by Lin Carter
The hawk-faced Hindu tested his bonds by slightly tensing the muscles of his forearms. As he did so a cutting pressure tightened about his throat, stopping his breath. The moment that Chandra Lal ceased exerting pressure upon his bound wrists, the strangling pressure at his throat lessened. In this manner the cunning and resourceful Hindu learned that a loop of his wrist-bonds was fastened about his throat.
It was an old Chinese trick, although Chandra Lai knew it not. If a man tied in this manner seriously attempted to free his hands, he could garrote himself. The Hindu wisely abandoned the attempt.
His movement had been slight and surreptitious, and the four Chinamen who lugged him through the dim, dusty storerooms apparently did not realize their burden had returned to consciousness. Chandra lay in their grip, relaxed, head lolling back, pretending that he was still unconscious. But he kept his eyes slitted partway open so as to observe as much of his surroundings and of the route whereby he was being carried deeper into the building as he could.
Some of the doors wherethrough he was borne were secret panels in the walls. One of them in particular excited the admiration of Chandra Lal because of the cleverness with which it was hidden. A stack of dusty bales taller than a man, and piled every which way, stood against a wall. From the looks of them, and from the dust which lay heavily upon their upper surfaces, the pile of boxes had not been disturbed in years, perhaps even decades.
One of the slim youths reached out, caught a projecting edge of one box which jutted out precariously from the others. His fingers fumbled for a moment, feeling for a secret catch. They found it and pressed it home. A rusty click came to the ears of Chandra Lal, loud in the silence of the stifling room. Then, suddenly, the entire pile of bales and boxes swung away from the wall, to reveal a hidden opening which yawned blackly before them.
Through eyes squeezed half-shut, the Hindu saw that the seemingly haphazard stack of boxes were actually all fitted together, joined by nails or bolts in some cunning manner, and obviously they were empty, from the lightness with which they swung clear of the wall and the ease wherewith the slenderwristed Chinese boy moved them. Their backs were all securely fastened to the panel, which opened out from the wall on rusty hinges.
Chandra Lal remained limp as if still out cold, but inwardly he grinned. He could not help being impressed at the cleverness with which the secret door was concealed from prying eyes. These Orientals were, he thought to himself, every bit as cunning as the old Kali priest cult of his native country, whose secret and forbidden temples were honey-combed with hidden doors and secret tunnels!
The youth in the lead fumbled with his sash for a moment, drew forth a shiny new nickel-plated flashlight, and turned it on. He directed the cone of brilliance into the black opening in the wall. Now there could be seen a rickety flight of wooden stairs which wound down into the unknown depths beneath the buildings. They started downward, lugging the bound figure between them. The last of them to step through the secret door pulled it shut behind him and re-engaged the locking mechanism. Had there been any eye to observe the room they had just left, it would have seen nothing about the room to denote that a party of men had passed through it. The stack of boxes against the wall were piled crazily and thick with dust, as if they had not been moved in years; dust lay thick and undisturbed upon their upper surfaces, and upon the floor itself. It would have taken a keen eye indeed to note that the layers of dust were held by a thin coat of some adhesive substance akin to glue, and the dust could not be disturbed by anything less than the steel blade of a knife.
They bore the limp figure of Chandra Lal through a winding maze of underground passages. From time to tune, the boy in the lead would hiss a sudden warning by drawing in the breath between his teeth sharply. At such times, the others would come to an abrupt halt while the leader did something to the wooden beam directly ahead. These beams stood out at intervals along the sides of the passages and after several such sudden halts, Chandra Lal was able to make out what it was that the young Chinaman did: there would be a rusty nailhead in the beam which protruded a third of an inch from the wood of the beam, and this nailhead the boy would press firmly in so that it no longer obtruded. When this was done — and then only — did the gang advance.
Chandra Lal was intrigued by this curious action, and puzzled over it during the journey. When he finally concluded the reason for these inexplicable acts, the blood ran ice cold in his veins. The underground passages were a series of death-traps, and the Chinese boy was carefully disarming them one by one.
And Chandra Lal began to sweat. He wished now that he had never made that phone call from the street corner — that he had never apprised Prince Zarkon as to the location of the secret hide-out in which the fleeing Pei Ling had sought refuge.
