Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  For a split second Simms hesitated, then realized the peril of his position. His fingers opened reluctantly, letting the revolver fall.

  "Now walk forward slowly, Mr. Simms."

  Simms obeyed, his face white, his whole body aching to wheel about. Soft footsteps whispered across the floor behind him as his unseen adversary paced forward to take possession of the fallen gun. Then the footsteps receded. A dull click stabbed its way into Simms' consciousness.

  He whirled then, stared bitterly at the closed door. Even as he lunged toward it, spurred on by blind fury, a key grated in the lock.

  A mocking laugh found its way into the room as Simms hurled himself against the barrier. The door, constructed to withstand just such an assault, budged not an inch. A triumphant vibrant voice, Sanderson's voice, said harshly:

  "You were very foolish to come back here, Mr. Simms. From now on, you have only yourself to blame for what happens!"

  Simms stepped back with mechanical slowness, his face colorless, his hands half upraised in front of him. His tongue came out to lick his lips. He stared with wide eyes at the barrier which had suddenly transformed Sanderson's laboratory into a sinister prison-chamber. He cursed himself blindly and bitterly, albeit silently, for being fool enough to walk into Sanderson's trap.

  His hands clenched then, itching to make contact with the unseen face beyond the door. Grimly he waited for further words of triumph, but none came. Instead, there was only a repetition of that mocking laugh, eating its way into his soul.

  His rage was greater than his fear, then. Had he been able to gaze into Sanderson's face, as Sanderson turned away from the locked door, the order of his emotions might have been reversed.

  For Sanderson, pacing silently through the furnace-room to the stairs which led to the upper portion of the house, had suddenly become an animal. His eyes were abnormally wide, hungry, in a face vile with avidity. His whole body was trembling. He had become a slave of some unholy desire, and the details of that desire were engraved indelibly in every line of his countenance.

  Straight through the kitchen and into the central corridor he strode, and without hesitation or preamble ascended the wide staircase to the second floor. Stopping before a closed door, he rapped impatiently on the panels, and said gutturally:

  "Oleg! Oleg, get up!"

  A moment of forced waiting ensued. The door opened. Oleg, the dog-keeper, stood there attired in crumpled white pajama trousers, the upper part of his body naked and hairy, his face wrinkled in a frown of bewilderment.

  "You want me?"

  "We have work to do."

  Oleg stared, took note of the animal eagerness in Sanderson's eyes. A grin curled his lips. Some of the same eagerness found its way into his own good eye. He turned quickly, waddled back into the room, reappeared almost immediately with his feet encased in shoes and his thick body clad in coat and trousers.

  "We go downstairs, huh?" he said leeringly. "We let loose the dogs and those others, huh?"

  Sanderson nodded curtly, turning from the door and striding back down the hall. With short, quick steps Oleg followed him, breathing noisily, his blind eye seeming to come to life as it caught something of its mate's glitter. Master and servant descended the stairs together, the same unholy eagerness spurring both forward. A moment later the main portion of the house lay above them. They stood in the dimly lighted game-room in the cellar.

  Keys dangled from Sanderson's outthrust hand as he paced to the far end of the game-room. Stooping, he dragged aside a dark-toned length of carpet near the wall, exposing the oblong outlines of a cunningly placed trap-door.

  His hand jabbed down, thrust a key into its slot. The trap swung slowly downward, revealing the top rungs of a wooden ladder. With a brief backward glance at his companion, Sanderson put a groping foot on the ladder and began to descend. Below him lay a vault of darkness impregnable. Above, Oleg sidled past the Ping-Pong table, peered down, and followed his master's lead, making animal noises in his throat.

  The darkness vanished as Sanderson reached the foot of the ladder and thumbed a light-switch in the wall beside him. Staring up at Oleg's descending body, he growled a curt order.

  "Close the trap!"

  Oleg paused, reached up a ham-like hand, pushed the trap-door shut above him. By the time he reached the floor of the vault, Sanderson was advancing eagerly toward a row of small, grilled doors on the opposite side.

