The Avenger 35 - The Iron Skull (10 page)

“Sabotage America’s defenses,” replied the fat doctor.

“Yeah, but let’s hear some specifics.”

“He will destroy Justice, Inc. That is one of his top-priority projects.”

“No kidding. How’s he going to bring that off?”

“The walking bomb failed. Nevins was blamed for that. Now that he has three of them prisoner, I do not know what—”

“Three of them? You mean three members of Justice, Inc.?”

“So I have been informed by Nevins,” droned the doctor. “There is the aforementioned Fergus MacMurdie, and there are two more recent acquisitions, Joshua Newton and Cole Wilson.”

“Geeze,” commented the giant.

A very slight sound outside the office’s frosty window attracted Smitty’s attention.

He was just in time to see one of the hoods raise a pistol and fire at him.

“That must be the place,” said Nellie, slowing their car and glancing for an instant over her shoulder.

The Avenger had been riding in the back seat of the car. Pudgy Nevins was on the floor, tied and gagged and covered over with a blanket. Benson no longer looked as he had when he’d questioned the Iron Skull’s man by the roadside. Now he looked almost exactly like Nevins, and was dressed in the man’s clothing.

By treating the flesh of his face with a special drug of his own invention the Avenger was able to transform it into a highly malleable state. He could then change his appearance.

Downhill from them stretched a large fenced amusement park. A much-weathered sign over the closed gates read: Westlake Playland! Pride of the Connecticut Shore! Fun for All from 6 to 60! A newer sign announced that the park was shut for the duration of the war.

“You’re a dead ringer for our silent passenger,” observed Nellie as she pulled the car up in front of a shut-down seafood restaurant.

“Let us hope the Iron Skull agrees with you.” In his interrogation of Nevins, the Avenger had learned a good deal about the Iron Skull and his activities.

Every building on the block was closed—the cafés, souvenir shops, hamburger counters—some closed for the winter, some for the duration, some forever.

“I get the feeling we’ve landed in an evacuated area,” said the little blonde.

The last light of this short winter day was fading away. Snow was still falling.

“All right,” said Dick Benson, taking hold of the door handle, “stay here and stand by. If you don’t hear from me in one hour, get in touch with Don Early and have him alert the local police.”

“Good luck. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you and the boys.”

“Thanks.” He went silently into the approaching night.

Swiftly the Avenger made his way to the corner. When he began walking downhill toward the ocean and the amusement park, his style of movement changed. He moved the way a plump man like Nevins would move. A plump man who’d been shaken up in an auto smash, and was worried about what his superiors would say.

The stark skeleton of the roller coaster humped up above the wooden fence. A high castle tower made of lath, chicken wire, and plaster also rose up. An enormous plaster clown, shrouded in snow, stood next to the tower, an idiot smile stiff on his face.

The Avenger stopped in front of one of the boarded-up ticket booths. He reached under the protruding lip of the money counter, as Nevins had directed, and located the buzzer button concealed there. He buzzed out three shorts and two longs.

A minute dragged by. Twilight was filling the run-down street which fronted the shut-down park. A wind, blowing in across the cold, blackening water, threw snow at the tower and the clown.

In the fence next to the booth a small door opened a few inches. “Where the hell you been?” asked the broken-nosed man who squinted out.

“Now . . . don’t you start in on me,” said the Avenger in a very close approximation of Nevins’s anxious voice.

“He’s been raising hell.”

“I know . . . I know. I had an accident. It wasn’t my fault at all.” The door was allowed to open a bit farther, and Benson entered. “The car . . . it’s all smashed up. I don’t know what he’s going to say.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” said the broken-nosed man. “Especially the way he’s been acting lately.”

“Well . . . I’d better go and face the music.” He left the guard at his post near the fence door and made his way through the deserted amusement park. Up ahead, a mechanical gypsy woman sat in a glass booth with fortune-telling cards spread out before her on a table. Snow was piled up all around the booth.

Remembering the details of what Nevins had told him, the Avenger turned right just beyond the gypsy and walked along a street that passed between a shooting gallery and a wax museum. Jack the Ripper leered through the glass window of the wax museum, knife forever raised to strike. Bluebeard had fallen over, and the drumstick was gone from Henry VIII’s pudgy fingers.