For if Zarkon followed, he would be walking into a trap. A trap laid with all the merciless cunning of the ageless Oriental ... and it was Chandra Lal who was the bait in that trap!
At length, they brought him into a big dark room and deposited him in a chair. Handcuffs were affixed to the back and legs of this chair, and before the hawk-faced Hindu quite realized what was happening, the cuffs closed with a metallic click about his upper arms and feet.
Had he realized in time, perhaps the Rajput would have resisted, would have somehow striven to fight or struggle, despite the fact that his arms were still fastened securely behind his back, and his feet tied together, and the strangling cord still noosed about his neck. But now, with the clank of grim finality, as the cuffs were locked about him, the moment passed and his last chance to strive for freedom was gone.
He sat in a very uncomfortable position, wrists bound tightly together in the small of his back, with his back and arms pressed against the back of the chair. But still he pretended unconsciousness, letting his head loll on one shoulder as if he were still out. Wetness trickled down his brow from where the Chinese boys had clubbed him with the butt of the revolver. They had appeared out of nowhere while he stood in the illuminated street-corner telephone booth. The first inkling that Chandra Lai had that he was observed had come when one of them wrenched the door open while a second smashed the barrel of a revolver through the glass panel of the enclosed booth to menace him. Then they had struck him in the face and dragged him, limp and bleeding from a cut on the brow, from the booth, his feet crunching through the broken glass.
There was a muttered command in a sibilant tone, spoken in a lisping, sing-song language which Chandra Lal did not understand. Someone bent to crush a small glass vial in a handkerchief under his nostrils. The sharp medicinal stench of ammonia burnt his nasal passages. He coughed, gagged, and permitted his head to raise groggily, peering about in a mystified manner, as if still woozy from the blow on the head.
There was not the slightest trace of illumination in the room. It was pitch-black as the inside of a cave. Chandra Lal heard the whisper of slippers on the boards of the floor, as the unseen youths stepped away from him. He peered about him groggily, as if trying to ascertain his whereabouts.
Suddenly the lights came on, dazzlingly, blindingly.
Instinctively, the tall Rajput squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden glare of brilliance. When he peered forth cautiously again, the bound man saw that the illumination came from a bank of powerful spotlights set into the further wall.
Between the bank of spotlights and himself there stood a man. Against the blaze of electric fire he was only a black silhouette — a motionless shape, like a cardboard cutout. So bright were the lights that flashed directly into the face of Chandra Lal that the Hindu could not make out the slightest detail of the motionless man’s appearance. And, since the other was standing, and he was sitting, the altered perspective even made it impossible for the hawk-faced Hindu to guess at the man’s height.
Squinting against the glare, the Rajput blinked at the unmoving figure. It seemed swathed in bulky robes of some opaque material, obviously arranged so as to conceal the build of the man’s body. It even concealed
the sex; for all that Chandra Lal could ascertain, the standing figure could have been that of a woman. It was impossible to tell.
The strangest thing about the robed figure was that its head was hidden in a hood or cowl. It lent the motionless figure an eerie, almost uncanny, look. It resembled nothing so much as the conventional representation of a ghost or spirit. Where the man’s face should have been, the hood framed only blackness. The hairs lifted along the nape of Chandra Lal’s neck. The flesh crept on his forearms. His stomach knotted in a cold lump and icy tendrils of superstitious fear curled and slithered through his dazed, uncomprehending brain. He could have sworn that the hood framed only — emptiness!
But that was irrational and impossible, Chandra Lal told himself fiercely.
These men were only a gang of criminals! They were not specters or apparitions. They fought with guns and physical methods of coercion, not with black magic ...
And then he remembered the Invisible Death, and his blood ran cold with uncanny dread. The Invisible Death! The death that struck through closed doors into empty rooms and killed without leaving so much as a scratch on the bodies of its helpless victims! What was that, if not devil magic?
The black jungles and secret shrines of India knew such weird magic ... the hidden cities of Asia were home to uncanny cults of dark magicians ... perhaps even here, beyond the great ocean, in the heart of a great Western metropolis, the age-old devil-magic of the East had crept, and found a hidden lair, and flourished, growing strong in the secret darkness!
