The Case of the Vanishing Boy

by Alexander Key

  “I—I hurt.”

  “You’ll hurt a great deal more if you attempt any tricks. Straight ahead, easy … up a step … up another … turn as I guide you …”

  The sack over his head seemed a silly precaution, unless they’d become afraid of his curious power. Yet by the time he had made several turns he had lost all sense of direction, and he was beginning to wonder if she didn’t suspect them both of being telepathic. If Big Doc and company had been truly smart, he thought, they’d have knocked us both out with hypos while I was unconscious. That way we wouldn’t have any idea of where we were or how far we’d come. Then he thought, no, they are saving the hypos till later, so we won’t be able to tell anyone what kind of rig they are using to take us away. Rig? Did that mean another helicopter, or something else?

  In spite of Helga’s urging, he forced himself to move slowly and occasionally stumble as if in weakness. He was almost afraid to even think of the hatchet, though he was careful to keep his hand over the blade, pressing it against him so the weight of it might not be too much for his belt. He was vastly relieved when he and Ginny were thrust through a doorway, and he heard someone close and lock the door behind them.

  On the other side of the door a woman said in a disgruntled voice, “There’s food for you on the table. Make it last, for that’s all you’ll get while you are here.”

  Jan pulled the sack from his head and glanced at Ginny, who had done the same. She wrinkled her nose at the door, then tossed the sack aside with a wry little smile. It gave him the feeling that the sack had had no more effect upon her vision than darkness.

  The room, he saw at a quick glance, was hardly larger than his earlier prison. There was a cot on one side, a chair and a card table against one wall, and a sleeping bag on the floor on the other side. A door on the left opened into a tiny lavatory containing a washbowl and a toilet. On the card table were a plate of sandwiches, two glasses and a small pitcher of what seemed to be orange juice. Above it, covering what was obviously a window, was nailed a three-foot square of plywood. A small fixture in the high ceiling gave the place an unpleasantly weak illumination, which somehow reminded him of a storage area in an old hotel. Near it, air hissed downward from a circular vent.

  Jan looked thoughtfully at the plywood over the window, then glanced at the door. Seeing no peephole, he listened until the footsteps in the halls faded away, and quickly drew the hatchet from his belt and slipped it under the sleeping bag. Ginny had gone to the card table and was testing a sandwich while she filled the glasses from the pitcher.

  “They’re all cheese,” she announced unhappily. “But I intend to eat two of them anyway. They’ll help me go to sleep—and I’ve got to sleep. Anyway, I’m so hungry I could eat snails.”

  “Snails are good,” he said absently, frowning again at the plywood over the window, then reaching eagerly for one of the sandwiches. “My father loved them.”

  She sipped some of the orange juice, and asked quietly, “Jan, what was your father’s name?”

  “Raoul,” he said, and began cramming the sandwich into his mouth. He gulped it down, reached for another and mumbled, “You take the cot.” He managed the second sandwich, drank some orange juice, and slumped on the sleeping bag. There was something he wanted to tell her, but it slipped from him as he closed his eyes.…

  He was drawn forcibly out of a frightening dream by Ginny shaking him awake. Since the dream, as nearly always of late, had to do with blackness and Big Doc, it was no great relief to be suddenly faced with the unpleasant fact that he and Ginny were still Big Doc’s prisoners.

  “Sure wish we had a watch,” he muttered, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “If I just knew the time …”

  “It’s a little after four in the afternoon,” she told him. “We’ve slept about ten hours. How do you feel?”

  “A lot better than I did. How—how do you know the time?”

  “Otis is back in business.” Her small face was pinched and she was as serious as he’d ever seen her. “Go wash your face and freshen up. We’ve some things to talk over.”

  He hurried into the washroom; coming out, he poured the rest of the orange juice into their glasses and sat down facing her on the sleeping bag. She took her glass, but set it down without touching the juice. She looked as if she were ready to cry, but she didn’t.

