Liquid Death And Other Stories

by John Russell Fearn

  Ensdale shrugged. "Snake venom was already known to be in her system, though neutralized. The presence of a little more would not excite suspicion—nor did it. I merely gave her a second shot, so that she would not talk too much."

  "You are remarkably frank," Dawson remarked, vaguely puzzled.

  "Why not? Having admitted one thing, I might as well admit the remainder…" But, just the same, there was an. enigmatic light in Ensdale's sharp eyes. He appeared to be thinking swiftly.

  "I assume you insisted on joining our final conference so that you could discover exactly what we meant to do?"

  "Naturally."

  "I'm glad you did. I'd suspected you for a long time, and that move satisfied me. You had no real need to be so interested, not being actively engaged on the case, beyond the pathological side. Very ingenious, Ensdale. An imperial beard for the Chief, and none for Ensdale. Right?"

  Ensdale mopped his face. "For God's sake, Dawson, stop playing around with me and hand over that hypo. I can't stand any more of this!"

  Dawson complied and watched in silence as Ensdale quickly bared his arm again and sank the needle into a vein. He depressed the hypo-plunger to its limit and then smiled grimly to himself.

  "That's better!" he said, in relief, "or will be, when it gets circulating. Well, gentlemen—anything more?"

  "We'll be moving," Dawson said. "And I'm glad to see you are taking this business sensibly, Ensdale."

  Ensdale drew on his jacket and buttoned it precisely.

  "Before we go, Dawson, I have one or two experiments in progress in this basement. Have I your permission to switch off the current?"

  "Go ahead," Dawson agreed, watching narrowly. "But don't try anything funny."

  The scientist turned away to a switch panel, pulled out a number of plugs, snapped over several make-and-break switches, and then looked about him.

  "I'm ready," he said, but in striding forward he bent double and nearly fell to his knees. Immediately, Dawson and one of the constables helped him to straighten again. There was anguish in every line of his face.

  "The—the antidote's a long time working," he panted slowly. "I only hope you didn't let me have it too late, Dawson. If you did, that makes you a murderer, too."

  "Or an unwitting judge." Dawson answered. "We'll give you a hand up the steps."

  "No—no—I don't need that. I can do it better by myself. You needn't think I'm trying to attempt anything. I'm far too ill for that."

  Holding his middle and biting at his lips to stifle cries of pain, Ensdale tottered to the steps and began to climb them. Dawson nodded to his men and began to follow. He kept immediately behind Ensdale until the top stair was reached, then the scientist unexpectedly swung round and lashed out his foot. How much the effort cost him in physical anguish could not be measured. All Dawson knew was that he received the savage blow straight in the face, the whole world seeming to explode in sparks around him. He stumbled backwards, knocking over the man coming behind him.

  Then Ensdale was beyond the doorway to the hall, and it closed with a violent bang.

  VIII

  DAZED, BLOOD STREAMING from his face from a deep gash in his cheek, Dawson struggled upright again as his men helped him.

  "Never mind me!" he panted, whipping out his handkerchief. "Get after Ensdale—quick!"

  At that, one of the men bounded to the top of the stairs and shoved violently on the tightly locked door. In a moment or two he was reinforced by his colleagues and, in unison, they shoved and kicked against the panels, without result. Dawson watched them, mopping his face and fuming by turns.

  "Get something from below," he ordered. "There must be a something we can use as a jimmy, or a crowbar or…" He stopped, breaking off into a fit of uncontrollable coughing as a heavy odor wafted past him and nearly stopped his breathing.

  "That's chlorine gas!" one of the men ejaculated, startled. "I'd know it anywhere."

  "Gas—gas—or otherwise, we want something to open this door!" Dawson got his voice back with an effort; then he turned to attempt the task himself, using his handkerchief both to cover his mouth and protect his gashed cheek.

  It was when he reached the floor of the basement, the coughing men coming down behind him, that he realized how dense the gas was becoming. It could be heard hissing somewhere.

