The Complete Novels

by Don Wilcox

  “Give him the spines,” some one yelled.

  The players turned their clubs over in their hands. A square blow from the wooden sides could deal death. The sailors spread back to give the Japanese his cue. He summoned his flayed energies, threw himself into a race for the open gate.

  Ross caught his breath. Just outside that gate were two other figures. They were approaching swiftly. One was a girl, the other-well, there was only one person in the world that walked with that particular lumbering turtle-like waddle—

  It all happened so suddenly Ross wasn’t sure what he saw. But beyond that cloud of dust someone fired a gun. Then the chase whirled back toward the castle pelimell.

  In that moment Ross Bradford almost fell off the porch roof. What became of the Japanese or the girl he didn’t know. All that concerned him was that one clubber had gone down. The other nine were racing madly toward the porch, and the man who led the race was Hank Switcher.

  CHAPTER X

  Into the Tower

  “Give him the spines!” one of the players shouted.

  There was a momentary slackening of speed in the wave of red-hot pursuit. The clubs turned over in their hands. Hank was just two good jumps ahead of the deadly swishes. He was making a B-line for the castle and his plump face was as white as chalk.

  Suddenly he dodged to keep from running over Jag Rouse.

  The big captain strode out onto the court with the directness of a marching statue. “Halt!” he roared. “Attention!”

  The clubmen fairly skidded to a stop. Hank Switcher stopped too, frozen as if in a nightmare.

  “I’ll handle this!” Rouse growled as the men lined up before him. “Hold your tracks, you skylarkin’ crab. I’ll take care of you in a minute.” The big officer turned his commands on the line of sailors. “About face! Forward march! . . .”

  Rouse fell in back of them and marched them twenty paces out, gave them a sharp squads left, brought them to a halt and an about-face toeing a chalk line—their customary position for receiving dressings-down.

  “Now sailors—”

  “Your honor, the prisoner—” some one blurted.

  “Shut up! I’m talking!” Rouse delivered the upstart a slap in the mouth, “I’ll give you some pointers on this club swinging.”

  He took a club from the end man.

  “But he’s gone!” the sailor piped.

  Ross had no sympathy with the captain’s brutality, but he could have given that piper a pancake flattening.

  Those thirty seconds of marching had been Ross’ opportunity and he had jumped for it. He had thrown a loop of rope down. Hank had lurched away from it like a kangaroo, then had caught the slight hiss from the porch roof. A second later he had swung up off the ground for a magic getaway.

  “Hs-s-sh!” Ross had muttered, catching Hank by the belt and jerking him over the eave. “Keep low. Run for it.”

  They had ducked and gone. By the time the sailor blurted, they were out of sight.

  Captain Rouse’s angry roar came after them.

  “What the hell?—They don’t walk out on me that way!”

  “Up on the roof,” one of the guards yelled. “I seen him swing up. There’s two of ’em.”

  “All right, so there’s two of them. They’re not gonna take off and fly, are they? Listen to me . . .”

  The irate captain went into a dressing-down speech that was evidently the heaviest thing on his chest. Then he dispatched some guards to ascend the roofs and bring the intruders down.

  By this time Ross and Hank had reached the west edge of the castle top. Hank’s eyes barely clung to their sockets as he got his first sight of the five-hundred foot drop. He was so scared that if Ross had said, “Jump,” he’d have jumped.

  “Get your pocket knife,” Ross snapped. “We’ve got to scrape some rope.”

  He tightened the loop over the end of a beam that projected above the water. He seized the rope a couple of yards below the slipknot, and began scraping it with Hank’s pocketknife—long sweeping strokes.

  “Take over,” he barked at Hank. “See that the shreds blow off the roof. As soon as I get back we’ll break the rope.”

  Ross dashed eastward across the castle roofs, wadding a small ball of clay in his hand as he went.

  “Too late,” he thought as he saw the end of a ladder appear at tjie front porch roof. But a glimpse of the scene at the far end of the court—a group of sailors gathered around the clubman who had been shot—sent a desperate heat through his blood.

