Lucifer's Eye

by Cave, Hugh

  Grant was right on one point, without argument. He, Peter Sheldon, had feelings for this woman that went far beyond her being the owner of Armadale and in charge of his future. If, indeed, he had a future anymore.

  Because she had brought a fiancé with her from England—because she had appeared to be fond of the man and not unhappy about her commitment to marry him—he had refused to allow his personal feelings to surface. But they were there and now had to be acknowledged. And, he guessed, the devil's advocate in the scout uniform was about to make the most of it.

  In a moment he would hear Linford Grant saying, "Unless you capitulate, Sheldon, be prepared to see this woman on a cross, being whipped."

  But Grant said something else. In a casual, almost conversational tone, he said, "You do understand the extent of our training here, do you not, Sheldon?"

  Peter looked at him in silence.

  "I mean to say, there are many forms of violence. I expect you haven't thought about that, really. Our whipping is a mere beginning. Actually, when they graduate and go forth to carry on the master's work, they seldom use anything so simple as a whip. Explosives, firearms, knives—those are faster and more effective. And there is one weapon that particularly terrorizes women, of course. That is one of our most effective tools." He was smiling now. Peter had never seen a more evil smile. "No pun intended there, Sheldon. I refer, of course, to rape."

  Even had he wanted to, Peter could not have responded. His mouth dried, his throat contracted, his nails bit into his palms. Naked and helpless, his left ankle fastened by a chain to the iron ring in the floor, he began to tremble and presently was shaking all over. In exchange for one moment of freedom to go for the throat of the man before him, he would gladly have given the rest of his life.

  "So, then, Sheldon," Grant was saying, "I now offer you a choice. Either you cease your resistance at once, or I instruct these two men to undress this woman and rape her here and now before your eyes. Your answer please. Now."

  Peter had a voice after all. "Don't," he heard himself say.

  "You will do as I command? Without further defiance?"

  "I warn you, you will be taken from here to a training room and will find there a man on a cross. You will be given a whip and will use it on him until you are told to stop. Do you agree?"

  Peter looked at Edith Craig, but her head had drooped. If she was seeing anything, it could only be the floor at her feet. "Yes," he repeated, "I agree. Don't. . . don't do it to her."

  The leader motioned to his two aides, and they led Edith away.

  The chamber Peter was taken to first was not a training room but a dormitory. As before, Grant paced close behind him with a gun, instructing him which way to turn.

  There were twenty beds in a line along one wall. Made of mountain grass piled upon pine boughs, they must have caused their naked users to itch intolerably. Obviously the comfort of his trainees was not high on Grant's list of priorities.

  Along the opposite wall were stacks of firewood and circles of stones for cooking. At one such arrangement, pine logs blazed under a large, soot-blackened pot. Peter was ordered to halt, and Grant handed him a battered aluminum cup full of water.

  "You must be hungry, too," Grant said, and called to a naked young man who sat on one of the cots, cleaning an Enforcer. The youth came across the room and, when told to do so, ladled out a bowl of gruel and gave it to Peter in silence. He was a boy Peter knew well. Gazing at him while wincing over the sour taste of the porridge, Peter recalled the night he had gone to Look Up with a gun to kill the lad's brother.

  Experimentally he said, "Georgie Dakin, do you remember me?"

  The boy looked at him with what appeared to be total indifference. "Me 'member you."

  "Is that all you have to say?"

  "Me no business with you now. Me work for Mr. Grant."

  The food was a kind of cornmeal mush and rancid, but Peter was too nearly famished to refuse it. While struggling to swallow it, he looked at the other occupants of the chamber. There were five. Two seemed to be sleeping. Two played with a pack of cards. The fifth was cleaning a rifle, as Georgie had been doing.

  "How many do you trust with guns, Grant?"

  "At the moment, four." Grant shrugged. "But all have to be trustworthy before they leave here, or they don't leave."

  "How many are here? Are all these beds in use?"

  "All but a few. With my scouts and the soldiers, we're busier than usual."