Welcome To The Funhouse!
proclaimed a tattered oilcloth banner hanging over the end of the street. The giant clown loomed up beside the entrance.

There was another buzzer hidden at the funhouse ticket booth. Benson located it and gave two shorts and one long buzz.

A narrow moat, filled with muddy ice now, ringed the castle-like funhouse. On the drawbridge now appeared a small old man in a much too large overcoat. “Given you up for lost, Nev,” he said in a raspy voice.

“I know . . . I know. I had an accident . . . with the car.”

“He’s running around down there without his hood on,” confided the old man while Benson crossed the bridge. “I wouldn’t want to have to go in and tell him I’d—”

“You don’t have to, Weiner,” the Avenger told him. “Now stop nagging me and let me get on with my business.” Brushing by the old guard, he hurried into the funhouse.

Beyond a short hallway was an octagonal room with eight doors.
Which door? Will it lead to fame or failure?
asked a gaudy wall sign.

Benson walked to the second door from the right and turned the knob. There was another corridor behind it. He made his way along that and then down the staircase at the end.

An Oriental man was sitting at a card table at the bottom of the stairs, reading a copy of
Clues
magazine. “Hoo boy,” he said when he saw the Avenger. “You going to catch it, Nevins old buddy. He’s been talking about skinning you alive. Either that or boiling you in oil.”

“Verry funny, Jerry.” Benson went around the table and through another doorway.

He was underground now, in the new portion of the layout—the part which had been built at the orders of the Iron Skull.

Up ahead was a red-painted door. The Avenger walked up and knocked on it. Three long, one short.

The door opened by itself.

He was in a bare, white-walled room. Clearing his throat, affecting nervousness, he unhooked a microphone that hung near the opposite door. “Ahum . . . hum . . . this is Nevins reporting.”

Nothing for almost five minutes.

Then the door slid open, and the Avenger was face to face with the Iron Skull.

Silence was a spooky thing. Especially when complete and absolute darkness went with it. For several minutes, none of the prisoners had spoken.

Cole Wilson had worked the hidden compartment in his shoe heel open. This compartment was an idea of his own, one not yet adopted by his associates. He’d taken two items from it. One was a very efficient lockpicking tool. The Iron Skull’s men had missed the heel cache during their otherwise very thorough search of him and his person.

Too much quiet was going to sound suspicious if the Skull was listening in on them. Cole decided to talk while he put his lockpick to work on the door of his cell. “Would that we had one of Smitty’s handy little portable radios in our cubicles,” he said aloud. “I find myself wondering about the fate of Mary Joyce, M.D., and especially about little Jerry. Will I ever know if he got out of the cistern safely?”

“Oh, sure,” said Josh, who sensed Cole was up to something. “Old Mr. Trumbull found him when he was fishing for the Eustace diamonds.”

“What a relief,” sighed Cole. “But how did the missing gems get into the cistern?”

“They didn’t,” explained Josh. “Actually I think they’re in Mrs. Erb’s wooden leg, but try and tell kindly old Mr. Trumbull that.”

“Will you, for the love of heaven,” shouted Kirby Macauley, “stop that inane chatter?”

Cole was feeling at the lock, getting familiar with it through his fingertips. “Now there, Macauley, old bean,” he said, “don’t you realize how important light entertainment is to morale, especially in these troubled times?”

“I wish you’d all shut up.”

“Perhaps,” suggested MacMurdie, “ye could choose a more universally acceptable subject, lads.”

“Pick something else?” said Cole as he inserted the tool into the lock.

“Now, now,” put in Kessell, “if they want to talk about soap operas, why, that’s okay. My wife loves them. Not only
Mary Joyce, M.D.,
but
Richard Allen, Middle-aged Professor,
and—”

“What makes you so damn liberal all of a sudden, Kessell?” Macauley wanted to know. “You’ve been nothing but a grouch at our project meetings, complaining about everything.”

“I don’t know,” said Kessell. “Maybe being locked up all this time has mellowed me, or maybe listening to you being a bore has made me realize how foolish complainers sound.”

Macauley said nothing else.

Inside his head Cole said,
“Voilà!
Or, open sesame!” He’d succeeded in picking the cell door lock. No alarms had gone off. With extreme caution and slowness he turned the door handle. Still no bells ringing.