  One sailor neared the top of the ladder just as Ross got there. The fellow reached for a gun, but Ross clipped him squarely on the jaw. The fellow’s eyes wobbled, he lost his hold on the rung, slipped down the stringer like a sack of meal. The second sailor on the way up barely dodged him.

  Ross was tempted to kick the ladder over, but that was his second best bet. He seized it, gave at a jitterbug jerking. The sailor leaped back to the ground. But by the time his feet touched, the ladder swung up to the roof. Before the fellow could start firing, Ross and the ladder were out of sight.

  It would take a couple of minutes, Ross guessed to find another ladder.

  Two minutes weren’t much; not time enough for much moss to grow, but time enough to stave off several bullets.

  Ross jerked the clay from his pocket, slapped it against the sole of his shoe. He scurried along to the westward dragging the ladder after him. Both the ladder and clay left tracks.

  At the first steep roof, he swung the ladder up toward the ridgepole, climbed the rungs, left the ladder there. Sliding down on the other side, he left conspicuous tracks of clay.

  He found Hank still scraping rope. “Off with your shoes, Hank,” Ross said breathlessly. He took the rope, broke it, threw the long end to the ocean.

  Hank watched it sail down, saw it jump across a jutting rock and partially sink into the waves.

  Ross jerked his own shoes off, stuffed them inside his shirt. Then he and Hank made tracks—very inconspicuous stocking-footed tracks—to the big tower.

  “The rope’s waiting,” Ross whispered. “Up as fast as you can go . . . What’s the matter, man?”

  “I can’t do it,” Hank choked, glancing up at the forty foot climb.

  “I’ll give you a lift,” said Ross. “Keep a foot in the loop. If they catch us—”

  He didn’t finish. The if implied its own finish. He tested the rope, spit on his hands, took the ascent hand-over-hand.

  Arriving at the circle of open windows, he locked his legs on the tower wall, put his hands to the rope, drew it up and Hank Switcher with it.

  In a moment Ross, Hank, and the rope were completely hidden within the tower.

  “We breathe again,” Ross said in an undertone. “What’s the matter, Hank?

  Sick?”

  “I killed a man out there,” said Hank.

  “I thought so.” said Ross. He spared his friend any further scrutinizing looks. “Let’s get down out of these ledges and see what we’ve got here. You know, Hank, this is where the big fireworks comes from.”

  They clambered down from the circular ledge to the floor. Hank lay down and covered his eyes with his hand. Ross suggested shoes for a pillow since they weren’t being used otherwise.

  Ross stocking-footed around the circular room marveling at its absence of furnishings.

  In size it matched the South Pole plaza, which in turn had reminded him of the hundred-foot rotundas of some state capitol buildings back in the U.S.A.

  But this circular room was bare of ornamentation or design other than that furnished by thirteen encircling windows and a maze of crisscrossing shadows on the floor.

  These shadows came from the open fretwork which comprised the ceiling—or was it a ceiling? It couldn’t be simply that. It was too massive to be only an ornament, too open to serve as a roof over this room, too mysteriously jointed with metal and glass tubes—

  The surprise was somehow breathtaking. This was it—that unknown something�
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  This was the instrument capable of reaching out vast arms of destruction. What it was or how it worked was far beyond Ross’ most profound guess. But instantly he felt an impetuous desire to smash it.

  Those perpendicular steel tracks, like upright ribs between the windows, he noted, were for rollers to ride against. This vast metallic spiderweb could be raised and lowered. When lowered, its thirteen largest metallic arms would be stationed like so many rigid guns at the thirteen windows.

  Although this instrument held increasing fascination for him the more he studied it, he gave passing attention to four other features of the room.

  The most prominent was the canvas-covered seat in the center of the floor. Inspection showed it to be a spacious and comfortable leather-upholstered couch.

  At one side of the room was a weather-proof chest large enough to hold a small grand piano. It was solidly locked. Near the bottom were openings to admit two pipes that elbowed out of the floor—and Ross guessed these to be lead-ins of electrical power.

