by Don Wilcox
“Why is the Empress calling the people in?” the bald, brown-mustached leader asked. He halted the army around the first two statues, waited.
When Danny Downs, the nimble-footed, came running back from the blocks beyond with the news.
“It’s a ceremony for two new statues,” Danny panted.
The baldish leader turned to Eudora. “Did you see two new statues when you were aboard the ship?”
“Yes. And I saw the sculptor. He was helping unload them.”
“Was it Reginald Keith?”
“I don’t know,” Eudora admitted. “It was still dark, and this man wore lots of whiskers, and he didn’t talk. But this I do know, the statues were definitely Reginald Keith’s.”
“They’ve disguised him,” said Dave. “It’s exactly the thing the Empress would do. It’s a case of needing a man too much to murder him.”
“Did anyone have a gun on him?” the baldish leader asked.
“Miss Blanchard was over him every minute,” said Eudora.
“And she’s still watching over him,” Danny added. “He’s mounting the statues there in the courtyard, and she’s after him, every step.”
The big baldish leader turned to his army and shouted, “All right, men, up with your placards.”
From among the ranks of three thousand brown-backed men rose a host of white cardboard placards:
THE EMPRESS CONDEMNED KEITH. BUT SHE HANGED A SUBSTITUTE. WHY? WHERE IS JOHN DENNISON? WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO HANG WITHOUT A TRIAL? WE WERE WORMS. NOW WE ARE MEN. WILL THE EMPRESS HANG US, TOO? OR, SHOOT US? WE DEMAND THE SCULPTOR’S RELEASE. THE SCULPTOR IS ALIVE. SET HIM FREE. DOWN WITH THE STATUES! DOWN WITH THE GOVERNMENT!
It was upon this theme of statues that the big leader now shouted his orders to twenty obedient men. They marched forward and went to work on the two statues that stood like twin Empresses. The remaining thousands grouped themselves around this center of action. Several hundred backs were exposed to the approach of a corps of women motor cops who came sirening down the boulevard.
“Down with the statues!” Eudora cried. “Chop them down. Break them down!”
“Keep going!” the big leader shouted. “Pay no attention to the police . . . Slash into it, there. Give him a boost, someone, so he can reach that arm . . . Keep your placards up. Don’t mind the bullets!”
The bullets came in a wave. The rat-tat-tat of submachine-guns cut a swath of death into the outer edge of the circle. Hardly anyone turned. Dave heard the thump of heads to the pavement. With a glance he saw ten or twelve fallen bodies. He heard the hideous cry of terror from one of the policewomen. She had shot her own husband.
The bullets stopped instantly. Hundreds in the crowd turned their eyes momentarily from the swinging axes and flying chips of clay to the strange tragic scene of a dying husband clutching his uniformed wife by the shoulders, holding her at arm’s length from him, calling to her in his ebbing voice.
“Why did you do it to me? Why? Why? . . . But no, you didn’t do it. It was the Empress. The damned Empress! She can’t stand to have us be men!”
Everyone who saw the agonied expression in that wife’s face knew the realization that struck her dumb. The curse of the factory had been undone. The dying creature who held her was her man.
The other women police broke their way through the crowd to the base of the statue. A gold-painted clay arm fell at their feet, and a stream of red liquid oozed out of the broken end.
“Stop it! Stop it!” the officers cried. “In the name of the Empress!”
That last word must have sounded like murder to one of the ax-men. He swung with such a blow that his ax knifed straight through the clay figure’s mid-section. The life-size torso, minus head and arms, came crashing down like dead stone.
Tat-tat-tat-tat. Bullets stipled the ax-man’s chest, he crumpled, slid down over the tablelike pedestal of the statue, folded up on the ground like one of the statuary workers carved of clay in the base. His ax clattered down and ripped across his arm.
Dave seized the ax, leaped to the pedestal, started to swing. Then he stopped. He heard Eudora’s outcry.
“Stop! It’s blood!”
Then he saw. The torso that had crashed was not dead stone. Within the cast of paint and clay there was bleeding flesh.
He looked to the other statue that was being demolished. Around it the angry men had frozen, mystified. The policewomen, too, were staring with amazement. The severed head, the arms, the left shoulder that had fallen were seeping with a red liquid that was blood.
“Heaven have mercy!” one of the policewomen uttered in a quaking voice. “There’s people inside these statues. Live people.”
CHAPTER XII
The Sculptor Applies the Torch
Whether the army of three thousand liberated worms would turn into a mob of murderous men was a fair question during the swift, tense moments that followed.
“March on the Empress!”
“Hang her! Shoot her! ”
“On to the palace!”
“Grab the guns! To hell with the police!”
“Find the sculptor. He’ll account for this!”’
The shouts were as wild and uncontrolled as any fighter’s in the thick of battle.
As for the leaders, all of them were crying orders, trying to whip the situation into hand.
The policewomen thought they were in authority, but the hoots that greeted any orders from them were fair warning. They gathered back into a huddle at the farther side of the street. Dave saw the desperation in their faces. If they used their guns now, it would only be to save their own hides. Their bit of shooting into the crowd might boomerang on them at any moment.
