by Don Wilcox
Ross marched forward, Schubert and the other three sailors fell in beside him like a military escort.
“Conduct him to my study,” said Graygortch, turning to follow.
Captain Jag Rouse scratched his head perplexedly, then blurted, “Graygortch, your honor—what’s the big idea? It’s my job to execute him, not yours. I was all set to do it, but the damned electricity went off—”
“Don’t apologize,” said Graygortch hoarsely. “I need this man.”
“Huh?”
The big captain was so dumbfounded by this remark that he forgot all about his broken forearm and sprained shoulder, not to mention the bundle of pains in his side. He strode across toward Graygortch in great agitation.
“Lemme get this straight. You told me the other day to put some teeth in the discipline, didn’t you? You told me your thirteenth disciple hadn’t been chosen yet, and if I wanted to qualify—”
“Rouse! Hold your tongue.”
The old master’s snarl was hint enough; but the burly captain was tangled in his own mental underbrush. He stammered.
“Dammit, what’d you want me to do when the trapdoor stuck? Shoot him? Hell, I’d have done it in a minute, but I—”
“Rouse!” The angry rumble made the walls vibrate. “Lucky for you you didn’t. Lucky for you that my niece switched off his death in time. I need this man”
Jag Rouse stood glaring, red-faced, breathing humiliation and confusion.
“Stay where you are,” Graygortch’s parting words crackled. “I will take care of you soon.”
CHAPTER XVI
During the ten minutes that followed his exit from the overhanging porch, Ross Bradford endured the swiftest whirl of thoughts of a lifetime. His brain was like a photomontage movie, crowded with action scenes that raced and collided and tumbled over each other. Out of the blur he snatched for wisps of ideas.
Hank had gone down. Would there be a chance to rescue his body? What was in the air now? Was Ross himself on the way to a crueller execution than the one he had just escaped? Was this master-demon, Graygortch, taking over because Captain Jag Rouse had failed?
Echoes of the captain’s bitter growl overtook Ross as he marched away from the porch.
“. . . some teeth in the discipline . . .”
“Shoot him? Hell, I’d have done it in a minute . . .”
But Ross marched on out of hearing, and Schubert and the other three guards at his side whispered expectantly as if something surprising and unprecedented were in the air.
That, too, was Ross’s guess. The curious contradiction of authorities that he had sensed from the day he had entered this castle seemed due for a showdown. If that was it, he was on the right side—Schubert’s.
Unless Schubert himself was operating some undercover plot more atrocious than Captain Rouse’s!
What a contrast in the way those two men worked. Jag Rouse was a bellowing warhorse, clumsy and cruel, loud and brutal. He would plow into trouble for the sake of raising a dust, expecting the master to honor him for it. Schubert, on the other hand, was as streamlined as a submarine, as silent, and as much under the surface.
Both men were working hand in glove with Graygortch. But their cross-purposes had been evident to Ross from the start.
“Here you are,” said Schubert, opening the study door, “with our respects. It’s like I told yon that day when we guards met you at the gate and I took you in charge. The big boss has been waiting for a high-class criminal like you to come along—”
“But I’m not—” Ross checked himself. He had nothing to lose, now, and everything to gain, by playing the game from the inside. He would never find what lay back of those leviathan flashes of death from the castle tower until he got next to the central mystery—the mystery that was Graygortch himself. All right, he would be a high-class criminal—like nobody’s business.
“I knew the minute I saw you,” said Schubert, “that you had the stuff the big boss was looking for. Of course you tried to lie out of it, because you never knew I knew you’d got the mysterious call to come and marry the girl.”
“You’ve got my number,” said Ross, feeling a bounce in his blood pressure that would certainly have registered on a lie detector.
“Well, now that you’ve won over the captain’s death trap, looks like you’ve got clear sailing. And don’t forget me if you want someone to sing at your wedding.”
Schubert whistled a strain of a wedding march through his expressionless mouthful of overhanging teeth. He fell into step with his three companions and they marched away. Ross was alone in the master’s study.
Soon Graygortch arrived, closed the door behind him, sat down to face Ross across the table. The lights had come on, and the low table lamp, together with a generous stream of morning sunlight, gave the old man’s face a unique brilliance, highlighting his craggy features with white gold.
“I have few words,” the old man began. “My days are numbered. You have your life ahead. Tell me, did my power draw you here? Did you find yourself unable to resist coming?”
“I could have resisted,” said Ross. In honesty he might have added that he hadn’t felt the magnetic drawing-power in the slightest. He had seen the repulsive glare of evil eyes during his fall with the bomber. But evidently Graygortch, like Schubert, believed him a man of evil, whose coming was a sympathetic response to the world-wide magnetism of the master. Ross added, “I wanted to come.”
“You wanted to come because I wanted you to come” Graygortch blinked his wrinkled eyes complacently. “You were responsive to my call. Your past, I assume, has been a dark one. Dark, as judged by your fellow men.”
“Very dark,” said Ross, with another throb for the lie detector.
“A few minutes ago I watched you fight.”
“Yes?”
