He regained his balance with a desperate effort. The Dweller stumped inexorably toward him upon its stiff legs, its pincer-claw gaping menacingly open. Kent gave ground warily before the creature’s advance.
Despair numbed his reeling brain as he desperately tried to devise some means of penetrating the monster’s impregnable armor. Fists were worse than useless against the horn-hard surface of that chitin-sheathed body, and none of the rotting fragments of bones scattered over the floor were large enough to serve as weapons.
Kent was forced inexorably backward until with a start of terror he realized that he must be approaching dangerously close to the pool. The Dweller was far more crayfish than man; water was its natural habitat. If Kent once allowed himself to slip into the black waters of the pool his last faint chance would vanish.
He shot a quick glance back over his shoulder. The pool was scarcely five feet behind him. Then suddenly faint lines of light overhead drew Kent’s eyes. His gaze flashed upward for a fractional second.
His face hardened in swift realization of the startling significance of the dimly illuminated lines in the shadowed corner joists of the ceiling. For the first time he realized the real character of the Dweller. Hope surged in a mighty flood through Larry Kent’s heart.
The pool was not a trap of deadly danger. Instead, it was the only place in the room where he had a real chance against his frightful adversary! Water was the one thing that might penetrate that impregnable armor.
Kent’s eyes intently narrowed as he turned again to the stiffly stalking Thing. He feinted a sudden movement as though to dodge to one side, then allowed his foot to slip on the damp floor. He twisted his body as he fell so that he landed on his back almost parallel to the nearby bank of the pool.
The crustacean-armored Thing flung itself forward headfirst upon Kent’s apparently helpless body, the great pincer-claw aiming for his throat. Kent’s legs flashed up. They bent hard against his body, then straightened with the lashing thrust of pistons.
His feet caught the monstrous body squarely in the abdomen. The sheer power of his terrifically driving legs lifted the Thing bodily. It landed on the edge of the pool, tottered in a vain effort to regain its balance, and crashed heavily face-downward in the water.
Kent came to his feet with the lightning swiftness of a cat. He leaped high in the air from the pool’s low bank. He came down with both of his heavily shod feet crashing solidly into the monster’s armored head.
The water was shallow, scarcely more than a yard deep. The crashing impact of Kent’s feet apparently partially stunned the Thing, for its movements were sluggish and groping as it twisted its body in an awkward effort to rise. Kent flung himself recklessly in to close quarters.
His knees clamped firmly astride the segmented back. He snatched for the Thing’s right elbow with both hands. Fighting back a surge of nausea as the shattered bones in his left hand grated together, he slipped his grip with flashing speed down to the chitin-sheathed wrist. A savage lunge of Larry Kent’s powerful muscles brought the murderously clawed member up and behind the gleaming back in a wrestler’s hammerlock.
The deadly jaws of the pincer-claw clicked menacingly, but in that position the razor-sharp edges were unable to reach Kent. His knees tightened their clamping grip upon the Thing’s body. He thrust forward with all his strength against the imprisoned wrist in a lunge that drove the shoulders and grotesque head beneath the black surface of the pool.
The Thing went berserker then. For a long mad minute of savage writhing it almost succeeded in breaking the grip of Kent’s desperately clinging hands and knees. Then gradually the monster’s struggles weakened.
Kent thrust the submerged head deeper. Bubbles came gurgling up through the dark water. There was a final convulsive movement of the segmented body, and it went suddenly limp and motionless.
Kent grimly kept the head submerged for another full minute. Then he cautiously relaxed his grip. There was no sign of movement from the armored figure.
He dragged the heavy body half out of the water on the low bank. There was a blur of movement in the gloom above him. He looked up and saw Dorothy’s white-faced figure.
“Is he—dead?” she whispered through trembling lips.
Kent nodded. He bent over the still figure with swiftly exploring hands. The chitin armor was a cunningly contrived suit of jointed metal. The great pincer-claw was a device of steel, worked by the human hand inside it. Kent found a seam in the grotesque headpiece. Fabric ripped beneath the powerful twist of his fingers. He lifted the torn piece. A human face was exposed—the congested, twisted face of Jeffers!
