by Don Wilcox
Hank began to study tree trunks and rocks that might conceal one Japanese carrying one sword.
“Did you ever carry a gun?” asked Sue, reaching into her handbag.
“Sure. When I was running a filling station in Orange, New Jersey—what’s this?” He blinked at the small pearl handled pistol she forced in his hands.
“I carry it for a companion,” she said.
“Is it well behaved?” Hank asked, looking down the barrel to see if he could see the bullet.
“It’s never spoken out of turn yet,” said Sue. “But so often when Mr. H.K. and I meet we run low on conversation and my hands get nervous. On that last plane hop we made together it was pretty bad. I was really on the spot that time.”
“How do you mean?”
In answer Sue related a few of her contacts with the Japanese. In Japan she had eavesdropped on his secret meetings. She had heard him pledge several of his countrymen to commit hara-kiri if their political program was overridden. Next he had gone to their political enemies and enlisted them in the same tradition. His furious crusades had forced several hundreds of tradition-steeped Japanese to rip their own bellies open.
Then one day, when his suicide trade had reached what, in more genteel business, would be called the peak of prosperity, Mr. Hinko, the king of hara-kiri, yielded to some mysterious urge to travel.
Sue, who by that time had been shadowing him for weeks, had suddenly changed her tactics. She had taken passage on his boat, made acquaintance with him as a fellow tourist, tried to gain his confidence and probe his secrets. Eventually she had been convinced that Hinko did not know why he was traveling westward.
The admission of this fact had hurt his pride. He had thereafter shunned her company, had intended to become a recluse.
Several ship and plane trips had followed in rapid succession. Always there was a thread of consistency in the directions his travels took. Time after time he had come face-to-face with Sue, and each time it had become more difficult for her to explain the meeting as coincidence.
Finally, on a north-bound hop from Spain he had threatened to kill her if she shadowed him any farther. It was then that she had almost spilled her knowledge of his hara-kiri crusades and the fact that she was being paid to write his story. But at the very moment that Mr. Hinko had drawn his sword and Sue’s hand had twitched toward her handbag, she had squirmed out by her wits.
“Meaning what?” Hank asked, still hugging the little white pistol in his jacket pocket as he jogged along.
“Meaning that I told a powerful lie, and succeeded in putting H.K. and myself in the same boat,” said Sue. Her voice lowered to a mysterious whisper. “I told him I was being mysteriously drawn to travel in certain directions. I didn’t know where I was going, or why, but I knew this was the right way “What did he say to that?” said Hank.
“He put his sword away, looking at me like love at first sight, and said, ‘So you have felt it too? You understand?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said—”
“Hold the boat,” said Hank. “Understand what?”
“I didn’t have the slightest idea. Then he said, ‘It is a weird feeling,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘To be drawn by such a power,’ and I said—”
“You said yes,” Hank mumbled. “Right. And he said, ‘You too must be very, very wicked,’ and I said—”
“You said, ‘No, by hen!’ and took a shot at him.”
“Not on your life. I said, ‘Very, very, very wicked,’ as sweetly as I could say it, and beat it to my compartment and locked the door and held the gun on it all night. Wicked or not, I was just plain scared.”
“The fellow’s mad,” said Hank. “That’s what you said about Jimpson,” said Susan. “The bee that keeps stinging me is the way this Mr. Hinko consistently follows this something—something he doesn’t understand.”
“You mentioned fits,” Hank suggested. “Maybe he’s an epileptic.”
“Maybe,” said Susan, without much conviction. “Those storms got him in an awful uproar. The fisherman’s wife that lodged him told me he paced the floor and smashed up furniture. But maybe that’s excusable, considering the quake. How did you behave. Hank?”
“Like an epileptic,” said Hank. Then he gave a startled gulp. “Oh-oh. What’ve we got here?”
Just ahead was the gate to the castle grounds. Sounds roughly akin to the galloping of wild horses could be heard from somewhere beyond. There was some shouting and snorting—human sounds in spite of their animal ferocity. Hank gripped his gun and crept toward the gate cautiously.
