by Robert Reed
them . They stood close-clustered for a while in animated prattle
with their big guardian .
Wentworth came out, too, gave some final swift instruction to the
guard, then strode off on an inspection of police .
The children began to romp and play upon the lawn .
It was then that that sinister figure on the hill put the glasses into
their case and stood erect . From his pocket he drew an antiseptic
mask, such as surgeons wear in operating, and fastened it carefully
over nostrils and mouth .
Onto his hands he drew thin rubber gloves, which he wet thor-
oughly with an evil-smelling germicide . Then he cut a long switch
and walked with wary eyes toward the black satchel . He picked it
up and, holding it well away from him, made his cautious way down
the hillside until he came near the boundary of the Gainsborough
estate .
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 117
Swiftly then he unfastened the satchel, opened it, and sprang
back; and from the interior leaped a small, bright-eyed terrier . It
wagged its tail furiously and, bent almost double in an ecstasy of
pleasure over its escape from the confinement of the bag, flung to-
ward the white-masked man .
He slashed at it sharply with the switch he had cut upon the hill;
two, three, four times he hit the dog savagely . It yipped, turned tail,
and fled into the Gainsborough estate.
The man turned and hurried rapidly back the way he had come,
leaving the satchel, and pouring strong germicide over his hands .
He dropped the gloves and the antiseptic mask into a hollow tree
stump, then continued his retreat up the hill . Once he had regained
his vantage point he again used the glasses on the children romping
upon the lawn .
He had not long to wait, for the dog, attracted by the happy cries
of the children at play, penetrated to the lawn where they romped,
and seeing them, ran eagerly forward .
It had been stolen from a home where there were children, and
the monster on the hill, chuckling with sinister satisfaction, congrat-
ulated himself upon the thoroughness with which he had planned .
The policeman, he noticed, seemed completely unsuspicious . He
patted the dog’s head and allowed it to race and play with the chil-
dren . And Wentworth was a mile away, checking on the guards on
the opposite side of the estate .
The man on the hill saw this through his glasses and he laughed
aloud with a rasping harshness, and, rising, vanished into the thick-
ness of the woods .
Wentworth, striding swiftly forward toward the Gainsborough
mansion, stopped suddenly and listened . The breeze brought him
the excited, happy cries of the two children . But it brought him also
another sound that made the blood chill in his veins .
Not a sound to exercise an ordinary man, but to Wentworth, in
that moment, it suggested death in a most horrible form . The sound
was the sharp barking of a dog .
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 118
Wentworth broke into a pounding run, sprinting across the
smooth green lawns with furious speed . Nearing the two children,
who were playing with the dog and the heedless policeman, he sent
his shout ahead of him:
“Kill that dog!”
The policeman whirled around, and stared at him with gaping
mouth . Running, Wentworth had drawn his own gun . But there was
no opportunity for him to fire. The children tumbled upon the ground
with the dog, and only for fractions of a second was the animal’s
small furry body visible .
After seconds that seemed like hours, Wentworth darted finally
across the last yards of space, pocketing his gun and pulling on rub-
ber gloves that he had carried with him since first he had sensed the
threat of the Black Death . With these he snatched the boy away from
his laughing struggle with the puppy . He jerked out his automatic
and fired two shots in the dog’s head, then, without pause, caught
up the boy and, holding him at arm’s length, rushed back toward the
mansion .
He called back to the girl to follow and the policeman trailed in
bewilderment after them .
“In the name of all that’s holy, Mr . Wentworth, why ever did you
kill the puppy?” He panted, half trotting to keep pace with Went-
worth . But he got no answer .
Wentworth increased his speed, dashed into the house and shout-
ed for Mrs . Gainsborough . “Get the doctor here immediately . Tell
him it’s life and death! Tell him to bring Hopkins Solution with him,
the antitoxin for the Bubonic plague!”
Wentworth forced Nita to leave immediately . He ordered the
children put to bed, made them gargle with germicide and washed
them and himself with medicated soap . And he ordered the police-
man to take similar precautions . He did the same . But for the others,
who had been exposed for some time to the dog, the precautions
proved futile .
Never before had Wentworth seen the dread Black Death work
with such fearful swiftness . Within half an hour of the time he had
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 119
shot the dog, the children’s faces had gone gaunt and yellow with
the feverish touch of the plague .
