The Walt Whitman MEGAPACK ™

by Millard, Joseph J.

  “You little dried up, pot-bellied—”

  “Whoa,” I said, flashing my nicest smile. “Lester, sometimes I don’t think you like me.”

  He stood on the other side of the gate and the Great Dane galloped down the drive and took his place at Lester’s side. The pooch growled. It sounded like he meant it. He was a great bluffer.

  Lester uttered a few more remarks on the condition my neck would be in if I didn’t leave that spot.

  “I’ll set the dog on you,” he shouted. That sounded like a great idea. It might work.

  “I dare you to,” I said.

  It had developed into one of those arguments kids get into over their pet bag of marbles. Lester unlocked the gate and the pooch came pouncing toward me. I held out my arms as if I was greeting my best friend’s wife.

  The pooch growled and put his front paws on my shoulders. I braced myself and submitted to some wet kisses. I didn’t like them, but I did like the way Lester’s eyes popped out at the little scene. He started yelling at the dog, trying to bully it back behind the gate.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “We’ll both come in. He likes me. He won’t be any trouble. I got to see Mr. Lion anyhow.”

  It almost worked. I got in all right, and fast. About that time, Lester gathered his wits together and rushed me.

  I was as ready as I’ll ever be to meet a tank coming at full speed with the gun turret working. I double up my right hand under the glove, felt that nice pair of knuckles underneath, and let it fly from way down.

  I put everything I had into it. It was a nice effort. Lester stopped coming, rocked back and forth a couple of times and grabbed his jaw. My fist felt as though it had just gone through a brick wall. Lester’s eyes opened wider and wider and he just stood there. I tried again, straight arm, right into that spot below the ribs. It was low and dirty. Lester grunted and sat down. Then he rolled over, doubled his legs up against his stomach and howled. I didn’t pity him a damned bit. I walked past him and on up toward the house. It would be an hour or so before he got his stomach lining straightened out so he could fight again.

  I got twenty yards before I saw Lion running toward me. I jumped into the evergreen grove that grew close to the road. He hadn’t seen me. He ran toward the gate without stopping.

  Opportunity evidently was waiting—at least for a while. I ran in the opposite direction. My footsteps were damned far apart. I was in a hurry.

  I didn’t ring the bell. I went into the hall at the front of the house and stopped because there was something there I hadn’t seen before, and I was very much interested.

  Both sides of the hall were lined with mummy cases. I never could warm up much toward mummies. They’ve been dead too long to be very attractive. These fancy boxes in the hall had a lot of ugly faces painted on them. They gave me the willies. There was one, though, that looked interesting. It was open, and it was empty. There was a mummy loose in the house.

  I wondered if anyone else was around. I wasn’t worried about meeting the mummy. I was wondering a lot about it. I listened intently, but could hear no sound. I walked the length of the hall that divided the house, in two parts. An open door invited me to take a peek. I did, and went down the broad staircase into a brilliantly lighted room below. It was square, decorated with white, very clean enamel, and there was a table in the center under a bright spotlight.

  Frank Lion had been plenty worried when he left the house. I suppose he had heard the bell and wondered if Lester had things under control. He left the doors open behind him, and it made a pretty broad trail for me to follow. So I had followed it; I was here—but what now? I moved across the room, giving an imitation of a man who’s scared and wants to run away.

  I lifted the sheet, took a quick look, and found out where that damned mummy had gone.

  I kept on staring at the thing under the sheet, but my eye sockets were begging my eyes to come back in where they belonged. The mummy was a hideous collection of bones, held together by brown, parchment-like skin. You could count every bone and joint. You could look at the wrinkled mouth, grinning and open, to reveal brown teeth. Hair, like black horse hair, was matted and twisted around the neck and shoulders.

  I covered the thing up and waited for my blood pressure to go down to normal. A corpse isn’t bad when it’s fresh.

  I didn’t like this Egyptian importation. It had been dead long enough to take on a personality all its own, and I didn’t like it.

  Then Frank Lion’s footsteps sounded in the hall upstairs. It was a guess, of course, but I figured he was on his way down here. I had about thirty seconds to find a place to hide. I could fight, but if I did, I wouldn’t learn anything more about the mummy, and other details I had come to clear up.

  The sheet was large. It hung to the floor on one side of the table. I went to my knees and grunted my way under it. Sort of a lower berth, with a babe without much sex-appeal occupying the upper. I waited.

  The footsteps came down the stairs and assumed the form of patent leather shoes and neatly creased trousers. The patent leather shoes went briskly across the room and I heard the click of a house phone being taken from the hook. Lion’s voice said:

  “Lester?”

  Evidently it was. Lion sounded angry, and very impatient.

  “He’s not down here. Search the grounds. Find him this time and put him away. I should have done it when I had the chance.”

  I guess Lester thought he needed help because Lion listened a minute and swore at the phone softly.

  “Never mind. It’s your job and you can catch him or get out. If you wish to go on living in a world without iron barred windows, find him.” He hung up.