The Underground leaders shouted themselves hoarse; but it was the baldish, brown mustached factory worker who succeeded in placing the leadership where it belonged.
“Let Eudora tell you what to do. She has been in this from the start. She’s one of us. She’s the one who has worked to free us. Let her be your commander. She’ll pit her strength against the Empress.”
Eudora was helped to one of the pedestals where a statue so recently had stood. Her eyes were kindled with the fires of purpose. Her lips were almost white with anger. Yet her voice called out, strong, unquavering:
“I know what questions you’re asking. We have a right to the answers. Reform your ranks. I’ll lead you to the Empress. We’ll demand to know what she has done.”
The march held back only long enough for Eudora to appoint a few leaders for special tasks. Some of the valiant ax-men marched over to the policewomen, relieved them of their arms, and put them at work breaking into the fallen clay forms.
“Take all possible pains to identify the bodies that were in those statues,” Eudora ordered. “The police should be able to tell you approximately how long they have been dead—if indeed they were dead before we crashed into them.”
The policewomen, completely flabbergasted by this gruesome assignment, nevertheless went to work, breaking patches of clay off the severed and fallen heads.
Dave and the baldish factory leader marched alongside Eudora as her bodyguards and Danny raced about, serving as a messenger whenever needed. The three thousand men followed in perfect ranks. They wanted to press the pace to double time, in their eagerness. Eudora held them back.
“Slower . . . slower . . . slower,” she kept calling to the front ranks, and little Danny conveyed her purpose to the leaders farther back.
As they turned off the boulevard into the palace park, their slow, measured lockstep beat upon the gravel with a heavy rhythm like drums of doom.
The assembled three or four thousand people—mostly women—turned to watch the approach of this weird spectacle. They were used to seeing these men in orange slacks behave like machines—but not such a machine as this.
Thud . . . Thud . . . Thud . . . Down the aisles they marched, filling the semicircle of park seats before the improvised platform.
“Look!” Dave whispered to Eu
dora. “The Empress’ husband. Somebody’s let him down from the dome—”
“So he can tell something to his wife!” Eudora said. “There’s a swift conference going on up there on the stage.”
It was apparent only to those onlookers who were not momentarily overwhelmed by the approaching army of men. The sharper eyes that watched the Empress for her reaction in this moment were rewarded by a telling scene. Her husband, the low worm that she so despised was bringing her some news—something he had observed from his observation tower.
The Empress bent an ear to him, then she looked quickly down the boulevard, as if trying to check up on his information.
“He’s told her that we smashed a couple statues,” Dave whispered as they marched down closer. “Look, she’s in a bit of a panic.”
“Why shouldn’t she be?” Eudora raised her eyebrows with righteous anger.
“Yeah. You can ask her that one.”
The wormish husband must have given her the advance information; for a moment later, when policewomen hurried up to the stage from the boulevard, she took their news with an annoyed wave of the hand. She already knew. She was already taking action.
For a moment she turned to the crowd, now gathering with a storm of curiosity.
“Our dedication of the new statues has been momentarily interrupted,” she called through the loud speakers. “We will continue as soon as these late-comers have seated themselves.”
Her swift strategy! Pretending that these factory workers had been sent for, to attend this statue dedication. Once before, when Dave and Eudora had carried their bluff into her camp, she had turned the tables by granting them what they seemed to want, in order to regain the initiative.
Would she achieve that with these angry men? Dave almost wished their mob spirit had been encouraged. Obediently they were taking their places in the audience. Yet among them were weapons. They held tightly to their clubs, axes, guns. And no policewoman, seeing their fighting faces, advanced to challenge them. Their power was their presence.
“Stay with me,” Eudora whispered to Dave—the same words he had said to her on a previous night that they had stormed the regal fortress.
She led the way right to the platform.
Her steady eyes tightened their grip upon the Empress, who was now in something of a flurry to whisper some orders to her assistants before facing Eudora.
But under the stress of six thousand pairs of eyes, the Empress felt compelled to toss another flying apology to her audience to assure them everything was under control.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our new sculptor—” she gestured toward the slender, slightly stooped, bewhiskered man standing beside the two veiled monuments—“comes to us most highly recommended. He is perhaps the only person to be found in the United States who can duplicate the high quality of work done by the late Reginald Keith. He has come to us—”
Here the Empress stopped. The presence of Eudora, standing within five feet of her, arms folded, was too much. She glanced toward the women police at the rear of the stage. For some reason they were too nearly paralyzed to move. Perhaps it was the fact that Dave, the baldish factory worker, and four other persons who had the look of angry men, not slaves, were also standing there on the edge of the stage, their arms folded.
The Empress started again. “As I was saying, he has come to us—” Eudora’s clear voice cut in over the microphone. “Does he know what happened to Reginald Keith?”
“Your intrusion is out of order.” The Empress was white with rage, if not fear. Dave knew she knew what was coming. Yes, the awful news of that statue had reached her. “Your intrusion—”
“How do we know,” Eudora cut in again, “that this whiskered gentleman isn’t Reginald Keith?”
