The Avenger 23 - The Wilder Curse (2 page)

Through that opening crowded a form right out of a nightmare, a gray ghost of a thing as deadly as it was bizarre. The thing leaped toward Phelan.

“I want to talk to Mr. Benson,” Phelan said into the phone. “I want—”

They were his last two words, because death struck. He didn’t even have time to scream. He was knocked flat with such force that the phone flew from his fingers and broke against a wall.

He never moved again. Horror, such as should never be, took over the small office. A long time later—or what seemed to be a long time—the hand reached the door. The nightmare thing went out. Silence held the cavernous gloom of the basement and the little walled cubicle in the corner that was marked, “Office, Engineer.”

Mrs. Markingham Mead lived on the sixth floor of the central building of Thornton Heights. Mrs. Markingham Mead had a corner apartment. At her own expense, she had had bricks torn out and great corner windows installed in her living room. It gave her a very nice view and, in summer, as it was now, a good deal of light and air.

However, the arrangement also gave her a headache when it rained hard and the wind blew from the east.

Now, at a little after midnight, it was pouring rain and there was a heavy gale. The gale drove the rain hard against the big windows and against the casement at the left and bottom, where there seemed to be a hair-fine crack.

Nobody had ever been able to locate this crack and fill it in. The result was that, now and then, Mrs. Markingham Mead was infuriated to see water seep in there.

It was seeping in there, now, forming a little rivulet that kept reaching for her expensive rugs, no matter how fast she sopped it up with a dish towel.

Mrs. Mead went to the phone and got the head engineer, Carter, out of bed.

Carter didn’t like this very much. He had just fallen into a deep sleep, and the last thing he wanted to hear about was Mrs. Mead’s damned windows and their leak. The leak was Mrs. Mead’s fault, he thought. She’d had the windows put in herself, hadn’t she?

He wasn’t very diplomatic over the phone. He told her he was sorry, that he couldn’t do anything about the leak. Yes, in the morning, he’d have a man over. Yes, they’d try once more to find the crack. No, he couldn’t come now.

Rather nastily, he suggested that she call his assistant. Then, grinning one-sidedly, Carter got back into bed, having wished trouble off onto little Tim Phelan.

Mrs. Markingham Mead went to the window, gasped, and sopped up water frantically to keep it from the rugs. Then she hurried back to the phone and called the assistant engineer.

There was no answer. Mrs. Mead, purple with rage, tried four times in three minutes, never getting an answer. She decided to tackle the man personally.

She threw on a dark-red housecoat and went toward the stairs, looking and acting like a battleship under forced draft. Gray wisps of hair streaking out from a nightcap furthered the impression, looking like smoke from flying funnels.

She charged down the stairs, making up things she was going to tell the man, who, with all the rest of the building operatives, hadn’t been able to find a simple little leak around the bottom of a window.

But Mrs. Mead didn’t tell anybody anything.

She surged into the huge basement like a ship of the line, looked around for the office, saw it and surged over to it.

The light was still on in the office, and Tim Phelan was still in there. Rather, what was left of Tim Phelan was still in there.

Mrs. Mead didn’t see him at first. She stood in the doorway, looking, till she saw a foot. The foot was sticking out from behind the big desk. She moved in a step and saw the condition of the leg just above the foot.

The purple tinge left Mrs. Mead’s face. Her face got as white as snow. She tried to scream, but her throat constricted so that she couldn’t.

She backed out of the office without ever having seen more of Tim Phelan than his leg up as far as the knee. That was quite enough. That was more than enough.

The general office of the whole Thornton Heights development was on the first floor. Mrs. Mead hurried there, moving like a sleepwalker, staring out of glazed and unseeing eyes. It was late, but there was a chance that someone would be in the office.

She prayed to Heaven that there would be, because she wanted to tell someone what she had seen and then go off into a nice, peaceful faint.

The office had an occupant, all right, even though it was a quarter after twelve at night. In fact, it had two occupants, though only one worked there.

The one that belonged there was a young man named, on the small door of his modest private office, Daniel E. Moran.

Dan Moran was vigorous, big-shouldered, blunt-jawed. He had a high, wide forehead and a long, strong nose. He was in brown tweeds, a little the worse for the rainy night, and he was sitting in his desk chair and looking up at the other person in the place. Also, he was holding this other person’s hand.

This other person, the one who didn’t belong in the Thornton Heights office, had a hand well worth holding.

She was a girl, rather tall, beautifully formed, with long, dark-brown hair and with deep-brown eyes. A slightly turned-up nose robbed her of classical beauty but made her something to cause one to turn and look at her twice.

Her name was Myra Horton. She sat the moment, on the edge of Dan Moran’s desk with her slim long legs shimmering attractively in the light from the one shaded lamp.