Susan Smith was a shade bolder. She was burning up to know what her Japanese had run into.
The open gate afforded a view of the human hockey game moving swiftly back and forth across the court. The men in sailors’ uniforms were chasing through dust clouds, swinging clubs lustily. Yes, and gleefully.
Suddenly the object of their clubbing came dashing out into the open. Hank saw him clearly—a small, dark, badly battered Oriental.
“My story!” Susan gasped. “If they kill him—” Her groan sent chills through Hank. “Stop them, Hank, Don’t let them—”
Crack! The little pearl handled pistol spoke—and a decisive word it was. One of the sailors turned a tortuous flipflop, fell hard. Others tripped over him. The momentary heap of sailors and clubs gave the Japanese his chance. He sprang out the gate and darted down the trail.
But his quick Japanese eyes caught, sight of Sue. He whirled on his boot, paused long enough to cry some damning words at her in his crisp Oriental.
“So it’s you. You set this trap!”
“No! No! I didn’t—” Her voice choked off. A thunder of footsteps told her that the hockey game was on again. She turned to see the sailors chasing pell-mell across the open court, swinging their clubs.
The object of their chase was Hank Switcher. There was no gun in his hand now.
“Run, Hank, run!” she screamed.
Hank was running—but fast. For all his turtle-like build, he must have been a dash man at the last Olympics, thought Sue. But Hank Switcher couldn’t outrun nine sailors with long wooden clubs—not for long.
Yes, there were nine of them. The tenth still lay where he had fallen. For once the little pearl-handled companion had spoken out of turn.
CHAPTER VII
Jag Rouse—Ambitious Man
When Graygortch had begun his ascent of the lofty tower stairs and the gongs on each landing had clanged the coming storm, Jag Rouse had jumped into his usual swift routine of supervising the castle activities.
With long-practiced military dignity he had marched through the lower halls to see that kitchen utensils and dining hall furniture were flung into their well-established earthquake nooks.
He had bounded up the ornamental stairways, a trail of little ringing bells following in his wake.
His swift survey completed, he had hastened to follow Graygortch. Of all the persons in the castle, Jag Rouse was the only one privileged to be with the tottering old man during the storm rituals.
Just as Rouse was crossing the South Pole plaza to mount the tower steps, he caught a glimpse of a strange face.
Jag Rouse stopped, gazed across the lavender-lighted space for a second look.
The newcomer was a tall athletic young man. His comfortable khaki suit was cut along military lines but bore no military insignia.
Rouse scowled. Strangers weren’t welcome here. How had this person slipped by the sailors?
There was a disturbing alertness in the young fellow’s bearing—almost as if he knew his way around. He crossed straight over to the wall and began removing pictures like a well-trained sailor.
Then Rouse saw something else. In the archway leading off from the South Pole the old man’s niece was waiting.
So there was foul business going on. Rouse had suspected it. And that young female thorn in the old man’s flesh was mixed up in it. The damned attractive little wench. If the old man would just hand out a little more authorit
y, just give Rouse a little more rope, there’d be an end to these underhand intrigues . . . yes, a marriage of convenience would be just the thing—
With a quick-flung second glance at the strange young man, Rouse hurried on his way.
He took the tower steps three at a time. Then, within a step of the first-gong landing, momentarily out of sight of the lavender-lighted plaza, he ducked through a fold in the lofty black velvet draperies. He reached up into the darkness, caught the end of an unseen rope, climbed up hand over hand.
A full eighty feet of climbing brought Rouse’s hands to the steel hook from which the rope was suspended. His feet found the solid landing, he stepped through a slit in the massive velvet draperies.
The cool breeze of the open tower filled his gasping lungs. Jag Rouse was proud of that hand-over-hand climb. Not a sailor in the castle could duplicate that feat, he was satisfied.
Not that any had ever tried. The rope was his own secret passage to this open tower-top room. Only Graygortch knew. The sailors and menials supposed that Rouse used the tower stairs, the same as Graygortch, and they never ceased to wonder about his uncanny powers of silencing the gongs.
