“Dr. Carlin! Jeffers! Where are you?”
Shocked recognition flashed through Kent’s started brain. The clear contralto voice was that of Dorothy Lane!
“Hold it, fellah!” Jeffers snarled, closing the gap between them. Kent felt the pressure of the pistol muzzle against his back. “Keep your mouth shut!” There was savage menace in Jeffers’ whispered warning.
“Here we are, Miss Lane,” the gray-haired Carlin answered.
A slender figure loomed dimly in the fog curtain, then came running into full view. Kent’s breath caught in his throat as he recognized the familiar and beloved details of the girl’s striking beauty. Her hair had the brilliant blackness of polished jet. The exotic loveliness of her exquisitely molded face was accentuated by the terror that made of her eyes great pools of liquid darkness.
“Dr. Carlin!” Dorothy Lane’s voice broke in a muffled sob. “Did you find the one who escaped into the swamp? Was it—”
“No,” Carlin broke in sharply. “He is still safe in the pool. This one was Bartlett. We got him all right. Joe is taking him back to the house now.
They must have passed you without your seeing them in the fog.”
Overwhelming relief suffused the girl’s softly tanned face. Then her glance drifted past Carlin and she saw Kent for the first time. For a fraction of a second amazed recognition flashed in her startled eyes. Then almost instantly her expression became as utterly impersonal as though she were facing a total stranger.
“Who is that?” she asked.
“Merely a gentleman from Sharby who lost his way in the swamp,” Carlin said softly. “He is spending the night with us.”
“But he can’t!” the girl protested sharply.
“I’m afraid he must, my dear,” Carlin insisted. “You see, he has already seen Bartlett.”
“Oh!” Dorothy Lane’s lovely face hardened. “In that case, he had better be our guest, of course.”
She turned away, as though having no further interest in Kent. The party started off again through the fog. The pistol lifted from Kent’s back, but he knew that the weapon remained menacingly ready as the brutish-faced Jeffers strode stolidly along behind him.
Kent’s brain seethed in a whirl of bewildered conjecture. What was the reason for Dorothy’s strange refusal to recognize him? And in what possible way was she connected with the sinisterly mysterious activities of Carlin and his two armed thugs?
Carlin’s name was vaguely familiar to Kent, but for the moment he could not quite place it. The man’s dilated pupils and the taut intensity of his every action indicated that he was a drug addict, with his clouded brain hovering perilously near the yawning abyss of stark insanity.
Kent was under no illusions about the probable fate awaiting him at their journey’s end. He had a cold premonition that he would never be permitted to leave the place alive. He could not believe that Dorothy, no matter how deeply she might be involved in the dark secrets of the isolated swamp retreat, would ever willingly assent to his death. But Dorothy could very easily be helpless against Carlin and his armed aides.
Kent knew that he had already seen too much to ever be allowed to go free and tell his story. The mere fact that he had seen the claw-handed creature with the pointed head had apparently been sufficient reason for Dorothy to agree that he should be kept a prisoner. Carlin had not mentioned the looted graves to Dorothy. Kent wondered if she even knew of the two maimed corpses.
One thing was certain. They were heading straight for the source of the invisible emanations of crepitant fear that Kent had first sensed back in the swamp. It surged in swiftly increasing volume now with every step they took, pulsing eerily through the dusky murk in an aura of monstrous and nameless terror.
They strode silently along over ground that rose steadily until it was well above the level of the surrounding swamp. They emerged from the trees into a large grassy clearing, in the center of which yellow light glowed mistily from the windows of a sprawling one-story building. Over at one side, the throb of a gasoline motor came from a small shed, apparently the generating unit for the lights.
The main building had the grimly severe lines of a prison. The front door was massive enough to withstand the impact of a battering-ram. The small square windows were heavily barred.
There were still a dozen steps from the building when they heard muffled sounds of confusion inside. A man’s voice husked in snarls of command. Dull reports cracked like the lash of a whip. And yammering cries rose in a babbling chorus that was weirdly tinged with something utterly alien to anything human!