  A third feature of no little interest was the dark spiralling stairs, walled on each side by black velvet draperies. Ross couldn’t look at those velvet walls without conjecturing upon the weird nature of Graygortch’s storm rituals. If the man were sane—

  But he couldn’t be, resorting to such freakish and vastly destructive exhibitions. Again the welter of confusions flooded Ross’s thoughts. Graygortch, whom he had never yet seen, was already a score of conflicting legends.

  Finally Ross took particular notice of the hook upon which his rope had caught.

  It was a steel hook projecting from near the top of the inner wall. Its obvious purpose was to support another rope—one that led down into bottomless blackness behind the long flowing black draperies.

  “Have we thrown them?” Hank whispered, his eyes still closed.

  Ross stepped up on the ledge and peered cautiously through a window. “We’re okay for the present. There’s a huddle of guards on the roof over at the west edge. They got field glasses and they’re trying to spot our bodies in the sea.”

  “They figure the rope busted with us?” Hank asked.

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “They would never swallow that ruse if they knew me. I’d never swing out over the sea on a rope. What’s the sense in it?”

  “They’ll think we tried to swing down into a castle window and the rope broke with us.”

  “You mean we were both on that rope at once?” Hank asked dubiously. “Maybe they’ll figure that one of us got in at the window and the next fellow came along and busted loose.”

  “In that case,” said Ross, “they’ll continue to search the castle.”

  Hank stuck on that word continue, and Ross was forced to make some explanations. The varied receptions he had got from Schubert, Vivian, and Rouse interested Hank no end.

  “Then the chase was on before I showed up,” said Hank with a lowdown scowl. “It was on when you told Jimpson to tell me everything was hotsy-totsy.”

  “Things aren’t hotsy-totsy,” said Ross. “We’d just as well be frank about it.”

  “I’ll be frank,” said Hank with a groan. “I’m a louse . . . What do you think they’ll do to me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ross. “What made you kill him?”

  “Lost my head. Sue stuck a gun in my hand—”

  “Sue?”

  “That’s the reporter gal with the handwriting. I told you she’d be good looking—and how! She’s a swell dame, Ross.”

  Ross Bradford looked at his companion steadily, accusingly. “So she put a gun in your hand—and you call her a swell gal . . . What’d you do with the gun?”

  “It’s out there by the gate, maybe. When I saw that bird fall I didn’t have any more use for guns.”

  “And where’s the girl?”

  Hank made a helpless gesture with his hands. “Following the Jap, I guess. That’s her game. She’s been on him all the way from Tokio. That’s her story. He’s the high mogul of some fancy suicide racket—the old hara-kiri.”

  Ross groaned. “Let’s hope he takes the first boat back home. If there’s anything we don’t need around here it’s—Say, what did he want in this part of the world anyhow?”

  “That’s the question,” said Hank. “He was drawn here.”

  “Drawn?”

  “Mysteriously. She’s been following him all the way. He didn’t know where he was going. He just kept gravitating—”

  “I’ll . . . be . . . damned!” Ross gave a disgusted snort. Here it was again, that devilish superstition of Vivian’s that people came here in answer to some subtle beckoning from her old Uncle Bill Graygortch. It was impossible, absurd . . . and yet, here was one Susan Smith who had seen that beckoning reach around the world.

  “Hank,” said Ross with his quiet penetrating confidence, “are you superstitious?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why did you come here? . . . Were you drawn here?”

  “Hell, no. I came partly because I had a hunch you were in a jam. Partly because I wanted to tag along with Sue Smith. That gal’s got a story—”

  “When those storms broke loose,” said Hank, “did you get any overpowering urge to come hiking up to this castle—or just how did you feel?”

  “All I felt was scared,” said Hank. “Plenty scared. That’s all.”

  “You didn’t see anything—such as a pair of evil eyes glaring—”

  “Yes!” Hank gulped, coming up on his knees. “I saw ’em. Big dark eyes with a sort of luminous rim around them that shines right through your flesh. I saw ’em in both storms. Did you?”