Dorothy’s voice choked in a muffled cry, Kent swiftly silenced her with a warning finger against his lips. He pointed toward the telltale lines of dim light in the ceiling above.
“That’s a trapdoor opening into Jeffers’ room,” he whispered tersely. “Jeffers descended through it whenever it was necessary for him to play the part of the Dweller. The pool was empty when Vanders blundered in here tonight, so they had to kill Vanders then to keep his mouth shut. Jeffers must have cut him to pieces with the iron claw.”
“But I thought that Jeffers was in bed afterward with a badly wounded side,” Dorothy protested.
“That’s what Carlin wanted you to think,” Kent answered. “He probably planned to throw me in here to be killed by the Dweller later tonight. Jeffers’ injury was faked to remove any suspicion in your mind that Jeffers had a part in my death.”
Kent’s glance flicked to the barred door. He could go up through the trapdoor and surprise Carlin from the rear, but the quickest and surest method would be to lure him into the room here. Kent sought quickly around him for a certain object that he knew must be somewhere near.
He found what he was seeking in a small niche near the wall. It was a little metal cylinder with a crank in one end. A slight tug at the crank indicated that this was the noise mechanism that had produced the eerily stridulant call from the Thing in the pool.
Kent hastily propped Jeffers’ armored body on its elbows on the bank in a rough simulation of life, with the torn flap again in place over the dead face. He handed the noise-cylinder to Dorothy.
“When I lift my hand, give that a single hard spin,” then fling yourself down on the bank here as though you were either dead or unconscious.”
Kent raced across the floor on silent feet. He crouched against the wall close to the door, then lifted his hand. Dorothy spun the crank violently. The wailing stridulation rose in savage crescendo, then died slowly away. Dorothy slumped to the floor in apparent collapse.
Kent’s heart leaped exultantly as he heard the steel bars of the door slide back. He had been correct in guessing that the metallic call would be used as a signal that Jeffers’ murderous work had been safely accomplished. The door was cautiously opened. Carlin’s face appeared in the opening.
For a moment Carlin warily studied the scene. Then the sight of Dorothy’s motionless body on the bank of the pool near the dimly looming armored figure apparently reassured Carlin that everything was all right. He slipped into the room. The heavy door thudded shut behind him. A split second later Kent was upon him.
He twisted the gun from Carlin’s hand, sent the man reeling with a smashing blow to the face, and snatched the fallen weapon up. Carlin’s face went starkly ashen. He licked dry lips, and looked furtively back toward the pool. His eyes widened in stunned surprise when he saw Dorothy rise and come toward them.
“No help from there,” Kent said grimly. “Your little pal is dead. He played the Dweller just once too often.” Kent’s voice hardened to the timbre of chilled steel. “Carlin,” he grated, “you’ve got just one faint chance to ever get out of this room alive. And that is for you to talk—and talk quick! one of those two bodies I saw in the swamp was that of Raoul Lane. Why did you kill him?”
Physical courage was obviously no part of the mad biologist’s makeup. He was a shuddering figure of abject terror as he stared at the me
nacing pistol in Kent’s hand.
“I didn’t kill Raoul Lane!” he protested wildly. “Jeffers shot him down when Lane became suspicious of things here and tried to escape.”
“And you kept his death a secret from the others,” Kent said, “because you wanted them to believe that Raoul had turned into the Dweller, and because you also intended to use Raoul’s supposed transformation to get money from his sister when she came.”
Tears streamed down Dorothy’s white cheeks at the tragic news of her brother’s death, but she fought off collapse. In the corridor outside the door there was dimly audible the wordless babble of yammering voices as the maimed pack milled in dazed uncertainty, but Kent was certain that their overwhelming dread of the Thing in the pool would prevent any of them from opening the door to interfere. He remorselessly hammered away at the cringing Carlin.
“How about the other body in the swamp?” he asked.
“That was Blake. He died of a heart attack soon after he came.”