Then the motionless figure spoke at last.
Its voice was one which he could have sworn he had never heard before. It had a hollow, echoing ring to it that was strange and unearthly. The sort of voice that might have spoken out of empty air, but which did not sound as if it had come from a human mouth or a living man.
“I am the Grim Reaper,” it said.
CHAPTER 16 — Inspector Ricks’ Warning
Zarkon and the Omega men, with Doctor Ernestine Grimshaw, left the Beechview estate of Ogilvie Mather within minutes after receiving Chandra Lal’s message. Traveling in two cars, they drove recklessly through the night to Jerred Streiger’s mansion in Holmwood, and not a few of the local traffic laws but were severely bent, such was the dangerous speed at which Nick Naldini and Ace Harrigan drove the automobiles down the winding, tree-lined lanes.
In the back seat of the lead car, skinny little Menlo Parker squeezed his eyes shut and winced nervously as the former stage magician took a sharp turn on two wheels only. The frail physicist was in a vile temper anyway, since the curvaceous girl doctor was in the front seat, and Menlo’s reputation as a woman-hater was unparalleled, to the point that his associates often joked amongst themselves that he had a physical allergy to skirts, soprano voices, and silk stockings.
The wild recklessness with which Nick Naldini took the curves, however, did nothing to alleviate the edgy nervousness of Menlo Parker. He squinted sourly at Scorchy Muldoon, who sat beside him in the rear seat of the vehicle.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was you drivin’, Scorchy,” the bony little scientist said peevishly.
The Pride of the Muldoons bristled by instinctive reflex at the crack. Scorchy’s invariable inability to drive an automobile for more than thirty feet without hitting something, even if he had to cross the road and climb an embankment to manage it, was legend among the Omega men. His awful driving habits were all the more inexplicable, since the feisty little prize-fighter could do so many other things with such a high degree of professional skill. It was a topic on which Scorchy was inordinately sensitive; generally, it was Nick Naldini who made such cracks; seldom was he on the receiving end of such a remark from Menlo Parker.
The fighter cast a wounded look at the frail little scientist.
“Not you, too, Menlo,” he complained in injured tones. “Dang it all, ‘tis unfair o’ yez to make remarks loike that! ‘Tain’t my fault; it’s the crummy cars they do be after makin’. Blasted things are made so cheap, these days, ‘tis a scandal! ‘S a wonder they let ‘em on th’ road at all, at all!”
Menlo Parker opened his thin lips to give utterance to a further stinging riposte; but just then Nick Naldini took another curve, an even sharper one, and on little more than one wheel, this time. Menlo closed his mouth with a sharp gasp and squinched his eyes shut.
“Let me know when we git there,” he groaned faintly. “An’ if it’s the Pearly Gates, instead of Streiger’s place, I’ll not be surprised!”
Despite Menlo’s dire prediction, it was to Twelve Oaks after all, and not the front door of Heaven, that Nick Naldini arrived. He pulled the long black car up before the gates, tires squealing in the gravel, and honked deafeningly until old Pipkin came tumbling out of the gatekeeper’s house in his night-shirt, to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Grumbling and cursing, dragging his arms into the sleeves of a threadbare, snuff-colored robe, which he had hastily snatched up against the chill of dawn, the silver-haired old fellow opened the gates and let the two cars through, recognizing the Omega men in the glow of his flashlight.
They pulled the cars around the carriage-drive, parking them in the rear of the house. There, squatting like a gigantic silvery insect from Mars, the big helicopter rested in the middle of an unused tennis court.
Zarkon and his men, with Ernestine Grimshaw in the rear, piled out and sprinted across the dewy grass for the copter. It was fueled and ready to go a few minutes later. Dawn was pale in the graying east as the vans started up with a whir and the chopper bounced lightly and springily on its undercarriage.
Inside, Doctor Ernestine Grimshaw stared about with surprise. She found leather-padded seats and a heated, soundproof cabin equipped with mobile phones, long-distance radio, and even a televisor screen. She had never seen a helicopter quite so roomy and comfortable and as noiseless as this one, as she remarked to Nick Naldini.