  She chewed on her lip a moment and rubbed a freckle on her cheek that she always rubbed when thinking hard. “Jan,” she began suddenly, “we’d better forget about Bill and Mr. Martin. There’s no way they can help us. Otis told me Bill picked up the transmitter signal on the direction finder, but lost it before he could get it to working properly. It didn’t point anywhere near the Green Springs area, as they thought it would. So that’s out. Pops got them a small plane right away, and they tried for hours to locate that old house where we were, but without a big helicopter in the back yard they couldn’t—”

  “Clausen managed to take it away?”

  “Yes. It left when we started over here in the van. Anyway, they can’t even guess where we are now. Of course, Pops and Aunt Heck are cruising around all the back roads with Otis, hoping he can sort of get in range of us, but …”

  “Otis found me,” he reminded her.

  “But that was easy, Jan. He had only a few miles to search in. This is different. It’s easy to figure out, though I’m no good at math. If we’re only ten or twelve miles from them, double the radius and that gives one side of a square. That works out to four hundred square miles. How long do you think it would take poor little Otis to … to …?” Her voice broke.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” he said quickly, sliding over and putting his arm around her. Somehow he knew he’d never thought of putting his arm around any girl before, but this was different. Ginny was like a sister, only more so. They were like a team, and she’d become the most important person in the world to him.

  “Now look,” he hastened, “I’m not depending on Otis or Nat Martin or anyone to get us out of this. We’re going to do it ourselves. If anyone tries to stop us, they’ll get a taste of this.” He reached under the sleeping bag and drew out the hatchet. “It ought to open the door for us. If it won’t, maybe it’ll pry off that plywood so we can get out of the window.”

  Impulsively she kissed him on the cheek, then smiled. “I’m awfully glad we met on the train that day.”

  “Me too!” he said earnestly, and hugged her. “Now look, we’ve got to figure out a couple things, First, did you get any idea of what part of the house we’re in?”

  She nodded. “That sack didn’t stop me. It just made things a little fuzzy. It’s a big, long house, but not nearly as old as the other, and I think we’re in a wing on the side of a hill. Or maybe it’s just a steep slope—all I got was a glimpse through a porch at the end of a hall. Anyway, I hope you can open the door, ’cause I’ve a feeling it’s an awful drop from that window to the ground.”

  “Have you heard anyone moving around in the house? Or out in the hall?”

  “Yes. There’s a room close to us—maybe it’s across the hall—where I’ve heard people go in and out several times since I’ve been awake. One of them—I think it was a man—went out a little while ago and drove off. But that leaves two people in the room. Oh dear, they must be the ones left to guard us!”

  “Sure, they wouldn’t leave us unguarded now.”

  Frowning, no longer as confident as he had been, he got up, went to the door and put his ear to it. As he did so, a telephone rang and he heard a woman answer it. When she hung up a man said something in a low voice, but he was unable to make out any of the conversation.

  Remembering the turns, he guessed the man and the woman were across the hall in a corner room where they could watch the door here. He stepped back from the door and studied the way it fitted into the frame, then very carefully tried the knob to find out how loose it was. Finally he tried wedging the hatchet blade between door and frame and pressing it sideways. It was imme
diately obvious that he would be unable to budge the door without making so much noise that it would be heard all over the house.

  Lips compressed, he turned away from it and went to the window.

  His spirits rose a little when he discovered a lower corner where the square of plywood, slightly warped, did not fit tightly against the wood beneath it. The hatchet blade went under it easily. A slow, careful twist of the handle widened the space. He pushed the blade higher and again twisted the handle. A nail squeaked—it sounded so loud he was sure it must have been heard across the hall, and in his sudden nervousness he almost dropped the hatchet. He stopped and went to the door and listened. Hearing nothing alarming, he hurried back and was gratified to see that the corner of the plywood had been lifted a full inch from the window.

  After that he proceeded slowly, using the hatchet with greater care. When the lower edge of the square had been loosened, he was surprised at the ease with which the sides came free. He had to stand on the chair to get the upper corners, and now he discovered that the top of the plywood had not been nailed.

