The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (10 page)

The giant went down the dark hall, as softly as if he were a little Nellie Gray instead of the towering giant he was. One small slot of light showed in the otherwise all-prevailing darkness.

This was a crack that came from another door, halfway down the corridor. He went to it and saw that it was the basement door.

Ahead of him, in a room at the front of the house, he heard a low rumble of guarded voices. Several men in there. No telling how many.

He opened the basement door and started down the stairs. Then he paused, lips stony.

The stairs were of the half-finished type with no risers between the treads. And there was no partition between stairs and basement.

It was a little like an ordinary ladder, slanted more than most, descending into the cellar. There wasn’t a chance of getting down that unseen.

Smitty peered down and to the side.

There, from this other angle, was the scene he had witnessed through the slit cut in the light-concealing blanket at the basement window.

Seven men—counting the shambling, appalling figure that looked like a mad gorilla—and a girl. The strange figure was beside the girl now; and the misshapen, fumbling hands were touching her smooth arms.

“Attaboy, Nevlo,” laughed one of the others, “show the gal you may not look like much, but you sure are a big-time Romeo!”

A kind of glare came into Smitty’s eyes. Like most big men, he had a large regard for the rights of those smaller and weaker than he. It made him see red when someone was shoved around.

And there couldn’t have been a more outstanding example of it than this: a girl, bound, helpless, dazed of brain, with six men around to slap her down if she tried to do anything—and a seventh, like a damned gorilla, now roughing her up!

Smitty’s hand went to his left-hand coat pocket. In the pocket was one of MacMurdie’s brilliant chemical inventions. It was a small glass pellet containing a gas that paralyzed movement.

It was the weirdest thing. The victim kept his clarity of mind and could see and hear all right, but he couldn’t move. The motor muscles were left without control.

Smitty poised the pellet to toss it down to break on the cellar floor. And somebody kicked his elbow.

The glass pill dropped and broke on the floor next to Smitty, as he had scrambled to his feet and stared up.

A man had got up to him, sneaking down the hall from the front room where Smitty had heard voices. The man loomed over him now, snarling, murderous.

“Throw a stink-bomb or somethin’, will ya?” the man howled. “Well, see how you like hot lead!”

His hand started for his gun, but didn’t get to where it was holstered. His arm and hand seemed to wither and droop, like a plant stem in a drought. And then the man himself sagged slowly to the floor.

He stared at Smitty with horrified perplexity in his eyes. Smitty knew just how he felt. He could see the giant, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He suddenly had mush for muscles. He couldn’t even get out of the way if Smitty tried to crown him. The gas was working!

But Smitty wasted no time on the man. He was holding his breath and facing the stairs. They’d heard the other’s howl, down there, and were rushing up to look into the matter!

Smitty’s fist got the first one and he fell back, spilling three others as he did so. But a fourth, holding himself far to one side, escaped the tumble and lunged upward. He got the giant by the ankles, and Smitty fell.

The house shook. So did the stairs. For Smitty had fallen so that he joined the rest at the foot of the steps in a scrambling, unlovely tangle.

What he didn’t know was that fragments of the glass pellet rode down with him on his coat tail, and that with the fragments were evaporating droplets of the terrifically concentrated liquid which made the numbing gas.

So Smitty drew in a deep breath as he got two men with a hand on the neck of each.

Drew in the breath and felt instantly as if he had been drained of all strength.

He knew at once what had happened then. But it was too late. He held his breath again to keep from inhaling any more of the stuff, but the one whiff had almost paralyzed him. He could just barely keep his hands on the two throats and raise a weak foot to keep back a third man who was trying to crawl over prone bodies and get at him.

The only saving feature of the thing was that the precious gang of killers in here were as bad off as he was.

No! They weren’t. Not all of them. Smitty suddenly saw, with a sense of doom in his heart that could not be translated into action, that a man down there at the other end of the basement was not under the numbing spell of the gas.

This one stood next to the bound girl and the mad gorilla form. The gas would get down there soon, but the stuff hadn’t reached him yet. He was perfectly capable of drawing his gun—and was doing so.

Smitty, dragging toward the fellow with hopeless slowness like a leaden-footed person in a nightmare, saw a .38 automatic come forth in a leisurely, unhurried way. In the same manner, it leveled at his head.

Not at his body, which was protected by a bulletproof garment of The Avenger’s devising—but at his head!

Smitty saw a cold, dark eye behind the gunsight, saw a cold, tooth-revealing grin on the lips under the eye, saw the muzzle of the .38 yawn like a thing capable of being mounted on a battleship’s turret.

He saw sure death!

And then he saw the man abruptly collapse, with a small gash suddenly appearing on the exact top of his skull. It was as if someone had suddenly clubbed him down. Only there was no one around to club him.

