The Long Vendetta

by Clifton Adams

  “I don't know.” But I was hoping. Hoping so hard that I almost forgot to breathe. “Go get a light of some kind; I'm going to take a look.”

  I started down the steps again. A narrow shaft of morning light shot down the opening and fell in a brilliant rectangle on the cellar floor. Beyond the rectangle was darkness.

  “Jeanie...?”

  It was more of a wish than a question. I stepped cautiously into the darkness and the thumping got louder and faster.

  “Jeanie...?”

  The toe of my shoe touched something. Something soft and resilient and alive. Behind me, I heard the swish-swish of Nurse Flagg's crepe soles on the steps, and the sharp beam of an electric lantern stabbed slantwise across the cellar and fell on Jeanie's face.

  She lay on her side, her wrists fastened behind her back with a length of copper wire, her ankles fastened the same way. Her mouth was gagged with what might have been the sleeve of a discarded shirt, and her eyes stared up at me, wide and swimming with terror, and then with relief.

  Quickly I knelt beside her, my hands shaking so badly that I could hardly undo the knots in the gag. Nurse Flagg put the lantern down and untwisted the wire at Jeanie's wrists and ankles. Once freed, Jeanie's nerve deserted her, and she clung to me, trembling violently. “Buck! Buck!”

  I crooned to her. “It's all right, Jeanie. It's all right now. You're safe. No one can hurt you now.”

  She tried to speak but choked on the words. All she could manage was, “Buck...! Buck...!” over and over. I held her tight, knowing that words would be no good now, knowing that it would take a while before mere words would penetrate the terror.

  Nurse Flagg looked at me over Jeanie's shoulder, looked at me with a bleakness that was past emotion. She took Jeanie's wrists and began to massage them.

  “She is in shock; a touch of hysteria is to be expected.”

  But she didn't know Jeanie as I did. I knew what she was made of. Tough steel and Irish fire. It would take a special brand of terror to break a girl like Jeanie.

  “She ought to be taken out of here,” Miss Flagg said, holding the light to Jeanie's face, observing the dilated pupils. “You'll have to carry her; she won't be able to stand for a while.”

  I nodded, holding her gaze for just a moment. And out of that bleakness, she asked, silently:Could Fred have done this thing? My Fred?

  I said, “Will you hold the light, Miss Flagg?”

  She stood and shone the sharply focused disk of light on Jeanie, and then she swung the light slowly toward the cellar exit as I lifted Jeanie in my arms and started toward the steps. The electric lantern exploded in Nurse Flagg's hand.

  It happened with heart-stopping suddenness. A slender pencil of flame stabbed from the darkness. A flash as sourceless as summer lightning lit the cellar for the briefest instant—and in a deafening explosion battered the cellar walls. The lantern vanished.

  Nurse Flagg stood in the rectangle of light at the bottom of the steps, her white uniform dazzling against the cellar darkness.

  A lesson well learned is never forgotten, they say. It must be true. I dived, half crouching, half falling, with Jeanie in my arms. I fell across Nurse Flagg's legs and sent her reeling back into darkness, out of the light; then I struck the cellar floor on my shoulder and Jeanie and I hit and rolled almost to the near wall. Something stopped us—a chair, an odd piece of furniture, something. We hit it and stopped rolling and I grabbed for the Luger in my waistband. Grabbed instinctively, without taking time to think.

  Then, just as instinctively, I held my fire. That was what the sniper was waiting for: to give away my position. Oh, no, I thought grimly. My position was Jeanie's position. I wasn't going to draw fire as long as she was there beside me.

  Someone was trying to kill us. With a hand gun, from the sound of it—at least a .38 caliber, and probably even bigger.

  The old sickness that I had once known so well was there in the pit of my stomach, right where it had stayed through every minute of every combat mission of the war.

  And that's what this was—war. In the cramped confines of a cellar or on the shell-pocked plains of Ubach, as long as one man was trying to kill another, it was war.

