nina Fererra glanced up. The steady pumping was telling on her, yet there was no change in the steady, rhythmic strokes that she took; they were neither too fast nor too slow, but steady as the ticking of a clock. The perspiration was running down over her face and her naked shoulders in little rivulets.
“We haven’t been defeated yet, Jimmy,” she said quietly, although speech was an effort. “There is but one mind—and that is God’s mind. Our faith in God will save us.”
As if in answer to her assertion, there was a terrific crash in the corridor outside. In spite of the thickness of the steel door, they could hear the wild, maniacal shriek of triumph that rang through the great building. Then the clatter of running feet! A ferocious snarl, more like that of an animal than a human! Iron bars were rattling on every hand. There was another crash and a wild cry of exultation.
“Get back, damn you!” a man’s voice shouted. It was intermingled with the hoarse shouts of other men and the wild, terror-filled shrieks of women.
A quick call for help. The sound of a vicious blow. Then a horrible, gurgling sound...
“Help me. Save me! Take him off, you fellows! The devil, can’t you see—”
The shout was cut off in the middle as if by a throttling hand.
EVERYTHING was confusion now—the babble of voices, shrieks, cries, calls for help, the sound of running feet, the tearing of iron through wood, the crash of metal against metal. A revolver spoke sharply. Then another. A man shrieked for help.
“Oh, my God!...”
More feet came pattering down the corridor. In the distance a door slammed. Then came a wild, ungodly pæan of victory sung by half a hundred maniacal throats.
An axe crashed against the steel door of their cell. Nina Fererra shrieked. Holm’s face blanched.
“The maniacs have broken out. They are beyond control,” he said. “From the sound of things, they are running amuck through the place.”
Again and again the axe battered at the door. It shook on its hinges. Yet it held.
“It would look as if we would not be forced to wait for Death’s lethal gas to take us,” Holm said, trying to make his voice appear whimsical. Yet there was a tremor in it that he could not hide.
Nina barely glanced up at him. Her lips were moving as if in prayer.
“There is but one God—one mind,” she was repeating again and again. “God always has and always will meet... every human... need.�
�
Yet the slow rise and fall of her shoulders as she worked the pump never ceased. Through all of the confusion and tumult she was the calmest of the three.
The great steel door swung in on its hinges, its lock smashed.
A man crashed into the room. It was the giant Holm had seen peering through the bars, who had struck at the guard and, in return, been hit with the blackjack. His long, matted hair was hanging down over his bloodstained face. He was stripped to the waist, his body a mass of cuts and bruises from which blood was streaming. His swollen, bloodshot eyes were blazing with the lust to kill.
His massive body was crouched like that of a gorilla.
In one hand was the great axe dripping with blood. The other arm was extended, the stubby fingers working convulsively as if seeking to wrap themselves about some rounded throat to choke, to rend and tear a body.
Behind him were the others. The corridor was filled with them. They were wild, ferocious maniacs, all of them—men and women through whose brains the maggots of madness had been eating until they were rotten to the core. Their hair was long and matted, their bodies covered with vermin and filth. Homicidal cases, all of them, their eyes shone with a wild, bestial glare as they crowded in upon the man with the axe.
“Kill! Kill! Mine! Mine to kill!” they shrieked in cacophonous discord.
The giant with the axe turned on them, his eyes glaring, his lips drooling with bloody slaver.
“They are mine!” he snarled, raising the axe as if to attack those who were crowding in on him. “I saw them first. I broke down the door. I killed Huerta, the keeper! I killed the others. It was I who liberated the rest of you. And now you try to rob me of my kill!”
The others, maniacs though they were, shrank away from him.
Yet when he turned back into the cell they crowded in behind him again, licking their lips in keen anticipation.
“Kill! Kill! Kill!” they shouted in unison.
The giant started toward Nina. The great axe was upraised. The fingers of his left hand opened and closed as he stretched his arm forward, stopping to gaze at the others with eyes that blazed like the twin fires of hell.