  For a couple of long minutes he moved from place to place in the room, and although I could see only the feet and the lower part of the trousers, I knew that he was preparing for some work at the table. Then he went to the stairs and touched a light switch. The room blacked out. I felt prickly heat traveling up and down my neck. A soft, glowing light came from above the table. I could see little slices of it reflecting on the floor. It must have been some sort of a heating lamp.

  Then Frank Lion’s footsteps traveled up the stairs and I heard the door at the top slam. A bolt rasped into place. I climbed out from under the table and looked around. Little Miss Egypt, of what year I don’t know, was fairly glowing in the heat light treatment. I wondered how long it would be before her B.O. would get into action.

  So far I had some additional information and didn’t know what to do with it. I gum-shoed up the steps. The door was locked from the outside. I went back down and moved around the room like a small squirrel in a big cage. There was one more door. I slipped the bolt and opened it. It was the door that led up a flight of steps to the rear of the house.

  If I went out that way, I’d be seen. After that, it was just a matter of time before I got tossed out again, or worse. No, I’d stick around a little while yet. This was always an avenue for escape if it became necessary.

  Footsteps in the hall above again. It was beginning to become a habit, and my nerves rubbed on each other until they produced a short circuit. The whole mess was getting too hot, and I wasn’t getting anything but added trouble. I ran up the steps as quietly as possible and tried to press myself into the wall behind the door. The bolt rasped and Lester came into sight, a hulking shadow above me.

  “Mr. Lion,” he bellowed, and pushed the door open, I was behind it. He rushed past me, thundering down the steps. Evidently he didn’t like the mummy, relaxed under the glow of the heat lamp. He came back up again.

  He never did find out what hit him. I let him have about six inches of lead pipe over the head. He tipped backward and thumped all the way to the cellar. The sound was soft music to my ears.

  Just to make sure he wouldn’t get another opportunity to go snooping around and get
himself hurt, I wrapped him up neatly with some rope that lay in a corner with a lot of packing cases. I pushed him up on the table where he could get the benefit of the heat lamp, turned him gently so that he would awaken with his eyes staring at the comfortably warm mummy, and covered them both with the sheet. Lester was in for some more bad moments, when he awakened.

  I bolted the basement door behind me and rubbed paint off the wall, all the way along the hall, to make myself a small target. My ears kept me posted on who wasn’t around and I made a tour of the downstairs rooms. There were a lot of them, but Neva Lion didn’t materialize.

  I tried the second floor, stopping occasionally to look out toward the front of the house. I don’t know where Frank Lion went. He still had me worried.

  There was a third floor. I found Neva in a small bedroom, stretched out on the silk spread with nothing on but some smooth, very white flesh. She was, according to my understanding of such things; deader than a smoked herring.

  The girl was even more lovely than I had thought. I would no more have touched that delicate face than I would have tried to paint over a masterpiece. She was lying on her back, her honey-colored hair acting as cushion to the small, well formed head. Every line was softened and made more beautiful by the blue silk stretched beneath her.

  I stood there cussing Frank Lion for doing this to an Angel. I was so interested in cussing Lion that I stopped worrying about him until he pushed a rifle barrel into my back.

  “I wouldn’t turn around if I were you,” he said in a soothing voice; “This time I’m not going to worry about where I hit you.”

  He didn’t have anything to lose now. He knew what I knew, and that was too much. He couldn’t let me go again. I’d come back—with a lot of little helpers.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Don’t let me suffer.”

  He chuckled. I never, did like his kind of humor. It wasn’t healthy.

  “You still have courage,” he said. “I suppose you’ve seen a lot of things you don’t understand. You worked just a little too fast for us.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I concentrated my eyes on the body of the girl. It kept me from being frightened. I was still so sore I didn’t have time to sob about my own tough luck.

  “Satisfy your curiosity?” he asked. The rifle was rubbing the skin off my back.

  “Suppose you take that cannon away from my back. I can’t think straight.”

  He stepped back a few paces. I pivoted, slowly.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You can still hit me at ten paces, if the mood takes you.”

  He nodded, his eyes bright, not speaking. I sat down on the edge of the bed. My hand touched the girl’s arm. It startled me. The flesh was warm. Then, she couldn’t be dead. I think he noticed the change in my face.

  “You’re really not too bright, are you?” he asked.

  Lion was the sort of guy who would do a lot of talking if I could get him started. I knew the type. He had done something that he was very pleased about and he wanted to share his secret. I talked because I didn’t want him to lose interest and pull that trigger.

  “You know, Lion, your wife is smart.”

  He wet his lips with his tongue. The rifle wavered a little.

  “Where does she figure into this?”

  “You’ve been wanting to know where I came from,” I said. “Well, there’s no secret now, because your wife is out of the way. She hired me to throw a match into this mess and watch it explode.”

  His face betrayed color. His eyes, no longer bright, were narrowed.

  “With her out of the way,” I said, “I don’t care if you guess the rest of the story. She was putting up the cash and when that stops coming, I stop working.”

  “You’re damned right you do,” he said. “You stuck your neck out four miles and it’s too late to pull it in again.”

  I chuckled. I tried to make it sound full of humor and goodwill.