  I reached out and found Jeanie's hand and squeezed it, trying to tell her to stay where she was, to be still and silent and everything would be all right. Her hand was icy, and it was trembling, but she remained perfectly quiet and returned my pressure, and I knew that the Kelly toughness was still there.

  I began inching away from Jeanie, making for the far wall. Where Nurse Flagg was, I didn't know. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness and they were beginning to distinguish large masses from small, and light masses from dark, but that was no great help in pin-pointing a killer who had a gun and knew how to use it.

  Something loomed up in front of me—more discarded furniture. Apparently Miss Flagg never threw anything away; she simply stored it in her cellar.

  Now, near the wall, I could make out Nurse Flagg's white uniform. If I could see it, so could the killer.

  The longer I stared at it, the whiter that uniform seemed to get. I was glad it was on Nurse Flagg, instead of Jeanie. I doubted that even a madman would kill in cold blood a woman who was probably the only friend he had in the world.

  Seconds slowly drained away and formed minutes, and still there was no sound in the cellar. I tried to remember where the shot had come from. From the back? From my left, or from my right?

  I tried an old trick, a simple trick to draw out an enemy's position. Shifting the Luger to my left hand, I fished in my right-hand pocket and came out with a dime. I filled my lungs and held my breath. There wasn't a sound. Outside, I could hear an autumn wind rattling the dry leaves on Nurse Flagg's back-door bed of petunias. But there wasn't a sound in the cellar. I aimed for the far wall and flipped the dime with my thumb.

  The noise was startling. It lingered an instant and was gone. Nothing followed. Not the slightest reaction from the killer. I lay as still as death on the cold cement floor and tried to figure it out. Was he deaf, or did he have brass-plated nerves that refused to jangle to my brand of trickery?

  I lay holding my breath until my lungs burned, peering until my eyes jumped, listening until my ears rang. Nothing but cold, dead silence.

  Slowly—very slowly—I began to get it. Then, full blown, I had it. I knew why the killer made no sound. We were there by ourselves: Jeanie, Nurse Flagg, and I. The killer wasn't there!

  I couldn't explain how he had managed it, but even before the door at the top of the steps began to close, I knew that he had somehow escaped. But he hadn't gone up the steps; the confusion hadn't lasted long enough for that. Then how...?

  At the moment, it didn't matter. I glanced up and saw that heavy cellar door coming down like the lid on a coffin. The rectangle of light at the bottom of the steps became narrower and narrower. Then it was gone. The door came down with a crash.

  For a few seconds, the darkness was almost absolute. I charged blindly toward the steps and fell sprawling on the cement floor. The Luger jarred out of my hand and clattered against the wall. As I wasted valuable seconds pawing for the gun, the killer was barring and bolting the door from the outside.

  By the time I found the Luger, it was much too late to do anything about the door. But I fumbled along the wall, anyway, until I found the steps, and then I scrambled up the steps until my head cracked against the solid planking.

  “Stanley, open the door! I want to talk to you!”

  I might as well have been talking to the cement wall. But I kept yelling and beating on the door. “Stanley, let the women out of here! Whatever you've got against me, meet me with it man to man.

  “Listen to me, Stanley! Miss Flagg's down here. She's probably the only friend you've got in the whole world. At least open the door and lether out.”

  I had the childish hope that Mildred Flagg would be his weakness; that he would get to thinking of all she had done for him and take a chance on let
ting her out. All I wanted at that moment was a crack in the doorway. Just a crack big enough to get the Luger through.

  “Listen to me, Stanley, you lousy murderer!”

  I got my shoulders under the heavy door and tried with all my strength to force it. The door wouldn't budge. There wasn't even a crack of light between the door and the facing. I sat on the steps panting, my knees shaking from the exertion. Well, I told myself, this wasn't the only way out of the cellar. The killer had got out with no trouble, and he hadn't used the door. I fumbled for matches, struck one and cupped it in my hands.

  “Jeanie, you all right?”

  “Yes, Buck...”

  It was a small voice, but it wasn't hysterical.

  “How about you, Miss Flagg?”

  Mildred Flagg was crouched against the wall, covering her face with her hands. She reminded me of an old-fashioned actress registering shock. It looked too melodramatic to be real.