  The vault was a sub-cellar, small, compact, foul with the heavy stench of unwashed human flesh. Its sole means of illumination was a dusty, unshaded lamp-bulb, dangling, at the end of a stapled wire from the low ceiling. Yet the light was sufficiently strong to cast a sickly glow over the entire chamber, baring the room's entire contents.

  Walls and ceiling were of massive, rough-hewn boards, solidly put together. A small, heavily-barred door broke one wall. Frowning cell-doors, four in number and fitted with significant iron bars, broke another. Toward these Sanderson strode and stood glaring.

  Oleg, still mumbling animal sounds, waddled forward to his side.

  There was another sound then, a suggestive, sinister sound from the shadowy darkness behind the grilled doors. Hearing it, Sanderson smiled crookedly, took a slow step forward, said aloud in a rasping voice:

  "Get up! It's time to go out!"

  Reaching forward, he brought his key-ring into sharp contact with the iron bars, rattling them there as if realizing that the sound would mean something to the cells' lethargic occupants. The jangling clamor did mean something. Almost immediately, the sinister sounds from within were intensified as though heavy unwilling animals were condescending to stir from their places of retreat.

  But they were not animals. The faces which came forward like floating masks and flattened against the bars were human faces, or at least nearly so. Staring fixedly at Sanderson, they were like death-heads in the yellow glow of the overhead light, every hollow, every protruding mound of flesh accentuated by the ocher glare.

  Four of them, in all, studied Sanderson in the manner of slaves studying a master. All four were alike in one respect: they were less than human, despite the general normalcy of their unlovely features. The eyes which regarded Sanderson were madmen's eyes, hideously white where there should have been no white. The hands which gripped the iron bars were gaunt, powerful. The half-clad bodies beneath those terrifying faces were huge and hairy.

  Yet Sanderson did not fall back, did not shudder. Calmly he surveyed them, as though examining caged animals in a zoo. Quietly he nodded to Oleg, who paced to the wooden door in the near wall, raised the horizontal bars, and opened the door wide. The one-eyed man's eagerness had abated. He seemed apprehensive. He licked his lips nervously as he stood waiting beside the open doorway.

  The keys rattled again in Sanderson's hand. Methodically he leaned forward, opened the first of the four grilled doors. A curt command came from his lips. "Come out! It is dark outside; time for you to be gone."

  The cell's occupant slouched slowly over the threshold into the full glare of the light. He was naked, this one. Stark naked, except for a thin silver chain which encircled his throat. That chain had reposed, not long ago, on the slender throat of a young girl—a young girl who, in the midst of a merry party at the Rand house, had crept away with her tuxedo-clad escort and gone for a midnight stroll along the deserted beach, on a night when snow had fallen and the surf had pounded a death-dirge in the dark.

  Sluggishly the naked shape paced across the room, past Oleg, and through the small doorway where Oleg stood on guard. With narrowed, triumphant eyes Sanderson stood watching, then turned and unlocked the second of the iron-barred cell-door . . . and the third . . . and the fourth.

  When it was over, the four cells were empty, the four gaunt inmates had vanished silently through the doorway which apparently led to the outside. Oleg, closing the door and dropping the heavy wooden bars into place, swung about and said gutturally:

  "Now I go let loose the dogs, huh?"

  S
anderson nodded, smiled cruelly. Turning, he retraced his steps to the ladder, and climbed it, thrusting open the trap above him. Ascending to the game-room, he waited for Oleg to clamber through the aperture. Then he lowered the trap, locked it, and slid the concealing carpet back into place.

  "All right, let the dogs loose," he said grimly. "This time we will give the police something to think about. Something they will never forget."

  7. Portygee Murder

  Mark Simms, finding himself trapped in Sanderson's laboratory, finally ceased his futile assault on the locked door and stepped back, realizing that he had only himself to blame. He had been a fool, had walked blindly into a trap so obvious that even a half-wit would have sensed the presence of danger. Now, with a slow shrug of his shoulders, he lowered himself into a chair and sat staring.