“Look,” Dan Moran said, apparently going on with a conversation that had already lasted some time in the same vein, “I’m getting a raise. It’ll be enough for us to live on very comfortably. So why don’t we get married right now?”

Myra Horton pursed her red lips in a maddening way.

“I’ve told you,” she said, “that I’m not quite sure.”

“You’ve known me for eight months. You’ve said you liked me a lot.”

“I do,” Myra said. “But I don’t quite know if I like you enough to look at you across a table three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Besides, there’s this other thing.”

Dan Moran was silent. He looked troubled.

“You’ve said enough to give me the impression that you suspect one of the Thornton Heights partners of being kind of crooked,” Myra went on. “You’re here tonight, going over the books as you’ve done more than one late night recently.”

“Well?” said Moran.

“Well, say the man is a crook. You prove it. He gets thrown out of the corporation, and you get a fine promotion for being so alert. Good. But say he’s
not
a crook and finds out you’re laying for him, or say he
is
a crook but you can’t prove it. What will happen?
You’ll
get thrown out so fast it’ll make your hair curl. And you’ll be blacklisted, besides. Then we’d spend our honeymoon looking for some way to buy food for ourselves.”

“Mercenary,” jeered Moran, not entirely kidding about it.

Myra frowned. It was a very attractive frown. “It does sound that way. But I don’t mean it like that. If I were sure, I’d marry you whether you had money or not—whether you had a job or not. It would make no difference. But I’m not sure, and this other situation just makes me a little less sure than ever. So we’ll put the decision off for a little while, Dan.”

It was at this moment that Mrs. Markingham Mead, having entered the main door of the general office, saw the light behind Dan’s frosted glass panel. She banged the door open so hard, the glass almost broke.

She stood in the doorway, disheveled, like a ghost of her heavy, elderly self. The red housecoat was gaping every which way. Her mouth strained several times before words got out. Finally, she made it.

“Basement!” she croaked. “Assistant eng— He’s . . . behind desk—”

The floor trembled to her fall.

“What in the world—” gasped Myra. Then she was bending over the unconscious woman, while Dan was leaping beyond her through the general office and to the iron stairs.

When Moran got to the little office, he didn’t stop at Phelan’s foot and leg. He leaped on around the desk and was confronted by the full view of the man’s body.

Moran stepped back a pace, eyes wide. Then he turned from the grisly thing and reached unsteadily for the second phone.

“Police!” he said shrilly into the phone. “And have them come fast! There’s a man here. There’s a dead man—”

He heard steps in the basement and banged the phone down. He whirled with big shoulders hunched and fists clenched. But it wasn’t an assailant who approached him.

It was Myra.

“I called the building doctor,” she said. “Mrs. ‘What’s-her-name’ is conscious, but she seems too scared to breathe—Dan! What’s the matter down here? You’re as pale as a ghost. The engineer—is he—”

“He is,” said Dan shakily. He got out of the tiny office in a hurry and shut the door before Myra could see in.

But, looking curiously over his shoulder, Myra got one glimpse through the glass of the door. She saw that foot, and she swayed.

Moran’s arm went around her.

“I didn’t want you to see,” he said. “Hang it, why did you have to come down here?”

Myra didn’t say anything to that. The foot, and the condition of the leg as far as she could see, were too vivid in her mind.

She got to a chair nearby and sat down. The roar of the vast furnaces was softly in her ears as she shuddered there.

Then the police arrived.

Dan Moran, swaying a little with the pure relief the sight of them inspired, took over at once. He led them to the little office. Myra heard one of the police exclaim aloud and heard the low whistle of another.

Then she got up and went out of the basement.

She went to the street and began walking, faster and faster, till she was almost running toward the nearest subway.

Dan had called the police. Myra was going to try to enlist the interest of someone else. That was Richard Benson.

One person had thought of getting in touch with The Avenger this night, and he had met death in the attempt. But Myra did not know that. She only knew that she’d heard vague but confidence-inspiring stories of this man, and that he had his headquarters on a little avenue called Bleek Street, which was in lower Manhattan.

Pale and with ghosts in her eyes, she took a subway to get to this place and tell someone about that foot and leg.

Bleek Street, in downtown Manhattan, is only one short block long. One side is occupied entirely by the blank wall of a windowless warehouse. The other side has small stores, small warehouses and, in the center, three old three-story brick buildings. All of these are leased or owned by Dick Benson. In effect, The Avenger owned the block.

The three brick buildings, behind their unimpressive facades, are thrown into one. The entire top floor of the resulting unity is one vast room, and this was where The Avenger and his associates were most frequently to be found when not working on bringing criminals to justice.

A big man entered the door of the place now, at a bit before one o’clock in the morning. Big? He was gigantic!

He had a big moonface in which light-blue eyes twinkled in a disarmingly good-natured way. This was Algernon Heathcote Smith. But anyone who knew him called him Smitty, carefully avoiding the two first names, which he detested.