  "Ensdale must have done this when he monkeyed around with that switchboard," one of the men said, looking about him with watering eyes. "If we could find where… there!" And he pointed to a nozzle projecting from a tank rather like an oxygen cylinder.

  Even to approach it, however, was useless. It was emitting the deadly gas freely, and its nozzle was electrically controlled. To deal with it without masks was a hopeless proposition.

  "Here!" Dawson had been exploring hastily, and now started to unclamp a heavy vice from the bench.

  "This ought to smash the door through."

  Coughing and gasping, their eyes watering as the choking fumes grew denser around them, the men began to struggle with the clamps of the vice and, at last, got it free. It took two of them to carry it up the steps. Dawson and the remaining man followed them, handkerchiefs pressed to their faces.

  In three massive blows, the vice crashed through the wood of the hall door—but, instead of tumbling into the hall beyond, it clanged against something metallic, and then fell down into a cavity beyond the door.

  "I'll be damned!" Dawson muttered. "A steel slide. We can't get through that. Evidently Ensdale had this house of his fixed for any eventuality."

  The four men looked at each other anxiously, struggling to get some fresh air into their lungs—then one of them snapped his fingers.

  "This basement may originally have been a coal cellar! There could be a grid or something to throw the coal through!"

  Immediately they blundered down the steps again, hurrying into the basement beyond the laboratory section. Here the air was a trifle clearer, but their hopes of a coal chute or grid were instantly dashed. A steel slide was in position here, too, fixed in well-greased grooves, and probably electrically controlled from somewhere in the house above. Every means of escape was sealed.

  "Damned cunning swine, isn't he?" Dawson muttered, still mopping his damaged face. "Only one thing for it, boys, if we don't want to be choked to death mighty soon."

  "What's that, sir? Try and smash a way through the wall?"

  "No. That wouldn't do any good. I was thinking of that mercury fulminate. Which one of you has it?"

  One of the men looked rather astonished, and then scared. Carefully, he felt in his uniform jacket and finally produced the phial. Dawson took it and gave a frown.

  "To the best of my knowledge, mercury fulminate is a form of grayish crystal," he said. "This is either mixed with something else to give it its syrupy look, or else Ensdale was just bluffing, knowing we wouldn't dare argue!"

  In fascination, the constables watched as he uncorked the bottle and sniffed at it. He smiled bitterly.

  "Acetone! Can't you smell the peppermint?"

  "I can't smell anything but that damned chlorine!" one of the constables muttered, "and it's getting thicker, sir. Ensdale was fooling, then?"

  "Obviously. He knew we'd not dare to argue, and probably imagined that, since he is a physicist, we'd think he'd doctored the stuff up somehow. Fact remains it's no use… better see what else there is."

  They returned into the laboratory section of the basement, but they could only search for a few minutes before they found the fumes of the still escaping chlorine gas too much for them. They retreated into a far corner of cellar without having accomplished anything, and even here, the fumes were becoming denser, keeping all of them in a constant state of coughing.

  "Surely," one of the constables asked, "there ought to be an acetylene cutter in a laboratory like this?"

  "Very probably," Dawson agreed, "but when you're nearly knocked senseless by the gas, what's the use of trying to search? If any of you men have lungs strong enough to ca
p that chlorine nozzle, we might accomplish something; I can't do it—I'm bronchial even in the normal way."

  One of the constables suddenly made up his mind, driven by the desperate thought that death was the answer if something was not done immediately. He took as deep a breath as he dared of the mephitic atmosphere, then set off with his handkerchief clamped to his mouth and nose. The others watched him, struggling desperately to keep their senses.

  After a while, however, the constable came back, and allowed his pent-up breath to escape in an explosive gasp.

  "That—that's not doing the damage, sir!" he panted. "It's empty and labeled 'oxygen'. There's a sealed oxygen cylinder above it, and another one of sealed hydrogen on top of that. The chlorine is at the very top, coming from a jet let into the wall. Can't do a thing about it… we got the wrong idea."

  "Oh—hell!" Dawson looked about him in desperation; then, quite suddenly, his eyes gleamed. "Wait! Did you say a cylinder of oxygen and one of hydrogen? Sealed?"