  Morbidly he inspected the room in which he had been made prisoner. A light still burned in the ceiling, the white-topped table and glass-paneled instrument cases still gleamed dully, suggestively, adding to his belief that the chamber was something more than a laboratory for taxidermal pursuits. He stood up, paced toward the table.

  He stopped abruptly. Above him, the light went out, leaving him alone in a well of darkness.

  A scowl twisted Simms' lips. Turning, he stared toward the door, anticipating the return of the fiend who had imprisoned him. Then he saw that no streaks of light penetrated beneath the barrier from the cellar beyond, and he realized that Sanderson, or someone else, had undoubtedly extinguished all the cellar lights by turning a switch in the upper portion of the house.

  There was nothing significant in that. Merely a matter of routine.

  He groped back to the chair and sat down again. Escape was impossible. The room contained only one door, and that was locked. True, he had come here with the avowed intent of picking that lock and forcing his way into this very room. But Sanderson, after slamming the door shut and turning the key in the slot, had cunningly left the key in its niche. That key, expertly designed and modern in style, could not be forced loose from the inside. Simms had tried, had labored long and steadily over it with sweat drenching his face and breath groaning through his clenched teeth. But his efforts had been futile.

  Slumped in the chair now, he pushed a spread-fingered hand through his disheveled hair and made a desperate attempt to reason the situation out. There was but one answer. His every line of thought, no matter how devious, returned to the same point. The door had to be opened.

  His mind shifted to the steel instruments in the sinister glass-paneled cases near the wall. Scowling, he stood erect again and felt his way through the dark toward them. Then he heard something and stood quite still, one hand dropping mechanically to the pocket where his revolver should have been but was not.

  The sound was almost inaudible, and came not from the cellar but from somewhere close by, beyond the rear wall of the laboratory. He turned slowly, cursing the darkness which made him blind. The sound came again, a muffled hammering noise, as if someone, or something, were wearily pounding at the wall itself, seeking release or admittance.

  Simms flattened against the smooth barrier, listened a moment. He said curtly, in a guarded voice:

  "Who's there? Who is it?"

  The answer stiffened him. It came slowly, after an interval of ten seconds or more. A woman's voice, vibrant and pleading, said suddenly:

  "Oh God, let me out of here! Please let me out!"

  Simms' face paled. Despite the distortion caused by the intervening wall, he knew that voice, recognized it. It belonged to a girl with dark brown eyes, a girl who had been in his thoughts more than was necessary during the past few hours.

  He pressed his face to the wall, said quietly in a voice barely loud enough to carry through:

  "Take it easy, sister. What is this—a door?"

  "Yes! Yes, it's a door! It opens from that side. There's a hidden panel—" Simms stepped back, passed a flat hand over the wall, exploring its smooth surface.

  "All right, sister. I'll find it. Take it easy now."

  He did find it, after an interlude of nerve-wracking doubt. A grunt of satisfaction escaped his lips as the sliding panels opened. He stepped forward quickly. His outstretched hand encountered perpendicular bars, came in contact with another hand, soft and warm, which clung there. He scowled, bewildered.

  "What is this, a jail?" he said quietly.

  A sob answered him, but whether relief or despair motivated it, he could not be sure. His fingers still covered those other fingers, protectingly. The girl said anxiously:

  "Can't you make a light?"

  Simms scowled, reached into his pocket for matches, wondering why he had failed to think of it before. His scowl deepened when his search produced only a crumpled book of paper stubs with but two lights left. He scratched one carefully, stared into the girl's face as the match sputtered into flame.

  It was a white face, anxious and full of fear. The sight of it did something to Simms' masculine heart, made him hate Sanderson blindly, viciously.

  "How did you get here?" the girl whispered.

  "Walked in, like the damned fool I am."

  "You—you mean you're locked in?"

  "I sure am, sister. You and me both, so we might as well get together on it. How does this iron thing open?"

  "With a key," she said heavily. "Sanderson has it."

  Simms made a wry face, dropped the glowing match as it burned his fingers. The darkness then seemed more complete than ever, holding the girl and himself in a tenacious grip. He fumbled with the iron door, realized that the girl was right. Only a key would open it.