The ex-vaudevillian grinned in his Mephistophelean manner as he assisted the girl into one of the comfortable seats and helped her buckle into the safety harness.
“Wait until you see the Silver Ghost in action, my dear,” he said, in the fawning and fulsome manner he habitually adopted when conversing with unattached young women of more than ordinary pulchritude. “She is able to sustain a truly remarkable velocity — can land on the proverbial dime — and has any number of other extraordinary conveniences and capabilities built in, which may surprise you! The craft was constructed for Prince Zarkon by the Hazzard Laboratories, right here on Long Island out at College Point, and incorporates a number of special design modifications which are of the chief’s own invention.”
By this time they had all climbed into the cabin of the Silver Ghost, found seats for themselves, strapped in, and were ready to lift off. Ace Harrigan, at the controls, pulled her nose into the air. Effortlessly as a leaf gliding on the wind, the big chopper floated up from the tennis court, circled the mansion of Jerred Streiger once, then drifted off to the west in the direction of the giant metropolis.
Since the cabin was perfectly soundproofed, Doctor Ernestine Grimshaw could not have ascertained one of the more remarkable features of Zarkon’s flying ship. But that was the spectral silence wherewith the huge, glittering craft glided through the air. Most helicopters in use today raise an almost deafening clatter and can be heard approaching almost half a mile away. But the aptly-named Silver Ghost floated through the early morning sky as soundlessly as a drifting cloud. She seemed indeed like some apparition from the world of shadows as she soared through the dawn. An interconnecting sequence of fiberglass-insulated mufflers cut the noise of her rotors to a mere whisper, and the blades of the helicopter themselves were of a special flexible plastic which made hardly any noise at all as they sliced through the air.
Zarkon took out the mobile telephone receiver and dialed police headquarters in Knickerbocker City, asking for the Homicide Bureau, and then for Detective Inspector Ricks. In a few moments the crisp voice of that officer r
eplied; he had, as it turned out, worked all night long over a murder case, and was luckily still at headquarters.
In terse, brief phrases, the Man of Mysteries explained the present circumstance.
“We have been able to trace the murderer of Jerred Streiger to a tea shop on the edge of Chinatown called Wang Foo’s,” the Ultimate Man explained. He was about to give the street address of the establishment, but as it turned out, he soon discovered, there was no need to elucidate. Surprise was eloquent in the police officer’s voice as he responded.
“Wang Foo’s, eh?” said Ricks in amazement. “Know it well — mighty unsavory reputation, the place has. Or had: it’s been closed down for many a year. You quite sure that’s the place you mean, Your Highness? Because I’ve had no reason to suspect that the gang was back in operation again!”
“I take it you are familiar with the establishment, Inspector?” said Zarkon.
Ricks’ voice was grim as he made reply. “I’ll say I am! Although Chinatown is not exactly my beat, these days, and things are pretty quiet down there now. Time was, though, when the joint was jumping, and we had more trouble down in that part of town than in the rest of the borough put together! That was back when the Tongs were still active, of course, and the gangs were going strong.”
“Tell me what you know about Wang Foo’s,” Zarkon suggested quietly, cutting through the officer’s excited verbiage.
“Well, for years it was the headquarters of one of the Chinatown gangs,” said Ricks. “Wang Foo was a prosperous tea merchant, as far as anybody knew; but he turned out to be a crook. He’s dead, years ago. But he’s only part of the story. All that old part of Chinatown, you know, where the buildings are set back to back on crooked alleys, are a warren of hidden tunnels and secret passages. Wang Foo’s shop was one of several entrances by which the initiate could gain entry to the lair of Choy Lown. He was an old man — nobody knew just how old — who squatted there in the secret heart of Chinatown, like a fat, wrinkled yellow spider at the center of his web. An evil legend, that was Choy Lown — a sinister patriarch, a mysterious sage! He ruled Chinatown from the shadows. His word was law to a horde of invisible minions; his secret lair was shielded by all sorts of cunning deathtraps. It’s said that only one man ever penetrated those secret defenses to confront Choy Lown face to face.”