The Avenger, as has been said, never took human life. In his extreme youth, when he was piling up a fortune in far corners of the earth, he had been forced to kill a man. The memory of that still bit and cut.

Instead of killing, therefore, he disabled—as that man who had been about to murder Smitty was disabled.

Benson had two weapons that at first glance didn’t seem to amount to much when stacked up against the machine guns and pineapple bombs of the underworld.

One was a razor-edged, needle-pointed little knife with a hollow tube for a handle—one of the world’s best throwing knives. This, Dick holstered at the calf of his left leg and called, with chilling affection, Ike.

Mike was holstered below his right knee. Mike was a slim little .22, specially built, with only a slight curve for a handle and with a cylinder holding only four cartridges to keep it streamlined and small. Mike had a silencer, so that when he spoke he whispered politely.

But with each whisper a man went down.

The man went down—not dead, but creased, hit glancingly on the top of the head so that he was stunned instead of killed. It was a shot requiring eighth-inch precision, but one that Benson had mastered to perfection.

At the basement window, where he had stopped on his encirclement of the house to which Smitty’s call had drawn him, he had pressed Mike’s diminutive trigger just in time.

Smitty and all the rest seemed helpless to move very far in the basement, so Benson left the window at once and ran to the rear door and into the house.

Smitty tried to yell to him and found that his voice came out only in a weak cry like that of a hungry baby. His vocal cords were still numbed, as was all the rest of him.

What he was trying to yell to Benson was to hurry back to that window because the one man in the cellar not so much affected by the numbing gas because of distance was getting away.

And that one was the shambling figure that wore man’s clothes almost as an animal would wear them.

Smitty, in helpless agony, watched the misshapen figure hoist itself to the window and squeeze through. It was a tight fit, but it made it.

Smitty feebly cursed the freak of ill fortune that had exposed him to the gas. He was trying to drag himself to the window and after the fugitive when Benson came down the stairs.

Dick had had a little trouble with the men upstairs. Four of them lay on the hall floor, to testify to their end of that trouble; The Avenger had been delayed about four minutes to testify to his end.

“Chief!” gasped Smitty, in the suffocated voice and slurred tone that was all his paralyzed throat muscles would permit. “Guy like gorilla . . . Nevlo . . . got away.”

“Nevlo?” snapped Benson, eyes like ice with little lights behind them, but otherwise not seeming much concerned.

“Yes . . . got away . . . basement window. Guy who’s crazy . . . can ruin the world. We’re sunk!”

“No,” said The Avenger, voice cold and without emotion, “we’re not sunk. Nellie came with me. She’s outside, posted in advance to take care of just such an emergency. She can take up the trail and radio us when it ends.”

In the night outside, Nellie took up the chase. Only one man had come out of the house after The Avenger had gone in, so she’d had no choice to make as to which of several to follow.

Like a lovely little shadow, she slid along after the lumbering, inhuman-looking figure that had emerged from the basement window.

As she went, she felt horror mount in her heart. This was surely the man named Nevlo, according to the descriptions of the thing he had become since that blinding flash near the Marville power plant. Nevlo! With a secret more destructive than any man had ever possessed before! And he was most certainly demented!

You could tell that by his shambling walk. You could hear it in the mumbling, incoherent words he kept muttering aloud to himself.

Nevlo!

A madman, but sane enough, it seemed, to work with others. The trail ended at a quite expensive-looking coupé in which another man sat at the driver’s seat and waited.

Nevlo climbed in when the door was opened for him. Nellie heard an inquiring voice, then Nevlo’s mumble, and then a curse. Though she had been unable to hear words, she could divine the meaning of the short passage.

The man at the wheel, whoever he was, had asked what had gone on at the house back there and had been told that things went wrong.

The car drove off, gaining speed rapidly in the night and heading south. And Nellie had cause to be thankful that it was big and expensive and rode easily because she was accompanying the two, hiding in the luggage compartment under the rear deck of the coupé.

Nellie had thought that she was playing in luck when she felt the compartment handle and found it unlocked, so that she was able to crawl in while the gorilla person entered the car. But long before she left the compartment again, she concluded that she was completely out of luck.

First off, she was locked in! Then she was kept in for a couple of years. At least, it seemed like years.

She had crawled into the thing just as dawn was lighting the east. Through a crack in the bottom near the side, she saw the whirling road beneath her more and more clearly as dawn progressed. It was about half-past five in the morning, she concluded, when the car stopped for gas.

She heard the gas-tank cap unscrewed and the bump of the nozzle as the attendant shoved it into the gooseneck. Then she heard something else that made her heart skip a beat.

A hand on the handle of the compartment door!