He pushed the door open and stepped out into the pitch-black corridor.

Silently he felt his way along until he was at Josh’s cell. Kneeling, he went to work on that lock. In a moment he had the door unlocked and a few inches open.

“Hsst!” he said, almost inaudibly.

“Right here, man,” said Josh in a whisper next to his ear. “Figured you was up to something.”

“Going to get Mac,” whispered Cole. “Wait right here.”

Cole skulked down the dark stone corridor to MacMurdie’s cell. “I’m getting pretty good at this,” he thought while he worked. “Though lock-picking probably doesn’t offer much chance for advancement, as professions go.”

He succeeded with this lock mechanism, too, and pulled the door gently open.

“Hout,” said Mac near to him. “ ’Tis you, Cole?”

“Come on out here,” said Cole in a low whisper. “I was up above, and I think I can play blind man’s bluff and lead you and Joshua up there. Ready to tackle these lads up above bare-handed?”

“Whoosh, ’tis more than ready I am, mon.”

The trio began to walk along the corridor.

It was Josh who tripped on some projection unseen on the floor. He fell against the wall, scraping it with his sleeve.

Not much of a sound, but enough to alert Macauley.

“What’s going on? What’s happening out there?”

Cole sprinted silently back to the vicinity of his cell. “I fancy the rats are having their annual picnic,” he said. “Nothing to worry about, since Herr Skull assured me all the rats down here were vegetar—”

“You’re not in your cells!” shouted Macauley. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“What an absurd notion,” said Cole, laughing. “You must have me mixed up with my old friend Norgil the magician, who can walk through walls. I assure you we’re all snug in our cells.”

Macauley didn’t believe him. “You got out!” he accused. “You’re escaping and leaving me here to rot! It’s not fair, damn it! Not fair at all.”

From up above came the sound of several feet running . . .

Cole strolled over to his two companions. “I think we’ve just lost that element of surprise which is so important in all really good escapes.”

“You simpering buffoon!” said the Iron Skull as he rolled along the hall toward his den. “You maladroit oaf!”

“There’s no need to get personal,” said the Avenger in his Nevins guise. “Anyway . . . I did the best I could.”

“Yes, and that’s the whole trouble, Nevins. Your best is not good enough.” The Iron Skull rattled into his parlor-furnished den.

Benson followed, and the door dosed on them. “I thought I handled everything well,” he said. “After the car had its wreck and I determined that it was beyond simple repairing . . . I walked all the way into the nearest town and summoned a tow truck. As you know, the car is registered in a false name and I had the false identification to go with it. So we’ll have no trouble on that score.”

The Iron Skull began tapping a flesh fingertip against his metal cheek, producing a light pinging sound. “Walked all the way to town, did you, Nevins?”

“Yes, since there wasn’t a house with a phone anywhere in the vicinity.”

“How many miles would you say you covered?”

“Must have been at least five, sir.”

The finger rubbed at his metal ear. “Well, that’s very commendable, Nevins,” the Iron Skull said. “You’re showing some enthusiasm at last.”

“Trouble in the cell block!” came a voice. There was a speaker mounted up on the wall, next to the old Regulator clock.

“Should we—” began Benson.

“The guards will handle it, Nevins,” said the Iron Skull. “We have more important things to discuss.” He wheeled himself over to a marble-topped table. There was a bowl of fresh fruit there. Swinging up his metal hand, he took hold of an apple. “Join me in a moderate snack, Nevins.”

“No, thanks . . . I’m still a little too unsettled to—”

“Join me!” He tossed him the apple.

“Well, I suppose I can . . .” The Avenger took a bite out of the apple and chewed it.

The Iron Skull watched him, then selected an apple for himself. He raised it up to his mouth with his metal fingers and took a huge chomp out of it with his metal teeth. “Very tasty, aren’t they?”

Swallowing, the Avenger said, “Yes, certainly. Now, about our business.”

“Oh, you may as well sit down while we talk, Mr. Benson,” said the Iron Skull, chuckling.

“I don’t quite—”

“A very nice try, but no cigar, as they say.” He nodded his half-metal head at a rocker. “Sit down, Avenger.”