That was a laugh. What made it good was that a few sailors once tried the ascent. They knew Graygortch’s iron-clad rule but they were over-powered by a burning curiosity to know what caused the storms. Three of them followed the velvet walled spiral stairs as far as the first landing. Clinging to the draperies, they tried to ferry themselves over it without touching. But the gong gave them away. And the next morning at Captain Rouse’s regular disciplinary ceremony on the overhanging porch, fifteen sailors took the well-known march over the trap door, and at the finish of the march there were only twelve.
That incident had not been forgotten.
Now Jag Rouse glanced up through the wide circular instrument whose metallic filigree admitted patches of stars from the summer sky. Another clear night. A cool wind flowed through the circle of open windows. This was the kind of weather the old man picked for his storms.
Rouse touched a switch. The upper cylindrical walls went aglow with bars of colored light. Each of the thirteen open windows became a frame of light. The massive metallic filigree became a maze of crisscrossing reflections.
Seven gongs had struck. Rouse marched to the steps to give the pallidfaced old Graygortch a hand as the eighth and final note clanged and resounded up and down through the great tower.
“I should walk up with you,” Rouse said, drawing up his high left shoulder defensively as he assisted the tottering, gasping old man. “It’s foolish for you to refuse me that privilege any longer. If you ever fell—”
Graygortch gave a slight deep-throated cough. It silenced the big brisk soldier, who knew that the old man seldom talked at times like these. The long march up the steps did something to him—built up his mood for this ritual. He resented breaking the spell.
Rouse led the old man over to the center of the room, and having removed the cansvas cover from the leather-upholstered seat, helped him to a sitting position.
“Are you ready?” Rouse asked.
The old man made no answer. His breathing was hard, rasping.
Rouse went to the wall, unlocked a weather-proof chest, lifted the silk coverings from the table of electrical instruments. This table of apparatus he rolled carefully across the floor, drawing after it the loops of heavily insulated wire.
Now Graygortch’s bony hands rested upon the low table. His long fingers moved stiffly, yet with a certain precision as if operated by invisible wires.
The huge circular maze of metal overhead came downward slowly.
Rouse retired to an alcove in the wall, hooked his arms through the triangular wooden beams to support himself against the coming quake. From this position he could watch the mystifying process.
For nine years Jag Rouse had watched these storms come and go. For nine years he had wondered at their magnificence and grown more and more discontent. He had pleaded with Graygortch for an active share in this evil destructive ritual; he had beseeched and cajoled and even supplicated—unfamiliar though he was with the ways of prayer. But this was the most Graygortch had ever granted him—the right to sit at the edge of the circular room—to see the metallic tubes descend to form a wheel around the instrument table—to watch Graygortch’s hands play upon the mysterious keyboard and bring on the storm.
This privilege was, of course, far more than Graygortch granted to anyone else. Not one of the sailors had ever had a glimpse of this tower top. None of them, with the possible exception of that impertinent whistle-bunny of a Schubert, enjoyed the slightest confidence with the old man.
However, there were a few chosen men, somewhere on this earth, who shared this ritual by a sort of remote control.
Rouse knew this. He had known it ever since Graygortch’s first distant disciple had begun to tune in, so to speak. In the first years of the storms, before the quakes had become so potent, Rouse had sometimes been able to see those evil-faced visitors whose countenances floated before the old man’s hypnotizing eyes during this diabolical communion.
One of those men, Rouse knew only too well, was the war-waging dictator of Central Europe.
But Adolph Hitler, evil power that he was, filled only one of the thirteen niches in Graygortch’s circle of esoteric communion.
A few of Hitler’s close associates also numbered among the chosen. Other selections came from other parts of the globe. But as yet only twelve of the thirteen places had been filled.
There was much that Rouse did not know about the old man’s inner experiences accompanying these storm rituals. Graygortch was greedily silent about it all. Those who had known him more than nine years insisted that he had sunken into a mysterious insanity. Just when his creaking old bones were near to finding rest through death, he had rallied. The energy of this strange madness had taken root in him, he had scorned the grave, had gone on living, had equipped his castle with a welter of unique scientific paraphernalia.
