Collected fiction, p.212
Collected Fiction, page 212
“Andy!” he called. “Susan!”
No answer. What was wrong? Had Di Votan come back?
Trask fought down his growing fear. He went along the hall to the back, and then paused, eying the cellar door. He had left it open after coming up. Now it was closed. That might mean nothing—or everything.
He jerked the door open.
Trask’s reaction was instantaneous. He got a brief glimpse of a dark figure’s back. The man held a glistening object in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He seemed about to throw the shining thing—a bottle—down at Enoch Rice. Enoch’s scrawny figure was crouched at the foot of the stairs, his white, withered face upturned in terror.
Somehow Trask sensed deadly menace in the dark figure’s gesture. He sprang down, intent on seizing the upraised arm.
But the opening of the cellar door had warned the man. Trask was blinded by the glare of the flashlight. Simultaneously he felt a violent blow on his cheek and lost his footing. He went rolling and crashing down the steps, vainly trying to check his momentum. He heard Enoch’s thin, frightened voice.
“Les! Les!”
Trask got up slowly, feeling the warm stickiness of blood on his jaw. He looked up at the bright glare of the flashlight. Dimly he could discern a man’s outline behind it and, more clearly, the glittering reflection on a bottle.
“So I must kill you, too, eh?” said a voice, low and without individuality.
The man reached out behind him with one hand and carefully closed the cellar door. They were in utter darkness that was made more terrible by the blinding flashlight beam.
Trask glanced at the shivering Enoch. No help there. Perhaps if he could get up the stairs—the killer didn’t seem to be armed. But he read Trask’s thought.
“Don’t try it,” he warned. “When I throw this bottle, the cellar will be flooded with hydrocyanic gas.”
“I get it,” the director said.
If he could only play for time, hold off the inevitable doom until someone would open the cellar door and discover the murderer! But it was such a long chance . . .
“I get it,” he repeated. “Don’t think I’m a complete fool. I know how you killed William Rice!”
THE light jerked a little.
“Yes? How?”
“Botulism,” Trask said, nodding toward the shelves of provisions. “When I saw those cans that bulged out at the ends, I guessed the angle.
Canned meats and vegetables sometimes get that way. It’s a toxin, produced by a bacillus, that’s a deadly poison. It’s killed lots of people. A single drop of fluid from the food, placed on the tongue—or inside the stem of William Rice’s pipe—will cause death.”
“You’re smart,” the killer said. “Too smart for your own good. Any more bright ideas before I throw the bottle?”
“Yeah,” Trask stated. “The lodge was fumigated just lately, so it was easy for you to get hold of the hydrocyanic gas. Aside from that there’s the motive.”
“Why should anyone want to kill me?” Enoch gasped.
“Money,” the director snapped. “I bet neither you nor your brother ever made a will. You never let anybody mention death around you, so it’s natural you wouldn’t admit its existence yourself by making a will. If you die, your money and William Rice’s goes to the next of kin—Susan.”
“Susan? But—”
Involuntarily Enoch glanced up at the motionless, silent figure above them.
“And suppose Susan is secretly married?” Trask said. “Her husband will get all the advantages of the fortune he got for her by killing you and your brother. He may have planned it for quite awhile, but this Devil Man curse gave him a ready-made set-up. The crimes might be blamed on the curse. If investigation took place, Gonder and Di Votan could be shouldered with the crimes. Gonder’s a lunatic, ar.d Di was in his power.
“Yeah,” the director went on slowly, “the killer certainly planned this well. But when Dan Wentworth, your nephew, came along, there was an unexpected hitch. Dan was your next of kin, and would inherit the combined fortunes. So he was put out of the way, too.”
There was a silence.
“Serum shock killed him,” the dark figure said, in a changed voice.
“Sure, because he was allergic to the protein in that particular antitoxin. But suppose he’d told somebody about his allergy, and suppose that somebody managed to dope Wentworth with some drug that simulated the symptoms of tetanus? You probably learned about the allergy from Wentworth when you were examining the wound on his leg—Dr. Maddern!”