  His small delight was almost immediately cut short by the sudden arrival of a car somewhere outside, and he heard quick footsteps entering the house. Ginny whispered in alarm, “I think that’s Helga. She must be coming here!”

  Jan barely had time to return the chair to its place near the table, and slide the hatchet under the sleeping bag, when the key turned in the lock. He glanced in despair at the window, for the piece of plywood, now loose on all sides, needed only a strong jerk to remove it. A telltale line of daylight showed all around it, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  He managed to slump to the sleeping bag as the door came partially open, showing Helga’s gray hair and stern features.

  “I brought some hamburgers and milkshakes,” she announced crisply, thrusting an open cardboard box over on the table. “Better eat them now, for we will be leaving soon and there will be no stops for food until tomorrow.”

  Without raising her eyes to the window, she withdrew and closed and locked the door.

  As the aroma of the freshly grilled hamburgers reached his nostrils, Jan rose eagerly and started for the table.

  “No!” Ginny whispered urgently. “No! Don’t touch anything in that box!”

  “Huh?” He gaped at her. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It—it’s all been doped! Her mind was full of it. It’s easier than trying to give us hypos, and she wants to load us in a big moving van while we don’t know what’s going on, so I can’t tell Otis. Jan, we’d better get out of here as fast as we can!”

  Before his final bout with the plywood, he hurriedly braced the chair under the doorknob to delay any sudden visitors. The plywood took longer to pull off than he had counted on, but he accomplished it finally without too much noise. Then he stared out in dismay at the totally unexpected view.

  He’d hoped to see other houses somewhere near, or a road or some sign of people, but there was nothing but woods—thick, dark woods. They started directly behind the house and dropped sharply away into an impenetrable gloom of rain. Rain! He hadn’t even dreamed of such a thing.

  Quickly he raised the window, tugged the screen loose, and held it while he peered cautiously out. What seemed to be a part of the garage was off to his right. Projecting on the left was a corner of a porch. No one was in sight. He scowled unhappily at the distance to the ground, then dropped the screen and turned to Ginny, intending to tell her to bring the spread that covered the cot. She had already brought it and was busy tying a knot in one corner.

  “If you can hang on, I’ll let you down,” he whispered.

  She nodded and scrambled to the window sill. Grasping the knot in the spread, she swung over the edge. He clung to the heavy cloth, easing it across the sill until she touched the ground.

  Instead of retrieving the spread, he dropped it, carefully dropped the hatchet on top of it when Ginny was out of the way, then snatched a sheet from the cot and dragged the card table to the window. After tying a corner of the sheet to one of the legs, he swung over the sill, braced the table in the window and slid downward. Halfway to the ground his speed abruptly increased as the flimsy table leg came loose, and he landed in a heap on the pile of cloth, narrowly missing the hatchet. Even so, most of his weight came down on his right foot, and pain knifed through it as it turned under him.

  14

  ELYSIUM

  For a moment, as he tried to rise, it seemed he would never make it, and that in an incredible second of bad luck they had lost their chance at freedom. At the same instant he heard a sudden shout from the house—it seemed to come from the porch—and realized they had been discovered already.

  “Run!” he told Ginny. “Get down in the woods! Hurry!”

  Instead she caught his hand and jerked him to his feet. “Come on!” she gasped. “You can do it!”

  He had to do it, if only for her sake. On this rocky, uneven ground, full of obstacles that her curious sight might be unable to detect, he realized she would be speedily overtaken unless he led the way and somehow found a hiding place.

  All in one motion he swept up the wadded cot cover and flung it over his shoulders. Then he seized the hatchet with one hand and her arm with the other and started for the trees. With every step, blinding pain shot through his ankle. Somehow he put the pain aside by concentrating on the chess moves ahead.

  He’d intended the spread from the cot to give them some protection against the rain, but now the color of it suggested a better use. It had a green-and-brown floral pattern that ought to blend well with the low foliage around them. Why not use it as camouflage?

