by Harold Ward
Once more the cavern was filled with black, sweating savages, their almost-naked bodies swaying and twisting in time to the senseless, hypnotizing beat.
Nebo again stood in front of the altar, a leer of triumph on his twisted black face. Behind him crouched Nina Fererra, a look of indescribable horror in her eyes. She was not tied. Yet Ti-Marie stood beside her as if to protect her, but in reality watching her to guard against an attempt to escape from the wild saturnalia.
The savage orgy had reached its height. The bleating kid had been dragged in and sacrificed. Another bull lay before the altar, the blood ebbing from the wound in its great breast. Blood-maddened, lust-inflamed, the dancers had wallowed in the gory mess, satiating themselves in the horrible fluid.
Jimmy Holm, emerging from the swamp, crept up through the circle of overhanging, moss-covered trees that surrounded the cave on three sides and, parting the foliage, peered out upon the hellish orgy. For a long time he waited, torn between a desire to search the little group of thatched huts, which were now vacant, or to remain until he could get a glimpse of the crowded interior of the cavern.
Nina was near by. His sixth sense told him that. He felt her calling out to him—begging to him to come.
Minutes passed... eternities, it seemed to the man crouching in the darkness. Gradually the dancers ceased their rhythmic swaying. Several of them had already toppled over, overcome by the stress of their emotions. Nebo, stooping, seized the frightened white girl around the waist and, raising her to her full height, held her up that all might view her loveliness.
“The new Maman! Mamaloi! Mamaioi!”
The noise was deafening as the blacks rushed forward, bowing in front of their new white priestess.
Jimmy Holm saw red. Like an avenging fury he leaped into the flamelit arena, his gun drawn, his eyes flashing.
“Jimmy!” Nina Fererra shrieked joyfully.
Holm thrust her behind the big stone altar and whirled. For an instant the worshippers had dropped back, frightened at this wild man who had appeared in their midst so abruptly. Then, as Nebo, bellowing with rage, charged forward, his machete upraised, they fell in behind him roaring angrily.
Holm’s gun belched fire. The bullet, aimed at Nebo, merely grazed his arm as he charged in, bending low; it struck one of his followers squarely in the chest. The man went down with a shriek of pain. Holm fired again. Once more he missed the papaloi who, it seemed, led a charmed life. Again the leaden slug found its mark in the body of one of those behind.
The mob halted... fell back... two of its number writhing on the stone floor. Nebo, sensing the sudden desertion, stopped. He turned his head. Then, turning, he joined the mad rush from the cave.
They halted just outside as the priest exhorted them to charge.
HOLM emptied his gun into their midst. As they dropped back again, he whirled and seized Nina Fererra. His arm around her waist, they fled out into the darkness.
“Are you able to run?” he demanded.
Nina nodded dumbly.
“I—I think so,” she responded. Then: “Oh, Jimmy, I knew you would come!”
They dodged through the underbrush out of the circle of light that came through the rear of the cave.
And, at the same time, Nebo, angered at having the woman he had fought so hard to acquire taken from him, succeeded in rallying his frightened followers. They charged again, circling in on their quarry from three sides.
Ahead of them were the hills.
Jimmy Holm thought rapidly. Nina Fererra was almost exhausted as a result of the horrible ordeal through which she had passed. He was little, if any, better. His wanderings in the swamp, combined with the fever and malaria that he had accumulated, had sapped him of his strength.
THE hills offered a possible refuge. Knowing nothing of the topography of the island, he yet sensed that there must be some caverns or gullies in which they could hide in the darkness. Then, if they could stave off their pursuers, rescue might come in the morning.
The thought of rescue brought a cold feeling over him. What had happened? Why had not Blake already arrived at the head of his phalanx? Had Death struck? Was he already in control of the world while he, Holm, wandered about in the swamp, derelict to the duty that had been assigned to him?
He shook off the feeling of dread that had almost overmastered him and turned to the work at hand.
Ahead of them was an open field. To detour would take time. Holm hesitated. Then, as he heard the sound of their pursuers crashing through the underbrush, he seized Nina by the arm and dashed forward again. In the open, he could, if necessary, hold off his enemies with his gun.
Experience had already shown him that they had no firearms, else they would have brought them into use long ago. In the forest there was too much chance of a spear hurled with unerring accuracy out of some dark spot.
The moon suddenly came out, bathing the swampy jungle in her silvery splendor. Ahead of them were the hills. Holm, knowing nothing of the taboo that had been placed upon them, wondered vaguely why the blacks had suddenly stopped. Were their pursuers planning new treachery?
He rushed the exhausted girl to her limit. Gaining the foothills, they sped through a little ravine and up among the rocks of the higher ground. The moon showed the rugged formation of the little mountain range, bringing out the narrow fissure toward which they were heading.
At the end was a pocket of blackness—a cave from all appearances. Toward it Holm led the trembling girl. Here, their backs against the wall, they could stand off an army until rescue came.
The cavern opened invitingly. Their eyes sought to pierce the stygian blackness, but failed.
“At last!” Holm panted, coming to a stop. “At last—for the time being—we are safe.”