The man above did not move.
“Maddern?” Enoch gasp. “No!”
“Of course,” said Trask. “This was his chance, when you and your brother were up here, away from any other possible medical aid. I heard Susan talking to her husband in the summerhouse. Later I found something there on the floor. You have a habit of paring your nails when you’re nervous and waiting around, Dr. Maddern. I found nail parings in the summer-house. That gave me the motive and the murderer.
“I don’t know how you managed to induce Susan to marry you, but I feel pretty sure you had your eye on the Rice fortune all along. She was telling you that she loved Andy Hathaway, wasn’t she? And she was trying to get you to agree to give her a divorce. Right?”
“Yes,” Maddern said coldly. “I never loved her, of course. I knew I could persuade her to keep quiet about the marriage and divorce until her uncles were out of the way. Later I planned that she, too, would die.”
“Maddern, why—” Enoch began weakly.
“Do you think I liked playing nurse to a couple of stupid invalids?” the killer cut in. “I, who could make a great name for myself with research? But my salary would keep up only as long as I kept you two idiots healthy. Whenever I tried to do some important research, I was dragged away to this lodge, or Palm Springs, or Tahoe. Certainly I had a motive—two of them—money and hate!”
HE lifted the bottle and stepped back, opening the door a little. Light came through faintly. Trask weighed his chances.
“You might manage to reach the door,” taunted Maddern. “But you’ll find it locked.”
“No, no!” Enoch screamed.
Without warning, the door swung wide. Silhouetted against the light was a huge, grotesque figure that swayed from side to side. A thing with twisted spine and neck bent awry—Di Votan!
“Somebody in the cellar?” the giant mumbled. “Ah!”
Votan’s bestial mask turned. The ice-gray, inflamed eyes focused on the bottle in Maddern’s hand.
“Whisky!” Votan rasped.
He lurched forward, arms extended. The gigantic frame blocked the stairway and prevented the killer from escaping. Maddern backed down a step.
“Keep away, Votan!” he cried. “This isn’t liquor. Keep back! Do you hear?”
The monster’s breath rasped in his throat. He came lumbering down the steps.
“Whisky! Give me whisky!”
Trask’s body was icy cold. If that bottle of deadly gas was knocked from Maddern’s grasp, it would be death. But—Votan kept coming.
The director started to plunge up the stairs, hoping to wrest the bottle from Maddern’s grasp. He was too late. Votan sprang, caroming into the doctor. The two men, locked together, went crashing down the steps. The bottle flew in an arc and vanished into the darkness of the cellar.
Glass crashed and splintered.
Trask sent Enoch Rice up the stairs with a shove. He dared not speak. He was holding his breath against the deadly fumes that he guessed were already flooding the cellar. At his feet lay Dr. Maddern and Votan, motionless.
Somehow Trask managed to drag the actor up the stairway. His lungs were ready to burst when he reached the top, but he made it at last. There he let Votan fall and glanced back.
Maddern lay limp below. To go after him, Trask knew, meant death. He could not hope to hold his breath again while he ran down the stairs and carried the doctor’s body up. His lungs were aching, and Votan needed immediate first aid if he was to have a chance of survival.
Trask’s face was grim as he slammed shut the cellar door and dragged the actor into the nearest room. There was no sign of Enoch. Brandy, artificial respiration and quick work would perhaps save Votan.
Rhythmically Trask bent back and pressed forward, forcing air into the unconscious man’s lungs. Suddenly the room was filled with people from nowhere—the camera crew, Andy Hathaway, Enoch Rice, Susan Kane. Andy pushed Trask aside and took over the job of reviving Votan.
“Gimme a drink,” the director said thickly.
He lifted the bottle someone thrust into his hand. When he lowered it, Hathaway was speaking.
“He’ll live. You’ve saved him, Trask.”
The director, glancing from the caretaker to Susan, grinned weakly and nodded. Susan was free now. Trask had a pretty good hunch that she’d marry Andy Hathaway. He couldn’t think of a better idea for the two of them. And Votan was okay, too. The picture, “Devil Man,” would be finished, another assignment in the cans.