“A pity he couldn’t have died,” his old friends always said. Rouse, from the day of his chance coming to this castle, had heard that sentiment reechoed countlessly.
For Rouse it was a repulsive sentiment. That so-called madness was the magnet that had drawn Captain Jag Rouse here, seized him, held him, inflamed with a desire to serve. Evil was something Rouse could understand and appreciate. Just as a highly sensitive musician might feel his way into the experiences of a great master composer, so Jag Rouse sought to attune himself to the fathomless genius of this unnatural man called Graygortch.
Rouse could only gather conclusions from what he saw and felt and guessed. But he was firmly convinced of one thing: Graygortch knew that he had only a short time left to go.
The end was near, and Graygortch burned with a desire as potent as the very lightning he released from the thirteen windows of this tower top. He wanted to complete his choices. He wanted to weld all thirteen of his disciples into that final bond—that ultimate union of the earth’s most potent men of evil—a union that would reshape the destiny of life of mankind.
. . . Along what lines, no man would dare to guess . . .
Now the storm came to an end.
The haunting, hypnotizing eyes of evil ceased their burning. Rouse relaxed his grip on the triangular timbers, slackened his tense breathing, rubbed his eyes.
The massive disc of metallic tubes rose gradually, came to rest, a fretted ceiling above the circle of open windows.
Graygortch waited until Ross had wheeled the instrument table back to its weatherproof case. Then the old man unbent and with Rouse’s support he moved feebly back to the stairs.
A high gong note clanged out over the Flinfiord valley, and the inhabitants of both villages knew the night’s storm was over.
“One word, your honor,” said Jag Rouse, as the shadowy old form began to move down the steps. “Another stranger has found his way in. I don’t like it. I’m going to apply my disciplines to the full.”<
br />
Graygortch flicked his bony fingers ever so slightly—his way of saying that such was the captain’s rightful authority.
“But there’s something disturbing,” Rouse added. “I hate to mention it, but I suspect your niece of extending hospitality.”
Now the old man turned, looked up at Rouse with a hint of questioning in his shaggy eyebrows.
“No offense,” Rouse hastily added. “She’s young. If she gets mixed up in intrigues that constitute a breech of discipline—”
“Discipline!” The word echoed resonantly from Graygortch’s ragged vocal chords. His one-word comment was wholly unsatisfying to Rouse. Discipline was a favorite word with the old man.
“I’m thinking the girl needs more supervision,” said Rouse. “If I were to marry her—” A quick twitch of the old man’s fingers cut him short. He grasped at a defensive straw. “If something were to happen—if you were to—”
“Die?” said Graygortch.
“Yes,” said Jag Rouse, but he shrank back, sure that he had blurted an indiscretion. “What I mean is, we can’t have criminals sliding in here, racketeering under her protection. She’s innocent of what’s going on—I might say ignorant. If she woke up some morning and found herself legally in possession of this castle, have you considered what a situation she’d face?”
“Yes,” said Graygortch.
“Oh?” The old man’s curt answer only sharpened Rouse’s perturbation.
“Have her dine with me at noon,” said Graygortch.
“Very well. You might set things up and I’ll be ready when you need me,” said Rouse, hoping the old man caught the spirit of sacrifice that attended his willingness to marry the girl. “Meanwhile I’ll carry on with my regular discipline.”
“Discipline,” Graygortch echoed once more. “If you were less soft—”
Jag Rouse caught his breath, held it until the old man finished.
“You might do.” The old man’s shaggy eyebrows twitched a trifle, then he turned and proceeded down the spiralled stairs.
“Soft!” Rouse repeated to himself as he climbed down the rope. That was a hot one! After all the prisoner-executing he’d done back in his military days, not to mention certain bloody turncoat acts he’d dealt out to his “friends” . . . after all the trapdoor disciplinary ceremonies he’d conducted here at the castle . . . he was too soft!
