The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (2 page)

Up the steps and into the plane. A roar of the props, slam of the metal door, which was locked into place, and then motion. And Benson looked around. He was doomed right then, though he didn’t know it.

There were six men and a woman in the plane besides the Bensons. The woman was young, pretty, but with a hard line around her mouth. One of the men was big and flabby with surplus flesh; another was big, but not flabby, and had pads of black hair on his hands; a third was short and stout, and chewed an unlit black cigar. The other three were just average, to be lost in a crowd.

“Comfortable, honey?”

Benson leaned forward in the seat and laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder. A perfect union was advertised in every movement of these two.

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” smiled Alicia Benson. And little Alice piped up, “I’m fine, too, daddy.”

Benson relaxed, body moving easily to the slight motion of the plane. Off to the west, at their tail, the late sim dipped under the horizon and purple dusk capped the landscape.

They were on a visit to a deathbed; but Alicia’s mother was old, and death comes gently to the aged. In spite of their errand, Benson could not help but feel almost happy as he dwelt on the great good fortune that was his.

He had the world by the tail—or so it seemed as the grim purple dusk lowered. A perfect family, a large fortune to lavish on them, comparative youth, and health—

The plane roared east and north. Underneath, the ebon surface of Lake Ontario was a black steel sheet under a starless sky. The short, stout man chewed his dead cigar and stared expressionlessly at Benson and the softly beautiful woman and the little girl. The big man with the pads of black hair on the backs of his hands looked out the window, paying no attention to anyone.

The stewardess, a girl of twenty or so, slim and attractive in the airline uniform, bent over Mrs. Benson to ask if she and the little girl were all right. And Benson got up, rubbing his hands together. They felt sticky. He wanted to wash them.

He started forward to the tiny men’s lavatory.

Again, from his movements you could get a story of rare physical power compacted in an average-sized frame. This man was just old enough to have a veteran fighter’s experience; just young enough to have the fire and endurance of youth. He blended both into a fusion of strength and swiftness that is seldom witnessed.

Alicia Benson smiled at him, and he smiled back with his vital gray eyes as he opened the door. Little Alice waved a chubby, pink hand at him. He went in.

His hands were not particularly dirty; but one of the characteristics of Richard Benson was a mania for cleanliness. In jungle and arctic wilds, in city and plain, during the amassing of his adventurer’s millions, he had carried that craving, washing sometimes when a sip of water was a precious thing.

He laved his hands leisurely and thoroughly and came back into the belly of the plane.

Two seats besides his own were vacant.

The seats occupied by Alicia and little Alice.

Benson stared at the seats with a little prickle of fear at his scalp. But of course everything was all right. The two were only in the rear, in the ladies’ lavatory.

The man with the unlit cigar stared at him, then turned stolidly to a window. The other five men and the woman didn’t look at him at all. The stewardess came toward him from the rear. Benson beckoned to her.

“Is my wife all right? She’s not back there sick, is she?”

“Your wife?” said the stewardess, frowning a little.

“Yes. She isn’t ill from the plane motion, is she? Or the little girl?”

“I don’t understand,” said the stewardess, beginning to look at him very oddly indeed.

Benson’s gray eyes flamed through her. The crawling feeling at the nape of his neck grew stronger.

“My wife and daughter,” he said distinctly. “The woman and the little girl who were sitting in those two seats in front of mine.”

“Those two seats were vacant,” said the stewardess.

A little glitter of moisture showed on Benson’s forehead. And a glitter like that of steel showed in his pale-gray eyes.

“I simply don’t know what you’re talking about,” the stewardess said. “You didn’t get aboard with anyone. You got on alone.”

“Are you mad?” snapped Benson. He whirled to the passenger nearest him, the big, flabby man.

“You saw the woman and girl, of course. Tell this pretty fool of a stewardess—”

The flabby man shook his head slowly.

“You’re the one who’s nuts, brother. You got on alone at Buffalo, like the girl said.”

Benson had trusted his life to his almost superhuman hearing in many a wilderness. But he couldn’t believe his hearing was correct now. He turned to the others.

“You—all of you! You saw my wife and daughter—”

On all faces he saw the same blank amazement, the same frowns of bewilderment and fear. They were looking at him as if he were crazy.

Benson leaped to the rear of the plane. He slammed open the ladies’ lavatory. The small cubicle was empty. He looked into the tail compartment. Only luggage was there, and mail sacks. He jumped to the front of the plane and wrenched open the door to the pilot’s compartment. The pilot and copilot stared around at him angrily, then perplexedly as they saw the mounting mania in his pale eyes.

Alicia Benson and little Alice were not aboard the plane.

Benson’s voice sounded like strong metal breaking. “Damn you all!” he cried. “What have you done?
Where are they?”