The boy tossed and moaned upon his bed in a half stupor, whim-
pering with pain . Upon his upper arms blue splotches appeared, the
centers showing the spidery tracing of blood-red veins, that dread
marking which is called the Flower of the Black Death . Beneath his
armpits and thighs purplish egg-shaped swellings grew . Wentworth
touched one with the tip of a gloved finger and a scream of wild
agony tore from the boy’s throat .
“It’s the Bubonic plague right enough,” the doctor muttered . But
the worry on his face was greater than even that dire announcement,
with its threat to countless thousands, warranted . He shook his head,
as he and Wentworth stared into each other’s eyes with drawn coun-
tenances . “There is no record in history,” the doctor said, “of the
Black Death working this fast . The infection must have taken place
four days ago .”
Wentworth shook his head slowly . In the silence between them,
broken only by the whimperings of the children, by the thudding of
the mother’s fists on the locked door, her broken pleadings that she
be allowed to enter, horror raised its ugly head .
“I’m positive,” he told the doctor, “that the dog brought the germ .
This must be some new and as yet unknown form of the plague .”
The little boy screamed out suddenly in anguish, straightened in
the bed and doubled over its edge . Blood gushed from his mouth .
The doctor went swiftly to work on him, and Wentworth made way
for a trained nurse who had just arrived . Her skilled help would be
of far greater assistance than his own . Sombrely, he left the room,
having almost to fight Mrs. Gainsborough to keep her out. He went
directly to a bath where he stripped and literally bathed himself with
germicide, syringing out mouth and nostrils . He burned the rubber
gloves and giving what small comfort he could to Mrs . Gainsbor-
ough, entered his car and drove away . There was nothing further he
could do .
He had failed, and the Black Death had struck its first, horrible
blow . Wentworth’s eyes were bleak at the thought of the menace to
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 120
the millions of the city; the thought of a thousand throats echoing
with those screams of agony that seemed even now to ring in his
own ears; of a thousand bodies tossing in beds that were racks of
pain; of a city demoralized by fear .
And over the entire city brooded that masked figure that was the
Black Death — a masked figure whose hands would be red with the
blood of the innocents…
Chapter 6
The Spider Unmasked
With those deaths at the home of Mrs . Gainsborough began the
most amazing reign of terror the modern world had ever known .
Newspaper headlines flung the ghastly news at their readers in let-
ters two inches high . Wherever people gathered in frightened groups
on street corners and public squares, they repeated over and over
those three grim words: “The Black Death .” They were shouted
above the clatter and roar of the subways, whispered in awed tones
over the family supper table . Mothers glanced with worried faces at
their children; and men went about their work with drawn lips and
haggard eyes .
For the dread Black Death that had swept England, that had
wiped out whole cities, had laid its horrid skeleton hand upon New
York . It was fortunate the panic-stricken multitudes did not know, as
Wentworth did, that the deaths were of human agency, perpetrated
by a monster whose fiendishness was almost beyond belief.
The Bubonic plague had appeared in modern times before; it had
killed its thousands in the East, but never had it been known in so
virulent form as now . For the present disease was almost instanta-
neous, killing within twenty-four hours . And the form doctors had
known and studied had an incubation period of four days . They had
devised two serums for it; one which gave a partial immunity im-
mediately and was effective for five days; another which acted more
slowly but which was effective over a longer period .
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 121
Both of these had been used in the present outbreak and both
had proved futile . Doctors spent long hours over their test tubes;
laboratories worked frantically turning out the serums . But it was
slow work and nearly hopeless .
Wentworth, lean-faced and burning-eyed, blaming himself for
the death of those innocents, flaming with a white-hot rage against
the man who called himself tauntingly “The Black Death,” was
summoned into conference by Stanley Kirkpatrick, the Commis-
sioner of Police .
There was a never-fading scowl upon Kirkpatrick’s saturnine
face as the two men, sitting across the desk from each other, sought
to lay plans for the capture of the criminal . But what information
Wentworth had he could not reveal lest he also betray the fact that
he was the Spider, a man now sought vengefully by the police for
the murder of two of their comrades .
He could not tell him of the connection between that battle in the
pawnshop, of John Harper and the gloating laugh of a man over a
wire foredooming two children and an entire household to the Black
Death, threatening the city’s millions .
It was midnight when Wentworth left police headquarters and,
entering his Lancia limousine, drove uptown with unseeing eyes
fixed upon the turbaned head of Ram Singh. The car snaked through
traffic, turned west to the poorly lighted streets along the waterfront,
and Wentworth pressed the button that opened the secret wardrobe
behind the cushions .
He rapidly extracted and strapped beneath his shirt his compact
kit of chrome steel tools, dropped into his pocket a small but deadly
automatic, and closed the compartment .