  If he could just find the right place to hide …

  He could hear voices somewhere behind them, but when he glanced back he could see no one because of the dense growth of trees and the patches of shrubbery. Pausing a moment behind the thick trunk of an oak, he peered hurriedly about, then drew Ginny toward a low patch of shrubs on their right. It looked like a tangle of young cedars.

  “Get down and crawl in under them,” he ordered.

  She slipped quickly out of sight. He followed her, and carefully drew the green-and-brown spread in around them so that it covered them both.

  He heard Helga’s voice directing the search. The woods, all at once, seemed full of people, running, calling to each other, crashing through the underbrush. Helga’s voice came nearer. He made out her hurrying footsteps as she approached the thicket. She stopped. Someone else, running slower, paused beside her, breathing heavily.

  “Can you see them?” she asked.

  “Not in this rain.” It was Big Doc’s voice, gasping for air.

  “She fooled us all,” Helga spat. “The little blonde witch! She’s not only telepathic—she’s a mind reader!”

  “It is not the girl we must worry about,” the other panted. “She is not dangerous. The boy is.”

  “You should have known that in the beginning,” Helga snapped.

  “How could I? He didn’t know it himself.”

  “You read the book, Leopold. You knew the blood he has in him. You should have taken into account his potential.”

  “I can say the same for you. You should have taken into account the girl’s potential.”

  “Oh, stop arguing with me! We’ve got to catch them.”

  “We’ll catch them, my dear. They cannot possibly get away. Everyone’s been alerted. The rain makes it difficult, but if we miss them before dark, we’ll get them in the morning.”

  “We’d better! If they learn where they are—”

  “They’ll learn nothing in the dark. We’ll close in on them at daylight, and there’s no way they can escape us. You know that.”

  “If you are wrong, Kiev will have our heads. How do you intend to handle the boy?”

  “Gently, my dear. Gently. They’ve all been cautioned to take the girl first. He’ll do as he is told then, but if he is stubborn, we’ll use gas. I would not care to face a
nyone of the Aragon strain when—”

  “Stop talking and let’s get after them! Take that path, Leopold. I’ll go to the right …”

  Jan had forgotten his foot. He did not remember it until all sounds of the searchers died away and he tried to move. He decided it was better to lie still.

  “How do you feel?” Ginny asked worriedly.

  “Good enough. I’ll be able to hobble when the time comes. But I think we’d better stay right here till dark. I just hope the rain isn’t too much for you.”

  “Oh, I’m all right. Pops says it doesn’t hurt you to stay soaking wet for a long time as long as you don’t get cold. I’m not cold yet. I’m just wet … and sort of hungry. I could even enjoy one of those awful cheese sandwiches.”

  “So could I. But we’d better stop thinking about food till tomorrow. Right now I’m wondering which way to go when we leave here.”

  “I’ll show you. There’s a path ahead, and it leads to some sort of shelter. I picked it out of Helga’s mind. Only there was something very important I couldn’t quite get …”

  “How do you mean?”

  “About catching us in the morning. They seemed to think it would be easy.”

  “It would be easy if we were fenced in, like at the other place.”

  “Well, I sort of got the feeling that we were enclosed.”

  “Then we must be.”

  “Oh, dear! Then we’ve got to find the fence, and somehow get to the other side of it—before daylight.”

  “Right. We’ll dig under it. Don’t forget I’ve got the hatchet. And there don’t seem to be any outside lights around, so we’ll have plenty of time to dig.” He puzzled over their predicament, and added, “I—I just wish we knew what sort of place this is. Somehow it doesn’t make sense. I mean, why would there be lights and a high fence close around the big house where we were, but none here? The two places are certainly connected.”

  “Maybe,” said Ginny, “it’s all part of a big estate. There are some whoppers around, even bigger than Pops’. And that big old house where we were, that’s probably what they called the Center. That would sort of explain the lights and the high fence and the charged wire on top …”