He whirled at the sound of a sinister chuckle. There was a slam as the great steel doors in front of the cave crashed shut.
A light sprang to life in the cavern roof.
Just outside the illuminated circle stood Doctor Death. A gun was clutched in his bony fingers. It was aimed squarely at Holm’s heart.
“At last!” Death said, echoing the detective’s words, “for the time being—you are safe!”
He chuckled gloatingly.
Nina screamed. Then merciful oblivion came to her and she fainted.
Again Death chuckled. The face of the young detective was blanched—livid with anger. He had fought for days in an effort to rescue the woman he loved, only to have her fall into the hands of the very man he had sought to come to grips with.
Against this man Holm had mobilized the greatest peace-time army of all time. Now fate had delivered him and the woman he loved into the hands of the monster. And with him the woman he loved more than life itself.
Death must have sensed his thoughts, for he cackled with laughter. He was a creature of moods, this mad-man with the intellect of a giant—with a brain through which the maggots of madness ran riot. There were times when his lust for blood overcame all of the better feelings in his wild nature. He licked his lips in anticipation of the orgy of cruelty that loomed before him.
At a signal several men stepped out of the darkness and surrounded Holm. No Zombi these. Rather, they were broad-shouldered full-blooded men with flat, broad faces and eyes that gleamed with snake-like venom in the midst of a great expanse of whiskers.
“I have already informed them that you are the police,” Death chuckled. “They are Russians, Jimmy—anarchists, all of them—nearly all recruited from the slums of Europe and the larger cities to assist me in my campaign against society. They hate policemen—the law. All of them are skilled workers. My agents picked them up and smuggled them across the border to me. I have had them hidden in one of my retreats. Last night they came here at my command—by plane.”
While the sinister old man was talking, the Russians were searching Holm, taking from him his gun and other weapons.
Then the other lights were switched on, illuminating the whole interior of the vast cavern
.
“This time you die, Jimmy,” the madman snarled. “There will be no weak minded Zombi for you to overcome. Instead, I have these men—artists in cruelty, all of them. Yet none of them are equal to me. The instant I saw your reflection on the screen, the idea came to me of how to put you to death—you and the woman who, like yourself, proved a traitor to my cause. You will have the pleasure of dying together!”
He chuckled fiendishly.
“I said that you would die together,” he went on. “I misspoke myself. You will die first, Jimmy—a slow, lingering death. Your suffering will be exquisite. And Nina—Nina will be tortured by watching you die. Afterward—”
He stopped in the middle of the sentence.
“Bring him along!” he snapped to the Russians. “And guard him well. At the first movement to escape, shoot him. Shoot him, but do not kill him. He must he tortured.”
THE wild-eyed men around Holm chuckled. Sadists, all of them—cruel, malevolent creatures hating all that was good, their pain lust was soon to be satiated. With two guns jammed into his ribs, Jimmy Holm was marched out of the cavern and through a huge steel door into another underground room.
In spite of his predicament, he gasped with astonishment at the lavishness with which it was equipped. Great machines for generating the death-rays stood to one side. Close by was the huge range-finding apparatus; before it stood a silvered screen similar to the one he had seen in Death’s underground lair in New York.
There was an air of haste and confusion about everything. Various pieces of delicate apparatus were scattered carelessly about—dropped where they had been unloaded from the planes. Electric wires hung from the ceiling or were draped from machine to machine.
The old man chuckled at Holm’s look of astonishment.
“To bring such equipment here took months of hard work,” he said. “Which reminds me, Jimmy, that all things come to him who waits. I saw you coming in my range-finding device, the replica of which you forced me to destroy back in New York.
“You will doubtless be pleased to know that the one I have here has a range of at least twenty-five miles. Within a day or two, it will be enlarged to several times that distance. Inside of a week, thanks to the skill of these artisans I have brought here, it will have the power of circling the world—to look into every hidden corner of the globe.”
Cackling maniacally, he indicated that Holm should be led toward a curious device in the center of the room resembling a roulette wheel.
“Watch him that he does not fall against that wire,” he said, jerking his thumb toward a bare electric wire that was suspended from the ceiling to the machine and which hung in a loop almost to the stone floor. “I have no wish that he should kill himself. To touch that wire would do the job which I have reserved for my own pleasure.”
He turned to Holm again.
“You lost control of your plane,” he chuckled. “Would it be of interest to you to know that it was I who caused that disaster? Yes? Then listen.
“One of the most amazing little organs in your body is an automatic equilibrator and compensator. It consists of a delicate system of six little fluid levels hidden in the bones of the inner ear. These little levels start the nerve machinery which adjusts us to each new position without a thought on our part.
“Eyes, neck, trunk, limbs, all receive their proper reflex impulses from them. When these fluid levels become confused, the owner loses all control over himself. An airplane pilot loses his bearings in the clouds. He may even turn upside down without knowing it.
“It is a familiar fact that when rotation stops, a man seems to rotate violently in the opposite direction. Professor Raymond Dodge of Wesleyan and a number of other scientists have experimented along these lines. It has remained for me to perfect a device which you see before you. It is a rotater. Working on the air waves like a radio, it brings about a certain rotating motion of the air currents which, striking against these little compensators in the human ear, cause them to work in one direction. Then, by changing them in the opposite direction, all equilibrium is lost.