  “Miss Flagg...?”

  Slowly, she moved her hands and squinted at me through her fingers. I struck another match. She hadn't moved. She could have been a starched white statue against the gray cement wall. I said again:

  “Miss Flagg...?”

  Then I saw the blood on her hands and face, and Jeanie saw it, too. I stumbled down the stairs, hoarding my flickering match, but Jeanie reached her first.

  The match went out and I had to use another one. Now we saw that the blood on her face had come from her hands. She had been cut slightly from flying glass when Fred blithely shot the electric lantern out of her hand. Jeanie produced a small handkerchief and dabbed the blood from the nurse's face. I held the match close and Jeanie made a quick examination of the hands.

  “There are several small cuts,” Jeanie said, “but I can't see the glass.”

  Nurse Flagg took a deep breath and said tonelessly, “It doesn't matter.”

  Jeanie glanced at me, smiling fleetingly as my match began to flicker. “Can you spare another match? While I get a bandage on?”

  I held another match while Jeanie made a bandage with her handkerchief and some strips from the tail of her blouse. Mildred Flagg didn't even seem to notice.

  I fumbled about on the cellar floor and found a discarded broom that I hoped to use as a torch. But I saw immediately that a torch was out of the question. The air was already stale, and smoke from the burning broom would soon make it unbreathable. I glanced up at the ceiling—the hazy ring of light that had marked the entrance of the ventilating pipe wasn't even visible. The killer must have covered the ventilator with something, or stopped it up...

  Suddenly the ghostly halo appeared over our heads.

  “Sergeant Coyle, do you hear me?”

  I knew the voice was coming down the ventilating pipe, but there in the darkness it sounded as though it were coming right out of the walls.

  “I hear you.”

  “How does it feel, Sergeant? Trapped in a room, with no escape? Trapped, with death about to come down on you?”

  There was no gloating in the voice, no taunting. It merely asked questions with the cold objectivity of a machine.

  “How do you like it, Sergeant Coyle?”

  “What do you want?” I yelled. “Who are you?”

  Jeanie's hand closed convulsively on my arm, and I pulled her to me and held her close.

  “Don't you know who I am, Sergeant? Can't you guess?”

  “No!”

  There was a period of dark silence, and I had the impression that the killer was pleased that I hadn't identified him yet. I called tensely, “Listen, Stanley, what do you want with us? Sometime in the past maybe I did something to you, but I'm sure that Miss Flagg or Miss Kelly never harmed you. Let them go.”

  “My name isn't Stanley,” he said.

  “Whatever it is, let the women go. You'll still have me.”

  “That's not enough, Sergeant. I realized that a year ago.”

  Something inside me went cold, but I still hadn't grasped his full meaning. “For the love of God!” I yelled. “Don't you know the meaning of mercy?”

  “Mercy?” The voice took on a hard, chiseled quality. “Remember Ubach, Sergeant? Did you show mercy there?”

  “That waswar!” By now, I was almost screaming.

  “Think about it, Sergeant. For a little while.”

  The gauzy halo vanished from the ceiling.

  “Buck, who is he! Why does he hate you so?”

  Wearily, I shook my head. “I don't know, Jeanie. That thing that happened in Germany so long ago... The decision to shoot that house to pieces was mine and mine alone; that's one truth I can't escape. That man up there—maybe he's the voice of retribution. I've thought about it so much that it makes no sense any more.”

  “Buck, what are we going to do?”

  I grinned to myself and was glad that it was dark and Jeanie couldn't see it. “I guess we'd better think of a way to get out of here.”

  “How didhe get out? He didn't go up the steps, did he?”

  “Not unless he knows how to make himself invisible.”

  Nurse Flagg said, “The crawl space under the front part of the house. That's the only other way.”

  Suddenly I felt light, almost gay. “There's a second exit in this cellar? You know about it?”

  “Exit?” Mildred Flagg said in that colorless tone. “Not exactly that. I'll show you.”

  I already had the matches out.