  "According to the labels on them—yes."

  "I've got to have them! Also that empty Dewar flask from by the wall there."

  The constable nodded, but Dawson did not expect him to do the task all by himself. He jerked his head and advanced, holding his breath as much as possible, disregarding the ooze of blood still trickling down his cheek.

  To remove the two unwanted cylinders was not difficult, with four of them to handle the job and, in the process, they could see the jet from which the chlorine was apparently coming. It was too high up to be got at, however, let alone capped, and in any case, Dawson seemed to be in possession of some new idea.

  Under his directions, as they battled with their tortured lungs, the cylinders were carried to the top of the stone steps, whilst Dawson and the remaining man brought the big Dewar flask, probably used originally for the storage of liquid air. Up at the summit of the steps, the chlorine gas was not so dense, due mainly to its fairly heavy specific gravity, which kept it, as yet, at the lower levels.

  "What's the idea, sir?" one of the men questioned, as Dawson directed them to hold the Dewar flask upside down on a level with their shoulders.

  "An experiment," Dawson answered briefly, busy with the nozzle of the oxygen cylinder. "Think yourselves lucky I'm in the scientific division. My aim is to get two parts of hydrogen and one of oxygen into this Dewar flask, in which they'll remain, if it's held upside down. I've got to guess my bulk measurement, but it ought to be near enough. After that, we need a fuse of some kind. The moment the flame gets near those combined gases, it ought to blow the steel door and maybe half the house to blazes. It's our last and only chance, before the chlorine gets too dense. Fortunately, chlorine has an affinity for both hydrogen and oxygen, so there'll be no trouble in that respect."

  The constables looked at each other and said nothing. They knew little of chemical formula—at least, not in such a specialized way. All they could do between spells of coughing was support the flask whilst Dawson operated the nozzle of first one and then the other, directing the released gases into the inverted 'goldfish bowl'.

  "Right!" he said, finally. "That's as near as we can get it. The proportions are roughly right. Lower the flask, boys, wrong way up."

  He was obeyed. This done, he raised one edge slightly, and kept it supported by means of a sheet of paper torn from a notepad from his pocket, which he formed into a wedge. With some more of the paper, twisted into long lengths, he made a fuse that trailed erratically down the stone steps to about half way. Then he looked at the men.

  "This may be our finish, boys," he said quietly: "The explosion will be terrific—it always is with even a small proportion of oxygen and hydrogen—and for that reason, everything may come down on top of us. Our aim and hope is that that steel door, or the wall surrounding it, will be blown away. Ready to try it?"

  The constables nodded grimly.

  "Right—get below, into the furthest corner of the cellar and I'll join you in a moment."

  The men wasted no time, and neither did Dawson. He flicked his lighter, applied it to the paper fuse, and then hurried down into the suffocating, odorous atmosphere as fast as he could go. Here he joined the constables, and they all crouched with their faces to the wall, waiting tensely. Such a long interval elapsed, it seemed to them that something must have gone wrong.

  Then it came—ear-shattering in its violence—to the accompaniment of a blinding flash of energy as the two gases united to form water. Immediately, Dawson went hurriedly to the steps.

  "We did it!" one of the men cried behind him. "Or rather—you did, sir!"

  There was no doubt about it. The steel slide itself was still in place in its runners, the explosion not having been powerful enough to blast through it, but the surrounding wall was a crumbled ruin of dust, brick and mortar. Over everything there hung a dense cloud of smoke.

  Dawson led the way out through the aperture, thankful to breathe comparatively clear air again. Reaching the hall light switch, he depressed it and, to his satisfaction, the light came up, glimmering through the ashy haze. It was also at this moment that there came a sudden commotion at the front door.

  One of the constables moved quickly to open it. Instantly Harriday, Gwenda and Thompson came hurrying in.

  "You all right, sir?" Harriday asked quickly.

  "Just about—except for a lovely gash in the face—hello, Gwenda, still in one piece in spite of everything that's happened?"

  "Like you—just about!" She gave a wan smile.

