“My dear Miss Lane, you honor me!”
Kent stiffened in startled shock as the jeering words came from behind him. He saw Dorothy’s face blanch in terrified surprise. Kent slowly turned.
CHAPTER III
Mad Pack of the Maimed
Carlin stood in the partly-open door. His gaunt face was a twisted mask of insane triumph. The pistol in his hand was gripped so tightly that his knuckles showed white against the blued metal. Kent’s arm instinctively went around Dorothy’s slender shoulders in a gesture of protection.
“A very touching sight!” Carlin mocked. “And when you two first met in the swamp tonight you were utter strangers! You fooled me then, Miss Lane. You would still be fooling me, perhaps, had I not chanced just a few minutes ago to look over the things we took from Kent’s pockets when we brought him down here. The picture of Miss Lane that you carry in your wallet, Kent, is an excellent likeness. And the very affectionate inscription written upon it is hardly such as one would give to a total stranger!”
The softly mocking quality vanished from Carlin’s taut voice. His teeth bared in a wolfish snarl. “I intended to eliminate you, Kent, before the night was over,” he grated. “You saw too much in the swamp to ever be allowed to live. I regret that I shall now have to also remove Miss Lane. I had hoped to keep her alive for a time yet for purely financial reasons, but her usefulness in that respect is obviously at an end.”
Carlin’s deep-shadowed eyes were flaming pools of mad menace. “I could shoot you both down where you stand,” he rasped, “but that would be a foolish waste of valuable material. There is another and far better way in which I can use your deaths to terrorize my poor stupid charges upstairs, and thus make easier my task of collecting from them. I shall turn the two of you over to the Dweller in the pool!”
Dorothy Lane cried aloud in terror. Carlin’s thin lips writhed in a snarling smile. “You don’t know what I mean by that, do you, Kent?” he mocked. “Miss Lane will tell you. She is very well acquainted with our pool-dwelling friend.”
Carlin stepped swiftly out into the corridor. The instant the menace of the pistol left his body, Kent flashed into action. He flung himself in a hurtling dive at the closing door, but Carlin was too fast. The lock clicked shut a scant fraction of a second before Kent’s shoulder thudded impotently against the solid panels.
They heard Carlin’s mocking chuckle outside, then the sound of his retreating steps. Kent turned to Dorothy.
“Who, or what, is the Dweller in the pool?” he demanded. “And what devil’s work is Carlin doing here anyway that he is ready to commit cold-blooded murder to keep any hint of it from reaching the outside world?”
“The Dweller in the pool,” Dorothy answered, her low voice trembling, “is my brother, Raoul!”
“Your brother!” Kent repeated dazedly.
“Yes. You never met him. He lived in Denver. He lost an arm in an automobile accident last Winter. He was too bitterly proud to tell any of the rest of the family. The first I knew of his tragic loss was in a note I got from him nearly two weeks ago.
“Raoul was one of the men selected by Carlin as victims of the crudest extortion scheme that any mind ever conceived,” Dorothy continued bitterly. “Carlin carefully chose from widely separated parts of the country a group of well-to-do men who had suffered the amputation of limbs. He offered them a chance to have their lost members miraculously restored through the injection of his crayfish serum.
E swore them to absolute secrecy, telling them that the authorities would never knowingly permit it, and brought them here by devious routes. None of them knew their final destination till they got here. Raoul must have become suspicious at the last moment. When they came through Sharby he sneaked off a hurriedly written note to me, telling me what he was doing and asking me to investigate if I did not hear from him again within five days.
“When the time passed without any further word I left for Sharby,” Dorothy continued. “I should have told you, but Raoul had begged me to tell no one. Carlin must have learned of Raoul’s letter for Jeffers met me in Sharby with a story of Raoul being ill and needing me. I came here with Jeffers and I’ve been here ever since. I’ve kept my eyes and ears open and I’ve learned the real nature of Carlin’s plot in all its ghastly details.
“Carlin’s serum had no power to cause regrowth of normal human limbs.” Dorothy’s voice shook with emotion. “Carlin knew the terrible effects his preparation would really have, yet he callously injected it because it was upon the sheer horror of those effects that his scheme was based. New appendages began sprouting from the maimed stump of arms or legs, but the growths were of horrible crustacean claws. Other changes occurred in the skin of the victims, their bones, their brains, turning them gradually into monstrous Things that were more crayfish than men.
“Carlin sprung the extortion phase of his plan then,” Dorothy continued. “He told the men that there had been a frightful mistake somewhere, but that he could still make their scaly bodies normal again if he had the money to buy the expensive corrective serums needed. Stupefied as their brains were by the serum and by their overwhelming dread of the fate threatening them, they readily signed drafts for huge sums. Carlin’s task was made easier by his two horrible examples, Bartlett and my brother. They alone must have refused to give Carlin money and as a result were punished by being given far heavier doses of the crayfish hormones.”
Dorothy’s voice caught in a sob. She pluckily regained control of herself again and went on. “Raoul was already changed beyond recognition when I got here. I caught glimpses of him through the door when it was opened to throw his food in. Bartlett, grotesquely deformed as he is, is almost a normal man compared to Raoul. My brother is a monster of stark gibbering horror, a monster who killed poor Vanders tonight as callously as a giant crayfish would slice up an angleworm!”
“Carlin’s idea in bringing you here,” Kent said grimly, “must have been to get from you the money that your brother had refused to give.”
Dorothy nodded. “It was,” she answered. “When I first came I gave Carlin checks for the amounts he asked. I’d have given him anything if it would have made Raoul a normal man again. But I know now that Carlin or no one else can undo the terrible thing he has done to his victims. His salves and corrective serums are merely postponing their fate long enough for him to drain them of their last cent. There is no real cure for them. Eventually they are doomed to degenerate into unspeakable monstrosities—like my brother!”