At Seventy-Fourth Street the Lancia turned its nose east into a
district of cheap lodging houses whose stingy light barely penetrated
dust-filmed windows. Wentworth rapped sharply on the glass. Ram
Singh glided smoothly to the curb, and, with a few parting instruc-
tions, Wentworth, the Spider now, strode rapidly up the street, eye-
ing the dimly revealed numbers of the houses .
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 122
He spotted the one he sought near the corner, went deliberately
up the steps . The door resisted his skilled use of the lock-pick only
a few seconds, and the Spider entered .
But this time the Spider was bent on no errand of justice; nor was
he out to exact the penalty for some crime . The girl whose cry that
she had been framed for forgery had won his sympathy lived here,
and he hoped she might give him some clue to the master of the
plague . But this was an errand that Richard Wentworth could not
perform in his true identity . It must be the Spider who interviewed
the girl, lest later inquiries by the police link the two personalities
and identify them as the same man .
Up two flights of steps he crept, and in the darkness of the third
floor his hand slipped beneath his coat and once more a black silk
mask hid the face of Richard Wentworth .
At each door on the third floor he listened carefully, but found
nothing suspicious . Finally he knocked lightly at the one which
opened into the girl’s room .
A pregnant silence followed his tap . But a moment later he heard
a hesitant step and a feminine voice quaver through the thin board
panel .
“Who — who is it?”
“Your friend,” said Wentworth softly, “ — the Spider .”
There was a gasp and for a long moment more, silence . Then a
key grated in the lock, and the door swung open . The Spider slipped
in . He shut the door swiftly behind him . Before his masked face the
girl retreated with slow and fearful steps . Her face was pale beneath
the glowing red of hair that showered about her shoulders . Her hands
clutched about her a cheap negligee of green silk, to which the fresh
youth of her body lent dignity . Her mouth was open and a scream
had caught in her throat .
“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Doeg,”’ the Spider said . “It is necessary
that I wear a mask, lest my enemies in some way learn who I am .”
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 123
His words reassured the girl somewhat and she dropped to a seat
on the side of the shoddy white-iron bed which, with a second hand
dresser and chair, completed the furnishings of her small room .
The Spider, with one swift glance, took in every detail, noting the
drawn shade . He drew a cigarette case from his pocket and offered
it to her, but the girl shook her head, with a small smile, and in turn
offered him a box from the dresser beside her bed . A white box with
gold letters and long gold-tipped Dimetrios cigarettes .
She laughed shyly . “My one luxury,” she explained .
The Spider laughed, too . “Sorry I can’t join you,” he said . “But
the mask — ” He left the sentence in the air, and snapped a light for
her .When she had the cigarette going Wentworth began his question-
ing .“Do you know of any reason,” he asked, “why anyone should try
to frame you?”
The half-smile which had hovered about the girl’s lips faded en-
tirely . She shook her red head .
“Do you have any idea why you were framed?”
“Not unless someone merely wanted to steal the bonds, and I was
the most convenient person to hang it on .”
The Spider took an impatient turn up and down the room .
“You work in the office of MacDonald Pugh,” he said. “Who,
beside yourself, would have an opportunity to substitute the forged
bonds for the genuine?”
The girl’s face clouded and her eyes dropped . But in the brief
moment before her lids veiled them, Wentworth glimpsed some-
thing very much like fear .
“Come,” he said sharply, “what is it? This is important . If you
want to be freed of the crime, if you want — ”
The door knob rasped slightly . Wentworth turned toward it . But
the movement was amazingly slow for the Spider, almost as if he
wished to be — too late. His hand did not even move toward his gun,
and he stared calmly, a thin smile on his hidden lips, into the face of
WINGS OF THE BLACK DEATH, by Norvell Page | 124
the man, masked like himself, who stood just inside the door with
leveled gun .
A smothered scream burst out behind him . Wentworth, ignoring
the girl, studied the slitted eyes that glittered at him through the slits
of the mask .
The man advanced slowly, the gun in his right hand, his left hid-
den in his coat pocket .
“Over by the window, you,” he ordered . Wentworth said “Cer-
tainly,” in a casual tone, as if he granted a minor favor to an acquain-
tance, and moved slowly backward .
The girl came again into the range of his vision and he studied
her . Was she the innocent victim she pretended, or was she in league
with the Black Death? The Spider had been certain after their clash
in the pawnshop, that the criminal would seek to trap him . The only
logical bait was the girl, and he had deliberately taken that bait,