“You are seasoned to fighting. Your strength and daring wrung respect from Jag Rouse’s toughest guards—even the one you might have dropped—but it was cunning of you to save him.”
Ross nodded. The old man seemed to intend a compliment, though it was strange he should use the word “cunning” instead of “decent” or “sporting.” But Graygortch’s next remarks, spoken with great deliberation, were far more mystifying.
“I would have enjoyed seeing him drop. Still, you no doubt had your own purpose in saving him. I do not always profess to understand the motives of mortal men.”
Ross’ hands, pressing hard against the edge of the table, slipped off with a jerk. He moved uneasily under the old man’s penetrating glare, and shifted his attention awkwardly. He noticed his wrists, cut and clotted from the ropes that had bound them; but Graygortch went on talking.
“You have, I believe, the rare combination of abilities I have been seeking. I assume that you are accustomed to killing swiftly and cruelly.”
“In my stride,” said Ross. He dared not look Graygortch in the eye. But the lie had gone too far for any compromises now.
“And you came here hoping to marry my niece?”
“I understand that I am a candidate, your honor,” said Ross.
“The candidate,” said Graygortch, decisively. “You have the strength to protect her, the manliness to win and hold her love. You have the heart of a fighter, the swiftness and toughness of decision to beat off the swarms of invaders who will come to these castle gates—even as you have come—”
“Drawn by your magnetic power,” Ross interpolated.
“Yes—but soon it will be my niece’s power, for I will be gone.”
For a moment Ross stopped breathing. Chills cascaded from the base of his skull down to his fingertips. The fanciful vision of this mountaintop estate left in the hands of Vivian Graygortch and himself was paralyzing.
“My niece, you see,” said Gray! gortch, “is going to inherit my work.”
Ross stammered, “Does—does she know?”
“Not yet. The first step is for her to marry. With a partner to lean upon, she will be more receptive to her coming
responsibilities—or I might say, glories. As to your character, my human sources of observation have assured me—”
Ross’ heart skipped a beat. There it was again—that weird implication that this tottering old man held himself remote from ordinary human beings. He must be utterly crazy.
“My human sources of observation, especially Schubert, have assured me that you—in spite of your audacity and your recklessness where your own life is concerned—are as near the answer to all requirements as we will find. I do not mean that my niece considers you a perfect marriage—”
“No?”
“But she considers you the least among the evils from which she must choose. This, of course, is a very superficial judgment.”
“Of course,” said Ross, bewilderedly, “if you mean—”
“That in essence you are the most evil, otherwise you would not be qualified. Vivian is childlike. Her eyes have not been opened to the world that I live in. She sees only the shadow of me. And of you.”
“But what of Jag Rouse?” Ross asked, beginning to catch the old man’s line of thought. “Does she understand him?”
“Rouse is so bluntly honest about his intentions of evil that my niece sees him for exactly what he is. Consequently she is terrified by him. He has thus eliminated himself as a possible husband for her.”
Ross gulped. This line of reasoning was a tortuous one; strangely, it was complicated by a lack of normal human insights. Anyone should know that a young girl like Vivian would not be attracted to an arrogant, boastful beast of a man like Rouse. But that was the angle that this old man missed. He seemed only to weigh abstract evil against abstract good. And it was only the evil that he prized.
“You,” Graygortch continued, “not only possess potentialities for greater evil than Rouse. You also possess the cleverness to conceal your boundless wickedness by an innocent manner. So you are our man. You have the power to win Vivian over while she is still innocent of what is before her.”
“I have the power to win her,” Ross echoed.
“After her eyes have been opened, and she sees my world for what it is, then she will also know you for what you are, and she will respect you in a new light. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Ross nodded, touching his fingers to his sweat-streaming forehead.
“Time is growing very short,” said the old man. “I have had to give you these confidences briefly, almost before we are acquainted. In a few days I shall die.”
“Will there be any more storms?” Ross asked anxiously.
“Not many, I hope. I am trying to bring all of my thirteen disciples into a single focus—a single mind that will serve as a storehouse and boiling pot for the earth’s high lords of evil who commune with me—my disciples of death. Do you follow?”
“I think so,” said Ross, narrowing his eyes. “This mind that the disciples enter will be a place for them to share their power—”
“Exactly. Each will reinforce the other, like cells of a battery. All these years I have labored to bring them closer together. It has been a superhuman task. But in recent storms I have almost achieved it, in spite of difficulties.”
Graygortch closed his eyes in heavy reminiscence. His stiff old fingers pressed hard against his wrinkled forehead.
Was this insanity? Was it simply a mass of highly organized delusions? Ross Bradford tried to weigh every word. He hoped the old man would say more, for at last the talk had come close to the very heart of the old man’s mysterious workings.
“Among my disciples,” Graygortch went on, “are a few war leaders in Germany who are so preoccupied that they unwittingly resist my drawing power. If Hitler and a few others only knew how much more fully their potentialities could be realized if they would yield a little farther to my call—”
“Hitler?”
Ross echoed the name blankly. The breath was gone out of him. He felt dreadfully sick, fainty. “Then your disciples are enlisted from—”
“Anywhere on earth—even as far away as the land of the rising sun, I have limited myself to thirteen because I know that the earth’s most evil thirteen men, if I bring them together, are enough to plunge the whole earth into . . . my kind of world.”