  Peter looked at Georgie Dakin again. "Georgie, have you forgotten you have a mother? And a brother?"

  "Me no business with them again," the boy mumbled.

  "Give me some more water, please."

  Sullenly the youth walked over to a table and refilled the cup from a square kerosene tin. Taking it from him, Peter said "Thank you, Georgie" but received no answer.

  The muzzle of Grant's rifle touched his bare back. "We have things to do, Sheldon. Finish your food."

  "I'm finished."

  "Come, then. Dakin, lead the way."

  "Where to, sir?"

  "Number-three room. Bring your rifle."

  Georgie went across the chamber and took up his weapon. With a hostile glance at Peter he walked toward a tunnel. Grant said, "Follow him, Sheldon," and Peter did so. With the leader bringing up the rear, they continued along the tunnel for a hundred yards or so. Then Georgie turned left into a narrower, more crooked passage.

  Peter followed mechanically, no longer caring.

  He would be forced to whip some poor fellow tied to a cross, he supposed. Someone courageous enough to accept torture rather than inflict it on others. In the end what difference would it make? Some of those here would die, one way or another, and the others would join Grant's gang of terrorists. By abandoning his resistance, he had perhaps saved Edith Craig from rape, but he could not buy her release from this underground hell. They would never let her go to tell what she had seen here.

  Ahead, Georgie Dakin had reached another of the many underground chambers and stepped back against the wall to let Peter pass. While doing so, Peter for just a second or two entertained a wild thought of grabbing for the boy's gun and turning with it to destroy the man behind him. The notion fled when he saw who was on the cross in the room he had entered.

  He trembled to a halt. "No. I won't!"

  At the sound of his voice the man on the cross moved, raising his head with what seemed to be a great effort. His gaze fastened on Peter, but his eyes appeared to have trouble focusing in the chamber's green haze.

  "Peter?" He could barely talk. The marks of the lash on his white skin explained why, perhaps. "Peter Sheldon? They've got you, too?"

  Peter turned from staring at the Englishman and said in barely controlled fury to Linford Grant, "I will not whip this man, damn you!"

  "You will do as you agreed to," Grant replied calmly, "or the woman will be raped. Come to think of it, she is engaged to marry this man, isn't she? So I will have her raped here, where both of you can watch."

  On the cross, Alton Preble said, "Do what he wants, Peter."

  "No!"

  "It makes no sense to refuse. They're going to kill me anyway. As an outsider, I'd be no good to them here even if they could win me over."

  It was true, Peter realized. The barrister was merely a, visitor to the island, lacking even the papers needed for him to remain. He looked around the room in an agony of indecision. It was like the other training rooms he had seen—the cross, the table, the whip on the table. The only difference was that the naked man on this cross was white and the welts on his body were scarlet.

  "I am not a patient man," Grant warned. "You made your choice before we left the Eye, Sheldon."

  "Peter, get on with it," said the man on the cross. "What difference can it make? I'm dead anyhow."

  Peter looked at the gun in Grant's hands. At the one in the hands of Bronzie Dakin's son. He felt tears running from his eyes as he took the whip from the table. Moving woodenly toward the cro
ss, he tried twice to speak before at last saying, "I'm sorry, Alton. God, I'm sorry."

  "You're forgiven."

  Peter drew back his arm. The whip snaked out behind him and quivered in the air. He shut his eyes as he brought it forward. He heard it crack against Preble's body and heard the man gasp.

  "Nine more like that, Sheldon," the voice of Linford Grant intoned.

  "God forgive me," Peter whispered, and swung the whip a second time.

  The man on the cross gasped again, but still did not cry out.

  "Eight more," Grant said.

  Peter drew back his arm once more. The whip whistled forward again. But now his whole body was trembling and his knees buckled as he leaned forward into the stroke.

  As he pitched to the floor, he wondered whether Grant would think his blackout a pretense, and whether Edith would pay the price for his weakness.