  Jeanie stayed at my elbow, clutching hopefully to my arm. Miss Flagg guided us through a maze of rolled, discarded rugs, broken furniture, cases of old clothing and odds and ends of everything under the sun. “Here,” she said as we reached the back wall. Before the match flickered out, I glimpsed the small unpainted door about four feet above the floor.

  Jeanie pressed a book of paper matches in my hand, and a small metal cigarette lighter. That was a relief—my own supply of matches was running low.

  Miss Flagg touched the wooden doorknob. “When this house was built the owners decided on a half-basement. But the floor plans didn't allow for an inside basement stairway, so the main door was put outside at the end of the porch. Beneath the front half of the house there is a standard crawl space, and this small door was installed for the convenience of plumbers and other workmen.”

  I flicked Jeanie's small lighter and a clean, blue flame danced above the silver case. The door was under-sized, but large enough for a husky plumber to slip through with ease. I glanced at Jeanie and grinned. For the first time in days, I felt that my luck had started to change.

  “Is the door locked?” I asked.

  Miss Flagg shook her head. “No, it's never locked.”

  She grasped the knob and tugged. The cellar dampness had affected the wood, swelling door against frame to form a seal that was almost airtight. I handed the lighter to Jeanie and took the knob in my own hand. If the killer could open the door and close it, so could 1. I jerked two or three times and the door began to give.

  “It's opening!” Jeanie cried, and I saw the bright anticipation in her eyes. The prospect of escape was sweet to all of us. We could almost taste it.

  The door came open suddenly. Jeanie gasped and the flame of her lighter leaped wildly. For several seconds, we stared, hoping that what we were seeing was not real. The opening to the crawl space beneath the house was barred from the other side. Barred with three lengths of wide, heavy construction steel. Barred so that not even a midget could have squeezed between them.

  I grabbed one of the bars and shook it savagely. It rattled, but I couldn't move it more than a fraction of an inch in any direction. Apparently the bars were fitted in brackets and locked in place. This is how the killer had left the cellar. He had left one of the bars down; then, after shooting the lantern out of Nurse Flagg's hand, he had squirmed through, closed the door, replaced the bar and locked it in place. Then he had come around to the back of the house and locked the main cellar door.

  I tried to reach between the bars. The killer had very carefully pla
ced the brackets just beyond my reach. Glancing over my shoulder at Nurse Flagg, I said:

  “Has the man up there—the man you know as Fred Stanley—been coming here long?”

  She swallowed with some difficulty. The full meaning of those bars was just getting through to her. “I... I'm not sure what you mean. But yes, Fred has been coming here off and on for over a year.”

  Over a year... “Was he here often?” I asked. “I mean, did he more or less have the run of the place?”

  A kind of lethargy seemed to seize her, and she nodded heavily. “Yes, Fred has often been to this house. We have been... friends for a long time. Ever since the war, almost.” She spoke thoughtfully, almost to herself. “First there was the hospital in England. Then other hospitals, after the operations. The plastic surgery. It happens sometimes with nurses; you find the same patient in your care almost everywhere you go. Almost as though he were following you—or the other way around. That's the way it was with us, with Fred and me. When I came back stateside and got my first assignment, there he was. In the same hospital...”

  “Mental hospital?”

  She shrank from the term. “He... was under observation.”

  Jeanie uttered a little cry and dropped her lighter. “It's hot!” she said.

  I felt for her hand. “It's all right. We can talk just as well in the dark. Anyway, we'd better save the lighter fluid; we may need it later.”

  “Buck, shouldn't we be doing something about getting out of here? Beforehe returns?”

  For the moment, I had almost forgotten our immediate danger. Something else was digging in my subconscious, something I didn't want to look at. But it was there, digging, digging a little deeper all the time. Something the killer had said... Something Nurse Flagg had said just a few minutes before...

  “Buck...?”

  I said, “Yes, Jeanie, you're right. I was thinking that if we learned all we could about the killer, if we put together everything we knew about him, the three of us, maybe—just maybe—we'd find a weakness of his that we could play on.”

  But it wasn't that. It was something else altogether. A black thing, and evil.