Les Trask tilted up the bottle. He smacked his lips and glanced at the camera crew.
“All right, boys, be on the job at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. We’ll shoot around Votan till he’s ready to put on grease-paint. And when I say eight-thirty, I mean it. We’re making a picture, and we’re finishing it on schedule.”
“My God,” said Enoch Rice, “what a man!”
THE LAND OF TIME TO COME
A Blight Blasts Memory from the Mind of Nan—but Two Mortals Remember a World that Has Forgotten Its Own Rich Heritage of History!
CHAPTER I
Awake and Beware!
PAIN put a sudden period to the words that were slipping so easily through his mind. He lay quiet for a moment, all other awareness wiped out by the throbbing in his skull.
When the pain had ebbed a little, he felt a soft, cool substance between his hands. It felt like a throat, and the subconscious realization made his fingers tighten around it.
But that instinctive reaction was detached from his conscious mind, which strove to grasp some figurative rock above the maelstrom of his thoughts. The words came back.
In the nation that is not Nothing stands that stood before. There revenges are forgot,
And the hater hates no more . . .
Painfully he opened his eyes, focused them blearily. It was a man’s throat between his hands. The man was dead.
“I’ve killed him,” he thought dazedly. “Who was he? Who am I?”
All he could remember was the rhyme to which he had awakened, and some dim recollection of a girl’s face in the sunlight, her lips moving a little as she followed the lines he had been speaking, when . . .
“The nation that is not,” he murmured to himself uncomprehendingly. “The hater hates no more.”
It had no meaning. He looked down without belief at the dead man around whose throat his hands were still locked. This was a nightmare. If he could only remember!
“Woodley. Kent Woodley.” The name swirled through the mists of his aching mind. That was himself. But there was nothing else he could remember.
Sick and giddy, Woodley dragged himself to his knees. Stiffly he unclenched his fingers from the throat. He stood up, swaying.
He was in a cellar. Daylight filtered grayly through cobwebbed, dusty panes high up in the cement walls. In several frames the glass was broken, but Woodley could see nothing outside. There was a rusty furnace in one corner, and a dust-covered mound in a bin near it. Coal, probably. But what was he doing in a cellar?
His mind was a blank as he dazedly examined the body at his feet. It was a man, but no man such as Woodley had ever seen before. Shaggy hair concealed most of the face, and the stocky, bronzed body wore only a filthy animal skin tied about the waist. In one hand was a blood-smeared, jagged stone.
WOODLEY touched its forehead thoughtfully, wincing as he discovered an open cut there. Apparently he had been in a battle with this dead savage. Why?
Woodley found a clue nearby—the carcass of a small deer. He and the bearded man might have fought for possession of the animal. Yet that was scarcely plausible. Men did not eat raw meat in cellars.
Why was he so certain of this? Why was there a sudden flash of memory of cuddling the stock of a rifle against his cheek, peering through the sight at a great-antlered deer? A hunting trip, he thought vaguely.
Again there was that inexplicable, heart-wrenching vision of a girl’s face against a background of blue sky and sea, slim white hands . . .
He shut his eyes and tried to remember. He seemed to see a tall room filled with glass cases. The word “Museum” flashed into his mind. He saw a huge boulder in its case and he was falling toward it, smashing the glass. That was the last thing he remembered before the curtain of darkness had descended upon him.
He opened his eyes once more and saw his hands. They were smeared with blood, calloused, filthy, with talonlike nails. A shock blew like a cold wind against the inside of his ribs. He was wearing a wolfskin, and his bare limbs were tanned almost black! The soles of his feet were hard as horn. His hair was unkempt.
“I need a shave,” Woodley said aloud. His voice was strange to him. Nor could he understand how he knew that he was usually clean-shaven. “It’s amnesia,” he went on slowly. “Loss of memory. I’ve heard of such things.”