He went to the door. It was still locked and anyway, with the air pressure outside it would have been practically impossible to open it in flight. He whirled again.

The big, flabby man and the stout fellow with the unlit cigar were moving toward him.

“He’s insane,” faltered the stewardess. “Get him—”

“No, you don’t!” Benson jerked out, in that voice that he himself could hardly recognize. “I’ll kill the first man who—”

They retreated a step or two. The other four men got up. Benson’s hand went to his hip. He always carried a gun.

“Please,” said the stewardess, as one might talk to a child. “You got on alone. You rode alone. There was no one with you. You are having delusions.”

“You think I don’t know whether or not my wife and daughter were with me?”

Benson went to Alicia’s seat.

“The cushion will still be warm. You’ll see—”

He put his hand to the cushion. It was cool, as if no one had ever sat in it.

His wife and child were not in the plane. There was no evidence that they ever had been. All the passengers and crew swore they hadn’t been. And there was no way for them to have gotten out or been put out.

The pilot’s door opened behind him. He had forgotten about that. It opened slowly and without sound the copilot hurled a fire extinguisher. It hit the head of the “madman” at whom all were staring in fear.

And Benson went down.

Four police and three field attendants—all big, husky men—stayed close to Benson at the Montreal airport. They stayed close because twice they’d had to combine to hold him down when his eyes flamed pale madness and his muscles writhed. His face was chalk-white.

“Phone Buffalo!” Benson said. “I told you—”

“We have phoned,” said the airport manager gently. “They have no record of your passage at all.”

“I told you we forced our way aboard at the last minute. Of course they haven’t a record. But the field men—”

“They all say the same thing. You got aboard alone. You had no wife and daughter.”

The police looked at each other significantly.

“My wife! Alice! Where are they? What has happened— Someone believe me! I swear—”

Unbelieving eyes staring down at him! Hand reaching to hold him! Raw electric light battering into his eyes! And at the back of his mind—the lovely face of Alicia and the pink, chubby hand of little Alice upraised to wave—

Something snapped in his head.

An ambulance took him away. But in it was one more interne than the usual pair, and the three of them were extra strong. And they took him, not to a regular hospital, but to a sanitarium—

“Nurse—”

The voice was hoarse, weak. Benson hardly realized it was his own. A girl in white turned from the window of the white-walled room. Benson saw that the window was barred.

“Yes?”

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty in the afternoon,” said the nurse, with a professional smile. Benson noted, though, that in her eyes was a look far, indeed, from smiling.

“Half past four! Then I’ve been out for eighteen or twenty hours!”

“You’ve been out for three weeks,” corrected the nurse. “You’ve had brain fever.”

“Three weeks—”

Benson struggled upright in the bed. “I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to look for—”

The nurse pushed him firmly back. And finally he let her. He was too weak to do much, and knew it. He was silent for a moment, watching her.

“Why do you look at me like that?” he said. There was in his tired brain a sort of merciful numbness for the moment. It made dreamy and impossible the tragedy that had sent him here. Wife and child vanished apparently into thin air? Nonsense! They’d come in the door at any moment.

“Why do I look at you like that?” repeated the nurse. She hesitated, then shrugged. “You’ll have to know eventually. You might as well know now. You’ve changed, since they carried you in here.”

She handed him a mirror. Benson looked into it—and saw somebody else, not himself.

This somebody else had snow-white hair instead of coal-black hair. This somebody had a face as white as linen, instead of a face bronzed by sun and tinted by flowing vitality. This somebody’s face, moreover, was as absolutely expressionlesss as a wax mask.

There was something terrible about the expression-lessness. It wasn’t normal. It was that of something dead, not that of something living and merely in repose. It frightened you, that completely moveless face.

Benson, with a suffocating feeling rising within him, tried to smile. He couldn’t.

Lips, eyebrows all the flesh of his face remained entirely still.

He tried to frown, to grimace—and couldn’t.

“The facial muscles are . . . paralyzed,” the nurse said gently. “Oh, it’s not permanent, probably.” Her tone showed that she was lying, to help him. “Probably it will go away. But for now, it’s paralyzed. We don’t know whether it was the blow on the head you got in the plane when the copilot had to down you, or the nerve shock of your—delusion.”

Benson could only stare at the immobile face, that was white as linen, with the pale-gray eyes flaming through. The nurse went back to the window, which she had been closing when he first called her. Benson pressed at his face. He could barely feel the press of his fingers. The nurse turned.

She screamed, then stifled it with her hand.

Benson looked at her, then into the mirror again. And he saw why she had screamed.

He had pressed at his face with his fingers. Where he had pressed, the flesh was ridged up over one cheekbone. It gave him a demoniac look that was indescribable, when added to the linen-pallor of his skin.

He pressed the flesh down again. Then worked both cheeks.