  34

  HE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE ROOM WHERE HE had first been imprisoned, with his left ankle again chained to the ring in the wall. But the assault on his mind in the room called the Eye, and his physical suffering there, had taken their toll.

  He only dimly remembered using a whip on Alton Preble and blacking out while doing so. His recollection of talking to Georgie Dakin in a large chamber used as a dormitory was unclear. Somewhere, too, he had seen Edith.

  He was so very tired. If only he could sleep, and wake up in the Great House. But if he did that, he might be going down to the kitchen to open the gas line again. Or to Bronzie Dakin's house with a gun, to kill the twin brother of the boy who had just said, "Me no business with you again. Me work for Mr. Grant."

  He did sleep. But for how long, he had no idea. When he awoke again, his watch had stopped. He lay there in the green haze, trying to think things out.

  According to Linford Grant, this underworld was a domain of the devil—the biblical devil, archfiend of evil, adversary of God, and ruler of hell. The Bible said that Jesus had been forty days tempted of the devil but triumphed over him. The fiend was still very much alive and active, though. Anyone reading the world's headlines must know that. And this unknown cavern, this long, complex river cave in the Morgan Mountains of St. Alban, was one of his spheres of action.

  Only one. According to Grant, he had many others and was embarked on a campaign to take over the earth—perhaps more than the earth. Ahead lay a final confrontation in which evil would emerge victorious and he would rule all.

  Nonsense. Grant was simply mad. Yet how had Edith Craig been persuaded to walk to certain destruction at the John Crow's Nest? Why had Peter Sheldon tried to drown her at the tree bridge? And how. . . but the list was too long to review now. He lacked the ability to concentrate that much.

  Anyway, even if the scout leader were mad, he had certainly acquired hellish powers and passed some of them on to his followers. How else could Private Pennock have lured Edith and her fiancé here from the Great House?

  And where—oh God, where—was that grand old pig bunter, Manny Williams? After escaping, was he on his way back here with help? Would he get here in time, with the right kind of help?

  What was the right kind of help? Surely not more soldiers who could be made to believe they were groping blindly in a mist that could destroy their minds. Manny would have to do better than that. Otherwise, what happened next would only feed the fires of Grant's vile ambition by repeating what had gone before.

  Peter slept, and awoke to find Grant standing over him, nudging him with a booted foot.

  "Feel rested, do you?"

  He sat up. His nakedness had long since ceased to bother him, but in sleep he had turned so that the iron made his ankle ache. While gazing up at his captor, he rubbed the hurt. Having no idea what to say that might help him, he remained silent.

  "When you passed out, I thought at first you were pretending," Grant said. "I had Dakin use his knife on you to find out—the same knife with which he tried to cut off the head of that forestry fellow. The forester, by the way, was unconscious and dying at the time, from the crash of the helicopter. You know about that. Dakin's brother told you."

  Peter said, "How do you know what Gerald Dakin told me?"

  "You forget his twin is here."

  "And by reading Georgie's mind, you knew what Gerald was telling me?"

  "Not all, perhaps, but enough."

  "Is that why you sent me to kill Gerald?"

  "And you would have, had it not been for the Jarrett woman." Shifting the gun he carried to his left hand, Grant leaned forward with a key to unlock the leg iron. "A most remarkable woman, that one, from what I've heard. Know her well, do you?"

  "I wish you did. Nothing would please me more than to have her here.

  "Perhaps when we have finished your indoctrination, you will think of some way to entice her."

  Still rubbing his bruised ankle, Peter looked up.

  "What do you mean—when you've finished my indoctrination? Haven't you done that?"

  "Not quite."

  "Damn you, I whipped the Englishman for you, didn't I?"

  "Until you fainted. And perhaps you might have continued. Who knows? But I need further proof of your commitment. You are very important to me, Sheldon. And you held out in the Eye for a long time."

  And would still be holding out, you bastard, Peter thought, if you hadn't come in with the woman I love. But the problem now was to keep this monster in the scout uniform talking. To postpone for as long as possible the resumption of the "training."