“That’s absurd. Keith was hanged.” Eudora turned her keen glare on the bewhiskered sculptor. “Does that disturb you in the least, sir, to know that the former sculptor was hanged? You seem very calm over the news. Maybe you doubt whether the right man got the rope:”
A low murmur passed through the audience. It was the Empress, not the sculptor, who started visibly at these words.
Then the Empress gave a swift gesture with her right hand (at the same time covering the wart on her nose with the left).
“State your business, Eudora, and be quick about it.”
“I represent the three thousand men who just walked in.”
“What do they want?”
“They don’t like your government. They don’t like any symbols of it—your uniforms, your polished domes, your cheap gold police wagons, or your statues. The more those statues look like you the less they like them. So they have organized to destroy them—”
The Empress leaped at this suggestion. “So you, want the statues destroyed. Very well, I’ll grant your request at once!”
“But wait!” Eudora cried. “We have destroyed two, and we’ve discovered—”
“I’ll have them all destroyed at once!” The Empress screamed the words, so that anything more that Eudora might have said was lost.
And with the sudden shift of strategy, Dave felt himself sinking. In a twinkling the Empress had seen a way to turn this situation to her own advantage. She motioned to the secretary, Miss Blanchard, and before Eudora could get a voice of protest into the microphone, Miss Blanchard and the bewhiskered sculptor hurried off the rear of the stage to destroy the statues.
The audience watched the official gold and black car whirl through the driveway, they saw the flaming torch that the sculptor held out of the car window. The car drove up to the first statue; the sculptor touched the torch to the gold paint.
A stream of red flame flowed up the side of the gold-coated figure. In a moment the whole statue was itself a torch, flaming red against the white forenoon sky.
Then another statue was ignited, to become a monument of fire. Another . and another—and then
Another . . .
CHAPTER XIII
The Empress Defends Herself
What had been an audience became a disorganized scattering of people, awe-struck by the spectacle of their familiar art objects going up in smoke. And yet, while many small throngs edged their way outward from the courtyard meeting place, a great number, particularly those factory workers with their half-concealed placards, remained in their seats.
It was Dave’s impulse to rout out a bunch of these men and run for fire-wagons. He had felt certain, the moment those first two statues had been revealed as containing human beings, that any number of the forty life-size gold figures might also be found to be human beings with a coat of clay and paint.
This theory assumed the highest probability, now that the Empress had suddenly decided that the statues should be destroyed.
But Dave’s proposed action was cut short by a message delivered by Danny Downs. The little fellow had been quick to race out after the sculptor and that female watchdog, Miss Blanchard. The sculptor must have had his note ready, in anticipation of such a need to communicate.
Danny came running back to the stage, and with the pretense of simply skipping across the path at the side of it, he flipped the note into Dave’s hands.
Dave glanced at it, passed it on to Eudora. It read: “Let the fires burn.—R. Keith.”
That was all. But it was enough to hold Dave to the spot, to take things as they came. Which was, in this case, the hardest thing in. the world to do. For although he couldn’t see how a dead statue, standing through months and years, could possibly hold a live body, he was tantalized, now, by the conviction that any one of these statues might. All of them might, in fact. There was something about that number forty.
Those of the audience who had held their places, only to gaze up and down the boulevard for what they could see from their present vantage point, now began to bear down with their angry glares upon the Empress again.
Men with, weapons gathered closer. Enough men crowded onto the stage that the Empress, began to feel a fence tightening around her. Som
e of the women police were caught in it too. But not her husband. He slipped away unobtrusively and returned to his domed tower overhead. From there he could look down on all the proceedings. There he felt safe.
“While your statues are burning, Sophia Regalope,” said Eudora calmly, “we may as well come to an understanding.”
The crowd grew attentive as her firm words sounded through the speakers.
“We shall no longer address you as Her Majesty,” said. Eudora. “Your reign has come to an end.”
Men cheered. Some women started to cheer. They looked at each other, embarrassed, uncertain whether they dared reveal any inner feelings. But some of them had already sought out their husbands or sweethearts among these reconstructed men, to stand proudly beside them.
“A new government is taking over,” Eudora continued. “Its’ first official act will be to try you for murder.”
“Murder!” the Empress shrieked. “Murder!—me? Why, this is outrageous. It’s a frame.”
“We’ll proceed as soon as the sculptor returns from carrying out your orders . . . Oh, yes, here we have a little news of interest to you, Sophia, and to all of you.”
The crowd, waited, quietly while Eudora unfolded the note that had been handed to her by one of the axmen.
“A strange fact came to light a few minutes ago when we thoughtlessly destroyed two statues. We found they contained human bodies. And now, according to this note, a number of policewomen and factory workers have agreed upon the identity of those two, bodies which we unwittingly slashed into pieces. They were the son of John Dennison, and that son’s bride.”
It might have been thunder rolling up from the audience. From the terror in the Empress’ face, she might have pictured those angry men walking onto the stage and seizing her. But when she spoke, it was with the same lying voice and mocking manner that seemed to say, “I should have hanged these men—but there’ll be another chance. I’ll turn this trick as I’ve turned others. I’ll play the sculptor again to my advantage—”