Ross’ trembling hands slipped to his knees. These words were firebrands shooting through his brain. He could scarcely trust himself to speak.
“Once I have succeeded in bringing all of them in fully” Graygortch said, “I shall be able to transfer the focus to my niece, Vivian. Then I shall die—happily.”
Ross felt the force of Graygortch’s eyes on him, like an electric pressure crowding him against a barbed net. Crowding him to see whether he would pass through, or catch.
Ross tried to breathe. The room was hot and unbearably stuffy. He wanted to get out, to run away, to shake off these hideous words, to bathe his steaming face in cool water—Cool water! That’s where Hank’s body was—somewhere in the chill ocean. Maybe it had washed up on the rocks, maybe it had sunk. Probably the latter. Ross thought of the crippled hermit, Jimpson, who kept statistics, counting the bodies that sailed down from this castle and crushed into the water. He wondered if Jimpson had seen Hank fall?
Ross looked up. That stare was still pressing him. He tried to meet it. A knock at the door saved him.
Fantella entered, talking boisterously.
“Mine goodnuts, vy don’t you got a vindow open? It’s hot in here like der uffen. Vat iss you men cooking up—a private hell?”
She clattered across the room and flung a window open.
“Dare. Dot breeze makes you veel better already. Lucky for a man ven he got a voman to take care uff him.” She deftly slipped a note under Ross’ hand as she blustered out. Ross moved his hand unobtrusively toward his pocket. The note would have to wait.
“And now a word about your immediate duties,” said Graygortch, quite oblivious to the cook’s intrusion. “You will proceed without delay along three lines of action. First, you shall take charge of the guards as soon as I have dismissed Captain Rouse. He is through. He will leave today.”
“I—the captain of those—”
“Choose your own title. The important thing is to maintain a well-disciplined body of sailors so you can defend the castle against any party of trespassers. Use whatever disciplinary measure you wish, to keep order. The trapdoor is at your service when you want it.”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Secondly, you will accompany me to the tower for my meetings with my disciples. Very soon I will hold on§ of these storms to give you a glimpse from the inside.”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Thirdly, you must arrange for a marriage with Vivian. There. That is all. Mind you, don’t reveal what I have confided in you. But make all possible haste in completing arrangements—”
“Vivian, of course, has a mind of her own—”
“She has a mind for you, Bradford. She cut off the electricity to save you. Then she came and appealed to me to get you out of danger. That’s proof enough she prefers you. Go to her at once.”
“I will,” Ross said. “I’ll—er—propose immediately. If she turns me down—”
“She won’t. I’ve given her a curtain lecture.” The old man glanced at an antiquated time-piece on the table. “It is now high noon. If you’re the man my agents have sized you up to be, you’ll bring Vivian to me for a marriage ceremony by sundown this evening.”
CHAPTER XVII
Ross planted his elbows in the grimy dust of an east window and gazed across the castle grounds. He saw the party of five moving briskly out of the gate—four guards and Jag
Rouse. The ex-captain was stepping along without being prodded. He would reach the East Village before dark—if he didn’t take it in his head to turn back.
But Ross, watching from the castle, guessed some of the bitter thoughts that plagued the ex-captain. He knew only too well that his own troubles with Jag Rouse weren’t at an end . . .
* * *
As
far as ex-Captain Rouse knew, during that afternoon’s march, the sky was red, the trees were red, the stone bridge that crossed the tumbling headwaters of the Flinfiord river was red. And the waters, too. If ever in his life Jag Rouse had seen red, it was today.
And yet it wasn’t altogether the dismissal that burned him up. Nor Graygortch’s send-off, though the aged master’s words had been a hard jolt. More than anything else it was the sting of losing—losing to that damned scheming trespasser, Ross Bradford.
Jag Rouse muttered to himself. This put him in a class with a stray bull that has to be driven to another herd because he’s the wrong breed, or his brand has grown over, or he’s been sold—
That was it. He’d been sold out by that goddamned Romeo who should have taken the death drop, according to the rules.
What a turn. Here this hare-brained Schubert and three other sailors were giving him the bum’s rush across the mountain trails. And they were already talking about what a swell captain that new man Bradford would be, and what a fancy killer he’d been back in America, and what a handsome daredevil of a husband he’d make for Vivian, and what snappy starch he’d put into the sailors.
“Yep,” said Schubert, “we’re in luck to have a new chief like him, now that our old captain has decided to leave us. We’ll miss you, Jag, you old turnip, but I hear the big boss promoted you to a better set-up.”
“You’d be surprised,” Rouse grunted.
“That’s good,” said Schubert. “As long as you’ve got that extra discipleship coming up—”
“Who told you?” Rouse snapped. “So that is it!” Schubert chuckled. “I figured it was. A guy don’t walk off and let another fellow cop his girl unless there’s a better prize in the air. But that discipleship hangs pretty high in the air, I’m told. You think you can make the jump?”
Rouse snarled. “Why don’t you chase yourselves back home?”