Surely, though, this situation was utterly abnormal. Every fiber of his subconscious mind sensed strangeness in it. It was not right. If only he could remember a little! Again he examined the dead man, feeling repugnance as he did so.
“This must be new to me,” he mused. “I don’t think I’ve killed before, or made a habit of it, at least. Just what did happen?”
The cold, bearded face of the corpse aroused another of those brief flashes of memory. Suddenly Woodley remembered the fur-clad man rushing toward him, gripping the jagged stone menacingly. He had leaped away from the deer he’d killed and met the attack.
The memory ended. Nothing was left. Woodley felt alone and lost in a world he could not hope to understand. There was something more than amnesia that made him shrink from the thought of leaving the cellar. The sense of danger was connected somehow with the bearded dead man. Woodley felt that a real menace was still present, watchful and deadly.
There was a flight of steps leading up into gloom. Woodley mounted them, to emerge in a twilit room whose windows were black with grime. There were chairs and a table, the latter overturned. The shards of a vase were dust-covered on a moldy carpet. A square box that stood on a shelf in one wall drew Woodley toward it.
There were several dials and. pushbuttons studding its front. He wiped dust from a panel and saw odd markings that aroused a chord of memory, but he could not read or understand them.
ON an impulse, he turned the dials.
Something should happen. Music should emerge from the box. The name “radio” leaped into his mind.
Shaking his shaggy head, he left it and crossed the rotting carpet toward a broken door, sagging on its hinges. Past the threshold he discovered another room, quite empty, but with a flood of sunlight shimmering through a smashed window. Beyond it he saw blue and green.
Going closer, Woodley recognized trees, and, beyond them, the sky, pellucid and cloudless. He put both hands on the window-frame and stared out, amazed.
Surely this was not right! He looked across a broad expanse of sloping ground, covered with weedy growths and underbrush, to a forested park that stretched to right and left as far as he could see. Leaves flickered in the blazing sunlight. A soft sighing drifted to Woodley’s ears. The wind murmured gently through the trees, cooling the humid air. Beyond the forest towers rose.
“The topless towers of Ilium,” Woodley thought. “The face that—”
Janet!
Only the name, and it was gone like a sea-wave, back into the mental abyss from which it had been whirled. Woodley’s fingers tightened on the sill, heedless of the broken glass that cut his horn-hard skin. He felt sickening and horrible loss, a desolate longing as he looked out upon the green, sunlit world that was suddenly so alien to him.
Silent and enigmatic the towers rose far distant. Their stone sides were studded with windows. Within the great structures, Woodley knew, people lived. They were not clad as he was, did not wear wolfskins and go half-naked.
He clambered through the broken window, landing lightly on the ground outside. His legs bent springily, as though with long practice. Struck by a thought, Woodley examined the muscles of his arms. They were lithe and strong as the muscles of a savage. He shook his head, oddly puzzled at this.
The contour of the ground was also “wrong.” Soil seemed to have drifted on to a street, a rooting place for plants, which grew here profusely. Woodley knelt and scraped away with both hands till, a few feet down, he uncovered a hard surface of concrete. Somehow he had expected this. Yet he was a little frightened at the discovery. Such a metamorphosis could not have taken place in a month or a year.
How long had his conscious mind remained dormant? What had happened during that time?
A sound brought him to his feet, looking up. To left and right, fronting the park, were buildings, silent and des-date. Some were brownstones, four and five stories high. Others were great monuments towering far above ground level. It was froth, a brownstone that Woodley had emerged.
What had made that sound? It did not recur, but he felt that eyes were upon him—hostile eyes, well hidden. Some subtle sense, conditioned to this strange world rather than to his mind, told him of furtive movement going on unseen. There were so many mysteries!
THE buildings towered even higher into the sky toward the south. In that direction, Woodley knew, was water, but it was salt. Fresh water lay directly across the park. He remembered a broad river, spanned by web-work bridges under which boats plied.
He glimpsed a movement in the building he had left, whipped around. It was his own reflection in a window that had remained unbroken. Woodley moved closer, fascinated by the unrecognizable.