  Ross nodded slowly. “That’s Graygortch.”

  “Wait a minute. Not so fast. Are you trying to tell me—”

  “I saw those eyes just as you described them,” said Ross stoutly. “I tried to make myself believe it was just some long forgotten memory coming back, the way things like that do. But if you saw it too—”

  Hank slapped his hand down emphatically. “You can’t tell me that that pair of eyes was what pulled me up the mountainside. I don’t go for that a minute. Now if it had been a pair of eyes like Sue Smith’s—”

  Ross stuck out his hand. “Shake, brother. We’re agreed on that. Those eyes were about as inviting as a nestful of rattlesnakes. I’ll stake a lifetime of breakfasts on it, I didn’t get drawn up here by an outside power, repulsive or otherwise. If we’re going to pull this thing apart and see where the thunder and lightning comes from, that’s our start.”

  “I getcha,” said Hank. “We’re here as free moral agents.”

  “Exactly,” said Ross.

  “And anything we do—such as committing an unintentional murder—” Hank swallowed up his sentence in a painful gurgle. He stopped talking.

  He began to pace the floor moodily. Ross tried to shake him out of it, but he preferred silence.

  For another hour or more Ross kept watch at a window. The warm noon sun glared down. The roof had been deserted, the ladder hauled away. Ross wondered if the sailors were convinced that their two intruders had dropped into the sea. It would give both Hank and himself the breathing spell they needed to get their plans formulated.

  If Ross were only alone, the way would now be clear. He would wait here in the tower until Graygortch came to operate another storm. Then Ross would get to the bottom of things, even if he had to throttle the old man and shake the truth out of him.

  These storms and quakes, Ross reflected, were costly in more ways than one. Even a tiny island like Flinfiord could be highly valuable to England in these crucial times. This speck on the map should be an air and sub base—and it would be if it were not being wasted as a hotbed of electrical destruction.

  Ross wondered if the rumor would reach Vivian that he had fallen to the sea. His pulse quickened at the thought. He was conceited enough, he admitted to himself, to believe it might make a difference to her. In spite of her twisted notions about his being a crim
inal, she had given him the benefit of the doubt, had yielded him a little of her trust and confidence. There was a girl—

  “Ross,” Hank said abruptly, “I can’t get it out of my mind. I didn’t know the fellow. I didn’t have anything against him. I just lost my head and shot him. What do you think they’ll do to me?”

  Ross tried to reason the thing out.

  He had talked with lots of troubled men back in the Transient Hotel days and he knew the value of an ounce of understanding. But there was little he could say to Hank.

  “You’re a writer of stories and books, Hank,” he said finally. “You’ve got the imagination to see your characters through lots of difficult circumstances. If you were writing a story about a man like yourself who had killed another man—”

  Hank shook his head. “It’s no use. I couldn’t have a man like me do a thing like that. I’m not the killing type. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m no common criminal!”

  “Not so loud,” Ross warned, glancing toward the stairs. “Sounds carry through this tower, you know.”

  Hank stopped, apparently observing the velvet walled staircase for the first time.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We’re not too safe here, are we?”

  “We’ll know if anyone starts up. There’s a gong on every—Come away from there!”

  “I’m not going down, don’t worry,” said Hank, sauntering closer to the top step. “Just looking.”

  “Come back!”

  Ross sprang to grab him, caught his arm just too late. Hank’s toe touched the top step. The gong rang out—a full resounding tone that everyone in the castle would recognize as the eighth gong of the forbidden tower.

  CHAPTER XI

  Vivian Slaps Her Uncle

  Nothing less than a cry of “Fire!” could create as much stir as an irregular gong note. Village inhabitants on either shore of the Flinfiord would speculate on this strange occurrence and invent rumors to explain it.

  Before the echoes died away, the maids and sailors and other functionaries of the Graygortch castlehold were scurrying toward the South Pole plaza to see whether Graygortch’s shadow was visible.