“And the clawed Thing that dug the bodies up—was Bartlett wearing another costume like the one Jeffers wore?”
Carlin’s face set stubbornly, then abruptly changed as Kent savagely ground the muzzle of the pistol into his abdomen. Words spilled from Carlin’s gray lips in chattering terror.
“Bartlett wore no costume. His deformities were genuine. He was a microcephalic, a congenital idiot of the type commonly called ‘pin-heads.’ He was a sideshow freak when I found him. His pointed head and his weirdly deformed hand gave him the appearance of being part crayfish.”
“The whole thing was a hoax, then,” Kent grated. “You never used real crayfish serum in your injections, did you?”
“No.” Carlin’s voice sank to a broken whisper. “I gave the men nothing but a vaccine that caused a mild fever. Since then, I’ve kept them stupefied by drugs. There are no actual changes occurring in their bodies. Caustic ointments caused the scaly condition of their skin. The protuberances on the stumps of their limbs resulted from warm paraffin injected while they were unconscious.”
Desperate resolve suddenly flamed in Carlin’s wide-staring eyes. His right hand streaked to a pocket in his smock, and up again toward his mouth. The pistol in Kent’s hand moved with the flashing speed of a striking snake. The metal barrel cracked with bone-splintering force against Carlin’s wrist. Carlin yelped in agony. A small white pill fell from his limp fingers. Kent’s foot ground the pellet into the earthen floor.
“Poison would be too easy a way out, Carlin,” he said grimly. “You’re going to live long enough to sit in the death-house and taste just a little of the torture you’ve given those poor devils out there!”
Carlin’s gray features jerked spasmodically for a moment. Then he slumped abruptly to the floor in abject collapse. Kent stared briefly down at the miserably sobbing figure, then turned toward the door.
There was only one task remaining now, and it was a welcome one—the task of giving to the drug-dazed pack of the maimed the joyous news that would forever banish from their cringing minds the grisly fear that had made of this isolated torture-house a place of gibbering horror.
DEATH FLIGHT, by Robert Wallace
CHAPTER I
Murder of a Hero
The glaring white floodlights mounted on top of the great hangar building lit up the airport like day. They illuminated brilliantly the long main runways of the landing field, the low rope barriers that had been stretched on posts around the field, and the solid sea of humanity surging against those ropes. Scores of policemen struggled to keep the excited crowd from bursting through the ropes.
From a myriad throats came a deafening buzz and hum of voices, and in them one name was repeated over and over.
“Lucky James!”
A policeman turned toward a cool-eyed, craggy-faced man of wiry build who was passing along the line inside the ropes.
“Captain McCord, we’ll never hold this crowd back when Lucky James’ plane gets in!” the policeman panted.
Detective-Captain Thomas McCord told the officer crisply:
“You’ll have to hold them somehow. If this mob is on the field when James’ plane lands, some of them will be hurt.” McCord went rapidly down the field, his wiry form striding toward the floodlighted hangar building. A group of about twenty-five or thirty men were gathered in front of the hangar, including airport officials, pilots, and newspaper men who had been allowed inside the ropes.
One of the group saw McCord and gripped the detective-captain’s arm. He was a blond, good-looking young man whom McCord recognized as Blair James, pilot of a passenger airliner and cousin of Lucky James, the flier they were all awaiting.
Blair James cried to McCord:
“Lucky’s plane was sighted over Bayshore ten minutes ago! He’ll be here any moment! I guess this proves Lucky is the best flier of them all. A non-stop solo flight from Cairo to New York—and a fifty-thousand-dollar cash prize!”
“I’ve done a little flying,” McCord said dryly, “and I wouldn’t try a flight like that for fifty million.”
He added, “I’ve got to see Stangland a moment.”
He pushed past the excited Blair James toward Robert Stangland, the superintendent of Gotham Airport.
“Don’t you have any way of putting up more barriers?” McCord asked me superintendent. “That crowd is going to—”
McCord stopped speaking. He and the superintendent and the others became suddenly rigid, staring up into the northeastern sky, from out of which, now, was coming a distant, deep-toned droning.