Carlin raced for the door. He inserted a key in the lock with nervously fumbling fingers, and swung the heavy portal open. The menacing pressure of the pistol was again solidly against Kent’s spine as they entered. They found themselves facing a nightmare scene of eldritch chaos.
CHAPTER II
House of Grisly Fear
They stood in a large central hallway. At the end of the hall an open door gave a glimpse into a white-walled room with beds arranged in regular rows like those of a hospital ward. Crowding through the open door out into the hall was a pack of weird figures whose appearance sent cold fingers of eerie dread rippling down Kent’s spine.
There were eleven men in all in the yammering pack, ranging in age from the early thirties to late middle age. Every man was maimed. Some hopped grotesquely upon one leg. One sprawled upon the floor dragging a body that was completely legless. Others had lost an arm. One bearded giant had both hands gone at the wrist.
Their heavy faces were stolidly set masks of pure fear—not the brief flashing terror of a moment, but the grim accumulation of hours and days of a dread so overwhelmingly great that the gibbering horror of its eternal presence had driven every trace of rational thought from their numbed brains. Their mouths gaped slackly open. Their eyes had the dully staring gaze of men sunk deep in stupor.
But it was not the grisly fear written upon the faces of the maimed pack, nor their mutilated bodies, tragic though they were, that congealed the blood in Kent’s veins. It was the feeling that in some nameless and hideous manner the men were different from all normal mankind!
Their only garments were loincloths. Their exposed skin was discolored and mottled, with small shiny patches that shone with a scaly luster. The ends of their maimed limbs, instead of the rounded contours of normally healed stumps, bulged in grotesquely paired lumps as though they were growing strange, new, two-digited appendages to replace the lost members. Their yammering, almost wordless babble was weirdly suggestive of the chirring outcries of the scaly crustaceans in the black pools of the swamp.
Joe stood in front of the pack, keeping them at bay with the swishing menace of a long black whip. His swarthy face glistened with sweat as he turned.
“Give me a hand, Doc!” he gasped. “When I went into the ward after I chained Bartlett up, they ganged me. They’re completely nuts! They thought you’d gone away and left ’em for good!”
Carlin strode forward, his gaunt face livid with anger. “You clumsy, blundering ape!” he snarled. “Throw that whip down! It’s only making them worse.”
Carlin’s voice swiftly softened as he faced the pack. “Steady, men,” he said reassuringly. “I wasn’t leaving you. I’ll never desert you until you’re all right again. You ought to know that. But can’t help you unless you do your part. You must have rest, absolute quiet, to keep your strength built up so that the serums can take effect. Go on back to your beds. Everything will be all right.”
Carlin’s soothing words took quick effect. The cries of the pack quieted to dazed mumbling. They turned and began retreating docilely into the room behind them.
“Jeffers,” Carlin ordered, “come and help me get them settled. Stay out here, Joe, and keep a gun on our guest till I get time to take care of him.”
The door of the ward-like room closed behind Carlin and Jeffers. Dorothy Lane’s slim shoulders sagged wearily.
“I’m tired out, Joe,” s
he said listlessly. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
She turned and opened a door on the left of the hall. Kent tried to catch her eye, but the girl kept her gaze stonily averted. In the brief moment before the door closed again Kent saw the interior of a small bedroom.
Joe slouched against the wall half a dozen feet from Kent, his dark face still sullen from Carlin’s vitriolic tongue-lashing. He held a pistol alertly leveled in his right hand.
Kent’s eyes drifted curiously around the hall. The three doors on the left were closed. So was a rear door on the right, but between it and the front of the hall another door was wide-open, giving Kent a view of a room that was a strange combination of laboratory and aquarium.
Large glass tanks were filled with murky water in which scores of giant swamp crayfish slithered and crawled. A bench along the wall was littered with retorts, chemical phials, and gleaming bits of metal that looked like surgical instruments. In one corner was a white-topped operating table. A partly open door in the rear led into another smaller room. It was in this back room that the ghoul with the pointed head and the clawed hand was apparently confined, for Kent heard the occasional clinking of chains.