  "Where's Ensdale?" Thompson demanded. "And what's been going on in here? We heard the explosion as we came up. We came as quickly as we could."

  Dawson gave the details and then added: "Which makes it a pretty hectic night's work for all of us. I'd better get on to the Yard immediately and have them tip off the boys to get on the hunt for Ensdale. After that, we'll get the rest of them. Oh, yes, there's an ambulance needed for 'Mopes'."

  Dawson turned and caught sight at the nearest door—the drawing room—which was slightly ajar. He moved forward, pushed open the door, and then paused in surprise. The light was presumably on from when Ensdale had left the room to track down 'Mopes'.

  And, on the floor, his hands tightly clenched in a final paroxysm, was Ensdale himself.

  "I'll be a—!" Dawson stopped and gazed down on the figure for a moment, then hurried forward and made a quick examination.

  "Dead?" Harriday questioned, coming in with Gwenda behind him.

  "Absolutely." Dawson frowned to himself and stood up again. "I don't understand it. He used the antidote for snake-bite, because we watched him."

  Shelving the subject for the moment, he crossed to the nearby telephone and raised it. In a few minutes he had given his orders to the Yard; then he looked at the corpse again. Finally, he left the room and descended into the ruined basement. When he returned, he had the bottle marked 'Anti-Ser-Rat' in his hand.

  "It looks to me," he said slowly, "as though 'Mopes' McCall was not such a bonehead as he looked. I've just made a test of this stuff below, and it's plain water. No wonder Ensdale got no result from it!"

  Harriday shrugged. "Come to think of it, that's just poetic justice in a way. He fooled the lot of you with phony mercury fulminate, so he could get the better of you and have the antidote given to him, and 'Mopes' had fooled him by turning the stuff into water. Makes you wonder where double-dealing and lying ends, sometimes."

  "I don't think it makes me wonder," Dawson replied, putting the bottle on the desk. "There's a corpse in the cellar, and there's one here. They speak for themselves, in a fashion. As for the rest of 'em connected with this unholy set-up, we'll find them one by one, and bring them to account. The one main tragedy, to my mind, is that a man as clever as Ensdale was, should have been so criminally-minded. If he had been entirely on our side, what couldn't he have done to make the world a lot safer for law-abiding citizens?"

  *DEATH ASKS THE QUESTION*

  I Fiend incarnate

  THE
HOME OF Abner Hilton was situated in a none-too populous region several miles from Philadelphia. It stood in solitary magnificence in its own grounds—a passably prosperous looking place, its nearest neighbors being a dozen similar homes at regular distances. To back and front there was nothing but wild, open country—the former looking over rugged moorland to a distant hill; the latter towards the smoky line on the horizon that denoted Philadelphia itself.

  Within the dilapidated, depressing interior of the Hilton home, Abner Hilton sat scowling at his broken, dirty nails. The internal surroundings were as filthy as he was. Weak daylight filtering through the half-drawn Venetian blind glanced on faded, rotting wallpaper. It touched the spare furniture of the place, the most substantial article being an unusually long deal table provided with sloping wooden runnels on either side.

  In the room beyond, turned by the poor, half insane Hilton into a bedroom, the same drab daylight fell on muddy gray tangled sheets and dust caked floorboards.

  Gloom, depression—subhuman morbidity. All these things stalked the jetty shadows of the horrible place and filled both the rooms and Abner with a certain hellish meaning.

  He was waiting—waiting for his young niece to visit him. He had not seen her since her childhood. She was worth a fortune in money and he wasn't worth a dime.

  The thing to do then was to kill her, very skillfully, and throw the blame onto her fiance Courtney Wayne, a young Philadelphian engineer. Once it was done he could have the money for himself under the will of his dead brother, the girl's father.

  For months he had brooded over the idea in his rotting little retreat. She would come, surely. The outside of the house looked quite prepossessing. The neighborhood was fairly select and quiet. Finally he had written a letter. His one time culture had enabled him to write it very convincingly, expressing the urgent wish to see her and convey a confidential message that had been left in his keeping by her dead father.