  For that matter, what difference did it make whether the door came open or not? Even if he succeeded in jimmying the lock, the girl would still be a prisoner. But somehow he wanted her beside him, without those grim bars intervening. Why, he did not know, had no time to wonder. But the bars were sinister . . . .

  Saving his last match for the task ahead of him, he mumbled a word of encouragement to the imprisoned girl, then turned and groped back across the laboratory. There were sharp-pointed steel instruments in the glass-paneled cabinets near the wall. Those instruments were better than the thin-bladed penknife in his pocket.

  His out-thrust hand located one of the cabinets, clawed open the glass door. Scooping a handful of tools, he returned to the iron grill, pushed the crumpled match-book, with its solitary match, through the bars into the girl's hand.

  "Light that and hold it where I can see what I'm doing. I'll get you out of there, all right."

  She obeyed without protest, holding the flame directly above the lock, where its glare illuminated the key-slot and cast flickering shadows into her anxious face. Simms selected an instrument that looked like a nut-pick. Poking it into the slot, he turned it slowly in lean fingers.

  He was still turning it when the match went out. In the dark then, he continued his efforts, working by touch alone. The girl said softly, eagerly:

  "Can you do it?"

  His answer was inaudible. The real answer came a moment later, when he straightened triumphantly and put his weight against the door. The lock clicked. The door opened inward with a soft whine. A sob of relief came involuntarily from the girl's lips.

  Then, for no reason at all, she was suddenly in Simms' arms. Tortured nerves gave way; the terror of the past few hours, and the horrors of her confinement, took their toll. Sobbing softly, the girl clung to Simms with trembling hands, as if realizing that she had found at last, the only person in this house of sinister mystery who could be trusted.

  For a long time neither Simms nor the girl spoke. Holding her in his arms, Simms waited patiently for her sobs to cease. Darkness enveloped the two of them; they seemed utterly alone in a world of shadows. Then, stepping backward, Claire Evans said in a low, trembling voice:

  "There—there's someone else in the prison-room."

  Simms stiffened, scowling. "Someone else?"

  "Yes. A man, chained to the wall—"

 
Grimly Simms paced forward, feeling his way across the threshold. He had no light, no means of making one. In the dark, he advanced cautiously, one hand half upraised in front of him.

  His probing foot came in contact with something soft, limp. A low exclamation left his lips. He stooped, reached an exploring hand to touch the thing on the floor. His fingers encountered rough clothing, naked flesh, matted hair, then came in contact with the metal links of a chain.

  Slowly he stood erect, turned away. Groping to the doorway, he collided with the girl, put a firm hand on her trembling arm.

  "Who is he?"

  "I don't know," she said.

  "That sort of thing comes under the general head of taxidermy, hey?"

  The girl shuddered, came closer to him. She was afraid, he could tell that by the way she was trembling, the way her slender body quivered against his. Well, she had a right to be afraid. Any sensitive girl, after being locked in Sanderson's vile prison-room and forced to remain there in the dark, in company with that pitiful thing on the floor.

  Simms' mind shot back to the very first time he had invaded Sanderson's cellar. The sounds he had heard then, the hideous human cries of agony, had in all probability come from the tortured throat of the poor devil who lay chained in the prison-room. No further sounds would come from that same throat. Not any more. Sanderson, damn him, had—

  The girl's voice interrupted Simms' thoughts. She said suddenly:

  "We've got to get out of here, Mr. Simms. We—we mustn't be here when that monster comes back! You don't know him. He isn't human!"

  Simms' mouth tightened in a thin line. His hand went into his pocket, came out holding the assorted steel instruments which he had taken from one of Sanderson's glass-paneled cabinets.

  No, he did not know Sanderson as well as the girl did. But if that thing in the prison-room, chained to the wall there, was a sample of Sanderson's handiwork . . . .

  Lieutenant Michael Hurley leaned across the butt-scarred table in the headquarters room of State Police Barracks, and glared into the stubborn face of Max Ferris. The clock on the wall, above him, said three-thirty. For more than an hour Hurley had been sitting in the same place, staring into the same stubborn countenance, striving to batter down the prisoner's resistance.