There was an insidious and peculiarly repugnant odor in the air that made Kent’s nostrils crinkle. It was an odd blending of a stagnant, slimy effluvium as from the glistening chitinous bodies of swamp crustaceans, together with a strong tinge of the nauseous reek of carrion.
Kent’s gaze lingered on the aquarium tanks. His eyes suddenly hardened as the sight of the slithering crayfish roused a slumbering cell in his memory. He remembered now why the name of Carlin had sounded so elusively familiar when he had first heard it back in the swamp. Dr. Enlow Carlin, professor of biology in one of the large Eastern universities, had been a particularly lurid sensation in the newspapers of a year ago.
Carlin had claimed that he had definitely located the hidden gland producing the hormones that gave crayfish and other crustaceans their unique power of growing new limbs to replace those lost in battle or accident. Furthermore, Carlin claimed he had succeeded in adapting the extract from this crustacean gland so that the hormones would have a similar effect in the blood of human beings, stimulating their bodies to grow new legs or arms to replace members lost by surgical amputation.
A storm of criticism and censure had broken around the head of the biologist. It was charged that Carlin was caught in the act of using human beings in blasphemously revolutionary experiments with crayfish and other crustaceans. Carlin was dismissed from the university in disgrace. After a brief investigation, scientists branded his serum a cruel hoax, and Carlin’s name faded swiftly into oblivion.
Shocked conjectures ran riotously through Kent’s startled thoughts. Was Carlin using this hidden swamp retreat to carry on human experiments even more radical and revolting than those that had sent him hurtling into professional oblivion? And if so, what possible connection could Dorothy Lane have with the mad biologist’s grisly labors?
* * * *
Sounds from the room at the end of the hall abruptly drew Kent’s attention that way. The door was flung hurriedly open. Carlin and Jeffers hastened out, locking the door behind them. Their faces were worried and tense.
“Vanders is gone!” Carlin said furiously to Joe. “He must have escaped when they mobbed you and broke out of the room.”
“He’s gotta still be here somewhere,” Joe answered sullenly. “There didn’t nobody get by me to the front door. He’s hidin’ out either in one of the rooms or else downstairs.”
“We’ll soon see,” Carlin clipped. He and Jeffers made a quick, fruitless search through the two rear rooms on the left, and the aquarium-laboratory. Carlin’s rap brought Dorothy Lane to the door of her room.
“Have you seen any sign of Vanders?” he asked. “He’s missing from the ward.”
The girl shook her head. Carlin turned to the remaining door on the right. “He’s down in the basement, then,” he said grimly. “Come on, Jeffers.”
As the door opened briefly to let the two men through, Kent caught a glimpse of a flight of wooden steps leading downward. The strangely blended odor of crustacean slime and carrion came in dankly increased volume from the subterranean depths. There was the clumping sound of the men’s feet descending the stairs. A short moment of silence was followed by a swift blurred chorus of voices. Metal clicked. There was a heavy thud as of the closing of a ponderous door.
Dorothy Lane’s face was drawn and white with terror as she stared at the basement door. Sound again erupted from the hidden depths, a muffled blending of hoarse shouts and a splashing as of some huge body wallowing in shallow water. A man screamed, horribly, the cry dying away to a bubbling moan.
A weirdly chirring call that was like the metallic stridulation of some scaled monster of the swamp rose in wailing crescendo, then abruptly lapsed into silence as a gun crashed twice. There was again the heavy thud as of a closing door, and a moment later the sound of steps climbing the stairs.
Carlin and Jeffers stepped up into the hall, and Dorothy cried out in sharp terror. Kent stared with dilated eyes at the ghastly object in Jeffers’ blood-soaked arms. Horror coursed icily down his spine.
The object had once been a man. It was now a gruesomely sliced and shredded bundle of raw flesh that looked as though it had been cut to pieces by a pair of gigantic shears. Thin sandy hair was matted with blood on the head that lolled limply on a half-severed neck. The features were slashed beyond recognition. There was only one leg, but the unspeakable condition of the body made it impossible to determine whether the amputation was an old one or a part of the hideous mutilation just suffered.