“That, in plain words, is what happened to you. Seeing you in my range finder, I threw these rays against you and caused your plane to crash. I can do the same thing with all pilots—with all planes.”
He moved a lever. It started the little arrow on the dial to whirling.
“I have now set up a barrier against airplanes,” he smiled. “Not a single plane can get through that invisible barricade without crashing unless operated by gyroscope control. It is but one of the marvelous devices that I have constructed in my campaign against the world of science and invention.”
Nina shrieked a warning as Jimmy Holm leaped. One of the Russians fired. The bullet sang past the detective’s head, missing him by inches as, bent almost double, he landed his rubber-booted feet squarely in the center of the loop of wire.
His weight forced it down to the damp, stone floor.
There was a sudden blinding glare.
Then darkness.
Chapter IX
Petrifying Ray Attack
ALL was noise and confusion. For a moment Death seemed to be as badly frustrated as his men. Orders came from his lips like the rattle of machine gun fire—sharp commands for lights, warnings to beware of other wires which, on a different circuit, had not been shorted.
It was this momentary panic which aided Jimmy Holm. He realized that Nina Fererra would understand that he had not deserted her—that his escape gave him his only chance to rescue her.
Death was continuing his fusillade of commands as Holm whirled and charged through the darkness in the direction he believed lay the door through which they had entered. He crashed against a huge bulk coming in the opposite direction. The other grunted from the impact and muttered something in Russian.
Holm’s fist caught him in the pit of the stomach and he went down in a heap. He shouted. A second pair of brawny arms were wrapped around the detective in the darkness and he caught the odor of garlic as his adversary leaned forward in an effort to secure a better hold.
The young detective was like an eel, the knowledge of jiu-jitsu taught in the department standing him in good stead now as, falling backward, he unexpectedly brought the other down on top of him. He fell like a ball, his legs doubled until his knees were almost even with his chin. He thrust them forward. His opponent flew through the air, landing against something with a crash. Broken glass tinkled against the rocky floor.
In the beginning, Holm had oriented himself until he was certain that he knew the location of the door. Now, however, as a result of the two encounters, he was lost. He brought up against a bit of machinery and caromed away, thanking the kind fate that had prompted Constable Le Grand to think of the rubber boots. Thus shod, the danger from an encounter with live wires was materially lessened.
His groping fingers came in contact with the rough stone of the cave wall. By following it, he felt that he would eventually come to the door that led into the outer cavern. A shout from the distance told him that lights had been found—that his enemies were returning with flashlights. He must work fast.
He broke into a run, holding his fingers against the wall for guidance, going in the direction that he believed the door to be located. Over his shoulder he saw the darkness of the cavern slowly dissolving and knew that it would be only a minute more before the fuse would be replaced and the huge cave again made as light as day.
Ahead of him loomed a black mass in the darkness. He touched it. It was a pile of empty packing crates. He dodged toward them...
The floor dropped from beneath his feet.
He landed with a thud that jarred his body from head to foot. The back of his head crashed against the stone wall with force enough to make him see stars. Yet with the instinct of self-preservation that was his birthright, as his knees buckled beneath his weight, his hand was stretched forward protectingly.
It came in contact with an opening horizontal to the one into which he had f
allen. He dragged himself into it. Then outraged nature gave way and unconsciousness swept over him.
Apparently he was out only a short time, for when consciousness returned he could still hear the noise and confusion above him and the sharp barking commands. A dull glow at the top of the shaft showed him that the lighting apparatus had been repaired and the search was still going on.
He pulled himself farther into the horizontal hole. Stretching his hand above his head, he found that it was low—a man would be unable to stand erect in it—and so narrow that there was scarcely room for the passage of his body. Unlike the cavern itself, it was worn to a glass-like smoothness at sides, top and bottom as if from the steady passage of water for years. He assumed—and correctly—that it was a subterranean water-course that had been diverted.
The sides of the perpendicular shaft were smooth, also; that much he had already ascertained. There was no chance for him to get out that way. The only thing left for him was to continue creeping forward and see where the smooth fissure ended.
Again he thanked heaven for the foresight that had prompted him to wear Le Grand’s boots. He remembered now that, floundering as he had been through the swamp, he had dropped a box of safety matches into the top to keep them dry. His searchers had neglected to examine his boots. He retrieved the matches and scratched one on the side of the box. Cupping the light in his hand, he took a quick look about.
The smooth fissure ran at a slightly downward angle straight ahead as far as he could see.
IT was slow going, walking almost on all fours, yet he finally came to where the opening made a sudden turn to the right. Now, from a distance, came a confusion of sounds—the steady falling of water and a low, humming noise like that of a dynamo. It seemed, too, as if his eyes detected a glimmer a light far ahead.
The noise increased as he proceeded. So did the light, until he was finally able to see the round opening at the end of the fissure in the distance. He increased his speed, finally coming out upon a narrow shelf of rock.