  “I am the son of a long line of turtles,” I told him. “Let me explain. Ordinarily, this would be a tough spot to be in. Me, I’m a hard shelled turtle, and I can get my neck into that shell pretty fast. For instance, I know that you found out where your wife was hiding out. You put her out of commission a few hours ago. Now then, if I pointed you out as a strangler, you wouldn’t have a chance to drill me. You’d be busy saving your neck.”

  He didn’t deny it. He didn’t tell me anything. He just started moving toward me with that rifle ahead of him. He was going to murder again any time now, and it was a pretty personal problem with me. I talked big to get him excited, and I guess he was.

  “You came back once too often,” he said. He hardly spoke above a whisper.

  “Sure, big shot,” I teased him. “Shoot me right up close, so there’ll be a big hole. You’re having fun with those dried up hunks of humanity in the basement. They can’t fight back. Your daughter couldn’t fight back either. You kept her doped to the ears.”

  WHAM…

  Just before he pressed the trigger, I took a dive. I had been trying to time it. I wasn’t quite right. The slug tore a red hot hole in my right shoulder. I rolled over and over and found myself under the bed. Lion had lost his calm now. He didn’t know just what to do, and while he was trying to figure out where I was going to show up next, I came to my feet on the far side of the bed. The rifle was slow merchandise to use in the small room. I took a short run, put both feet ahead of me through the window and landed amid splintering glass on the porch roof ten feet below. It broke my fall. Half dead and unable to hold on, I rolled across the roof, grabbed for the edge and got a finger hold. I saw him at the window. I dropped to the ground and started to run.

  He fired again, and the bullet buried itself in the turf at my side. I held in the blood that was spurting from my shoulder. The arm didn’t hurt any more.

  I zigzagged across the lawn toward the garden. Ahead of me was the pool where the swan boat was tied. I had a chance to get out, if I played it right. I kept on going until I was about ten feet from the pool. Looking around, I saw that Lion, still in the window, had the rifle lifted to his shoulder. I heard the slug sing past me and dropped on my belly. I lay still, trying to make it look good. Then I started to crawl, dragging one leg behind me. I guess he figured I was winged. I wanted it that way. When I looked again, he wasn’t there. It would take a minute for him to rush downstairs and come out by the rear door. I took a swift sprint and went into the pool head first. I forgot to close my mouth and took a gallon of water into my system. By the time I had come up to exchange the water for air, Lion was out on the lawn. As quietly as possible I sank to the bottom of the pool. I found a handful of weeds, and held on to them. The water was cool and very clear. Some distance away, the hull of the boat was visible in the shimmering surface of the pool. It was pretty close to evening. I had to wait for dark. I swam underwater and came up on the far side of the boat. I held on to the side of the boat and took a big mouthful of clear air.

  Lion was on the other side of the pool, and I don’t think he was very happy. His language didn’t sound that way. He spent ten minutes wandering around among the trees, and had to give up. He went back to the house.

  I crawled out of the pool and managed to make the trip down to my special entrance over the wall. I took it by degrees. Once I was over, I felt better. Down at West Hills Village I found a doctor and had my shoulder cleaned up and bandaged. I lied to him. I said I had been cleaning a gun and it had turned on me and let me have it. Guns are very nasty like that, I said.

  He eyed me carefully and pretended that everything would be all right.

  Could he have my name? Usual report to the police. I gave him my name and my address.

  “124 Foothill Boulevard,” I said. “I’m staying with Mr. Frank Lion.”

  I’ll bet he was on the telephone three minutes after I left. That
was what I wanted. Foggerty would be here looking for me, and the Intellect would not be far behind. I might need them.

  By the time I got back, it was dark. Climbing that wall was a cinch for me now, even with a game arm. I felt more natural going in this way than I would have through the gate. Safer—also.

  The room below the house was empty. The door was open that led down to it. I had left it locked. Both Lester and his mummy were gone. So was the table. I ducked out into the night again and circled so that I could look up toward Neva’s room. There was a light in the room. Whatever Lion was up to, he was in a hurry. As long as I was circulating, he had to move fast.

  I’m not built for Superman stuff. I managed to huff and puff my way up the column of the porch to the roof. I was still ten feet below the window. I couldn’t stretch myself that far. The bricks were rough, with one or two turned endwise and set in for scenic effect. That’s a very poor ladder for a fat man, but I tried it. I made it. I was under the window with two jutting bricks and ten feet of oxygen under me.

  It wasn’t comforting.

  Lester was in there, and Frank Lion, and a lot of stuff I’ve never seen before.

  I was glad I’d come for the show. Neva’s body still lay on the bed, not a muscle, not a finger, moved from the original position.

  This mummy was there, on the table, her sheet missing. She didn’t seem to mind. At the foot of the bed there was a big cabinet with dials and tubes and wires dangling all over it. It was something out of a nightmare, in the Superman vein. Lester was imitating a big, dumb ape with his mouth hanging open. That was an easy part for Lester. Lion busied himself by carrying hands full of copper wire and attaching them to various spots on his daughter’s body. For each wire leading to Neva, there was another clipped to the mummy.