Carlin’s eyes blazed dark fire in the pale gauntness of his face. “Vanders tried to escape us by dodging into the room of the pool,” he said tersely. “He blundered squarely into the Dweller’s reach before we could stop him. We were lucky to even get his body away. Jeffers got badly slashed doing that.”
“The shots!” Dorothy breathed the words so low that they were barely above a whisper. “Did you kill—”
Carlin shook his head. “We only fired to frighten it back long enough for us to get clear with Vanders’ body.”
“Doc!” Jeffers blurted, his voice husky and strained. “Help me get to my room. I got it worse than I thought! My whole side is—”
His words abruptly faded into silence. His eyes closed, and he pitched forward on his face, his gruesome burden thudding to the floor with him. Carlin exclaimed in consternation and bent over him. Joe’s small eyes widened in concern as he stared at Jeffers’ huddled body.
For a brief moment no one was watching Kent. He took instant advantage of the chance. His right fist swung for Joe’s face with all his weight behind it.
Joe’s brain was stolidly slow, but his muscular reactions had the lightning speed of those of an animal. He instinctively jerked his head to one side, just enough that Kent’s fist glanced harmlessly off his cheek. Kent had a flashing glimpse of the clubbed pistol descending in Joe’s hand. Then the metal barrel crashed into Kent’s skull with a shattering impact that sent him spinning dizzily into fathomless gulfs of black oblivion.
Kent’s first waking sensation was of a splitting headache that seemed to pulse through every cell of his tortured brain. Then gradually the throbbing pain lessened a bit, and other sensations began to impinge upon his dazed consciousness. He was vaguely aware that he was sprawled full-length upon his back upon some hard, cold surface. The air around him had the chill, slime-damp scent of an underground chamber.
Yellow light glowed hazily against his closed eyelids. From somewhere that seemed an endless distance away a low voice was urgently calling his name.
“Larry! Larry Kent! Wake up, Larry. Larry, please wake up!”
Realization that the desperately pleading voice was that of Dorothy Lane shocked the last lingering mists from Kent’s stunned brain. He opened his eyes.
For a moment the scene above him swam in a dim yellow blur. Then
his vision cleared. He was in a small windowless cubicle of a room, with cobwebbed gray walls of roughly finished cement, and a floor of hard-packed earth. Yellowish light came from a single dusty bulb dangling from the ceiling joists.
He was lying near the center of the floor. Dorothy Lane knelt beside him, her dark eyes wide with dread, and the lovely oval of her face streaked with tears. Her soft lips moved in a tremulous smile of relief as she saw Kent’s eyes open.
“Larry!” she breathed thankfully. “I was afraid you’d never wake up!”
Kent lay there for a minute longer with muscles relaxed while strength flowed slowly back into his body. Then he struggled up to a sitting position. He waited a second for his spinning head to clear, and with Dorothy’s help managed to regain his feet. He twisted his white lips into the semblance of a grin.
“I’m all right now,” he assured the girl. “What happened after that gorilla slugged me? How long was I out?”
“Over an hour,” Dorothy answered. “After Joe knocked you unconscious, he and Carlin dragged you down here in the basement and locked you up in this little storeroom. Then Carlin went into his laboratory to work, and left Joe on guard at the foot of the basement steps. I sneaked a drink of whiskey down to Joe with enough veronal in it to put him to sleep for the rest of the night. After he collapsed, I came on back here to release you.”
“But I don’t get it,” Kent said dazedly. “What on earth are you doing in this madhouse, anyway? And why did you so pointedly refuse to recognize me before?”
“I had to pretend we were total strangers,” the girl answered. “That was the only way I could remain free of Carlin’s suspicion and wait for a chance to help you. But there’s no time to explain things now, Larry. Jeffers is in bed critically injured and Joe is unconscious. This is our one golden opportunity to overcome Carlin while he is without the protection of his paid thugs. We’ve got to do it, Larry, and quickly. That man is a fiend incarnate!”
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 24