  "Tell me something; Grant. After you finish indoctrinating the people you have here, and turn them loose on society like a pack of mad dogs, how do they explain where they've been?"

  "How what?" Grant appeared to be genuinely puzzled by the question.

  "You and your scouts disappeared. The soldiers came here looking for them. By the time you turn them loose—those you do turn loose—they'll have been missing for days. How will they explain it?"

  "There is no problem."

  "They'll simply go home and say they've been wandering for days in the mountains, and how nice it is to be back?"

  Grant shrugged. "In the first place, they won't go home. Georgie Dakin said it all when he told you he has no further interest in his mother and brother."

  "That isn't what he said."

  "It's what he meant."

  "Where do they go, then?"

  "The city has its crowded slums where people are never questioned. All our West Indian capitals do. And it suits us to be in large cities, of course. The opportunities are more numerous there than in the country towns and villages."

  Peter said, "What happens when one of your gunmen is caught? Isn't he identified? Suppose Georgie Dakin is caught a month from now in the slums of the city. 'Well, well,' they say to him, 'you're one of those scouts lost in the mountains a while back. What happened to you?'

  "Our people are not caught, Sheldon."

  "Oh, come on. The police are not that inefficient. They catch thieves and holdup men all the time."

  "Not our people. When ours are apprehended, they either escape or die trying; never are they taken alive to be questioned." Grant allowed himself a smile of self-congratulation. "Like many others, Sheldon, you probably wonder about police reports that certain criminals, when cornered, open fire on them and have to be shot dead. Police brutality, you may have told yourself. Their way of getting even for the trouble these lawbreakers cause them. Also their way of ensuring that the criminals, when brought to trial, won't be let off through the wiles of clever lawyers who make a reputation by defending them. But you're wrong. Our workers are trained not to be caught. I have lost some good men that way."

  "So your people melt into the slums of the capital. But you don't. You're a respected scout leader. How do you explain your own disappearances? Where do you live, anyway?"

  "I live in Wilton Bay."

  "Are you married?"

  "I've never been married, Sheldon."

  "But what will you say when you return t
o the Bay? How will you explain your absence? Even more to the point, how will you explain your missing scouts?"

  "I won't be going back there, Sheldon. Not this time."

  "What?"

  "I'm organized here now. Bringing my scouts to this place was the final step of a grand plan, don't you see? Now I have them and the soldiers who came looking for them, and soon Sergeant Wray will be returning with even more soldiers."

  "You let Wray escape on purpose?"

  "Of course. So my preparations are nearly finished, and in a short while the master's campaign to control this island will be in full swing. With you, I might add, playing a major role in it."

  Aware that he was to be led to a training room and probably forced to use a whip again—perhaps even on Alton Preble again—Peter desperately sought ways to gain time. "Tell me how you brought Miss Craig and her fiancé here, Grant. I know how you recruited Pennock; you've already told me that. But how did he persuade them to—"

  "He was instructed to bring you here, Sheldon. But when you got away from him by taking Sergeant Wray to the police station, he anticipated complications and made his move too soon. He should have waited for you to return, of course. Can you think of any other questions to postpone your training?"

  "Yes. Why did you bring two foreigners here? You can't use them in St. Alban, for God's sake."

  "I've just told you—Pennock was instructed to bring you here. He made a mistake."

  "So what are your plans for me, if you ever get to carry them out?"

  "Oh, I shall carry them out. Never doubt it. As I brought my scouts here, you will bring some of your plantation workers. We need a few more people. But that phase will be completed shortly. We are nearly ready to begin Lucifer's work in earnest."

  Unable to think of any new way to postpone the inevitable, Peter at last was silent.

  "So come," Grant said. "Quite a few of my people are waiting to watch you. Let's not try their patience any longer."

  With a gun at his back, Peter trudged along a short corridor to a room he had not been in before. Smaller than the other training rooms, it had no cross, no table, no whip. But before he could feel any relief at the absence of those props, he saw half a dozen of Grant's naked followers standing against the walls. And in the center of the room lay a bed similar to those in the dormitory.