The crowd was staring too, and a hush had fallen over it. A dead silence in which the only sound was that humming drone that grew louder each moment, waxing into a roar.
Down into the glare of the airport lights came a big silver monoplane that roared low across the field, and then banked around and came back, dipping toward the runway.
McCord heard over the thundering motor, the frantic yelling of the crowd, and felt his own pulse hammer with emotion. Tow-headed, reckless young Lucky James had spanned a hemisphere and was dropping out of the stars to fortune and fame and a crowd gone mad.
The great monoplane’s wheels touched the runway in a perfect landing and it rolled down the field, coming to a stop a few hundred yards from the floodlighted hangar.
McCord found himself running with Stangland and Blair James and the others toward the silver ship. They reached the monoplane as its motor was cut off, and a reporter pounded on its side.
McCord saw the door of the little enclosed cockpit open. And there in the opening stooped a rangy youngster with a grinning, tired white face, his blue eyes blinking at the flare of the photographers’ popping flashlights. He raised his oil-smeared leather-clothed arm in greeting.
“Well, fellows, it looks like I’ve made me fifty thousand bucks.”
Thuck! That brief, sinister sound cut through the din of popping flashlights and yelling voices around the monoplane.
Then McCord and the others, abruptly frozen in rigid, horrified silence, stared at the flier in the open cockpit door. Lucky James’ grin had taken on a sudden surprised quality. His hand went uncertainly to a little hole that had appeared in the left breast of his leather jacket. Then he crumpled stiffly forward.
McCord and the men around him stared incredulously at Lucky James’ body lying sprawled half out of the cockpit. Then Blair James, his face white and frantic, darted to the stricken flier.
McCord was close after him and helped him lift the limp body to the ground. Lucky James’ wide blue eyes stared up at them unwinkingly, unseeingly.
“Lucky!” cried Blair frenziedly. “For God’s sake—”
“It’s no use, Blair!” rasped McCord. “He’s dead—murdered.”
McCord’s eyes gleamed like crumbs of ice in his craggy face, sweeping dangerously over the staring, horrified group.
“Someone in this group around the plane shot Lucky James with a silenced pistol!” the detective-captain exclaimed.
A reporter turned to push his way out of the group, a wild yell coming from the other newspapermen as they, too, suddenly realized that they had witnessed the scene of a century. But McCord, his pistol flashing into his hand, sprang before them and halted them.
“Not one of you leaves here!” he grated. “Someone in this group is the killer and he’s not going to escape.”
“But you’ve got to let us break this story!” cried a reporter.
“Get back there, everyone of you,” McCord menaced them. “You’re going to be searched right here and now for the gun.”
Frenziedly protesting, the newspapermen fell back toward the monoplane. As they did so, Stangland, the airport superintendent, cried out and pointed to the ground near the ship.
“There’s a pistol, McCord!” he exclaimed.
McCord leaped and picked it up by its muzzle tip. It was a stubby automatic whose butt, trigger and trigger-guard had been wrapped with soft cloth. It had a silencer on it.
“The killer wrapped this so it would show no fingerprints, and dropped it right after he shot Lucky,” McCord said. “He must have shot from under his coat, standing right here among us.”
There came to McCord’s ears a vastly increased roar of voices from the great crowd around the field. A police lieutenant, coat torn and ruddy face pale, burst through the group toward the detective.
“McCord, the crowd’s gone crazy!” he cried. “They know Lucky James was just murdered and they’re wild with rage—they’ll tear to pieces anyone they suspect of being the killer!”
McCord whirled, saw that the crowds were now struggling to get through the rope barriers to the monoplane. The policemen along the lines were trying desperately to restrain them.
The idol of this crowd, the tow-headed youngster it worshiped, had been murdered, and the crowd wanted blood.
McCord’s voice crackled to the pale group around him. “We can’t stay out here—we’ll have to continue this investigation inside the hangar until that crazy mob gets calmed down considerably.
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 26