The girl’s voice faded into silence, a tensely pulsing silence veined with the wan gray threads of fear that were so integral a part of the atmosphere of this eldritch house of madness. Kent shuddered. He realized now the ghastly basis of that fear.
A group of men, drugged and sick, living in constant terror of the grisly transformation that was turning their maimed bodies into crustacean Things of unbearable horror, and a grief-stricken girl whose brother had become the dread Dweller in the pool. Small wonder that the throbbing agony of so many tortured minds should combine to taint the very air with a shuddering miasma of crepitant dread!
Recollection of the two maimed corpses in the swamp flashed through Kent’s memory. What tragic part had they played in the events occurring in this isolated torture-house? He started to ask Dorothy about the bodies in the looted graves, but before he could speak a blurred chorus of sound became audible in the corridor outside.
There were dully solid thumps of one-legged men hopping awkwardly down the wooden steps, and a slithering rustle of bodies. Voices yammered in wordless babble. Carlin was returning, and with him he was bringing the pack of the maimed!
The sounds advanced along the corridor, then came to a halt outside the door. unseen fingers turned the key in the lock. The door swung open. Carlin stood in the doorway, his pistol menacingly leveled.
“All right, my friends,” he said tautly, “we are ready for you. Come!” The muzzle of the pistol jerked in preemptory emphasis of the order.
Kent’s arm was around Dorothy’s shoulders as they slowly started for the door. Carlin gave ground warily before them, his eyes glittering as he kept safely beyond reach of any possible break from the captives.
They emerged into the hallway. It was a long narrow corridor, walled with rough cement. At the far end, the unconscious body of Joe was huddled on the earthen floor at the bottom of the steps.
Between where Dorothy and Kent stood and the stairs there was another door in the cobwebbed cement surface of the wall. It was a massive wooden affair, locked by two steel bars of almost impregnable strength. The furtively fearful side glances of the maimed pack, and the dark spots where Vanders’ blood had stained the floor, told Kent that behind that heavily barred door must lie the pool and its dread Dweller.
The entire pack of the maimed, with the exception of Bartlett, was crowded into the narrow corridor. They yammered ceaselessly among themselves in wordless stridulation. Their babbling murmur abruptly died as Carlin raised his hand.
“This man is a detective sent here by the authorities to spy upon me!” Carlin said vehemently. “And the girl is a traitor to all of us. In spite of the hideous fate to which it will doom her own brother, she gave this spy the information he was after!”
Kent started to voice a hot denial of Carlin’s lying accusations, then grimly remained silent as a swift glance at the faces of the maimed pack told him the utter futility of any attempt to appeal to their reason. Their scaly-skinned faces were as devoid of all trace of human intelligence as the swamp-slimed features of the crayfish they were beginning to so hideously resemble.
Carlin’s voice rose high and thin with nervous tension. “Do you know what it will mean to you if this man and this girl are allowed to leave here and tell what they know? It will mean that you will forever lose all chance of again being normal men! Doctors can’t save you. I am the only man in the world who can help you. If anything happens to me, you are doomed. Your bodies will change, swiftly and irrevocably, until you become like the Dweller in the pool!”
Wordless mutterings of brutish anger and hate drooled from the slack lips of the maimed pack.
“This sneaking spy came here to learn the secret of what is in the pool!” Carlin shouted furiously. “Very well, we will show him the Thing he seeks. We will lock both him and his traitorous companion in the room of the pool. And we will leave to the Dweller the task of making certain that neither of them shall ever escape to tell their story!”
A yammering chorus of savage assent from the pack was Carlin’s answer. The mad biologist’s white teeth flashed in a snarl of satisfaction. He reached out a foot and kicked the bottom of the heavily barred door. Eerie sound came in swift answer from inside. There was a splashing as of a heavy body in water, and an oddly metallic, stridulating call that rose in sharp crescendo until it beat unbearably upon the eardrums, then slowly died away.
Carlin’s eyes gleamed. “The Dweller is awake and hungry!” he exclaimed. “Myers!”
A one-armed stalwart stepped forward from the ranks of the maimed. “Unbolt the door,” Carlin ordered. The man shot the steel bars back.
Kent’s muscles tensed, as he measured the distance separating him from Carlin. The movement, slight as it was, did not escape Carlin’s alert attention.
“Better not try it, Kent,” Carlin warned in a voice that was taut with vibrant menace. “The instant you move I’ll fire—and I’ll send my first bullet squarely between the very attractive eyes of Miss Dorothy Lane!”
Stark insanity danced in Carlin’s dilated pupils. Kent hesitated, then his shoulders sagged in surrender. Before he could possibly reach Carlin there would be a bullet in Dorothy’s brain. There might be some faint chance against the unseen monster in the pool. But against the drug-inflamed murder lust of this armed madman there was no chance whatever.
Carlin snapped terse commands. The one-armed man cautiously swung the heavy door partly open. A reeking stench of slime and carrion surged out into the corridor. The clawing hands and jabbing arm stumps of the pack urged Dorothy and Kent swiftly forward. A final flurry of blows sent them staggering headlong through the door. Its heavy springs drew it promptly shut behind them. Metal crashed as the steel bolts slid home.
Kent blinked blindly for a moment. Then his eyes began to adapt themselves to the comparative darkness and he dimly discerned the outlines of the place. The room was a big rectangle, fifty feet in length by twenty in width. There was a single small bulb set somewhere in the shadowed joists of the ceiling, but its light was so feeble that the dim yellow glow did almost nothing to dispel the dusky darkness.
Like the rest of the basement, the walls were of roughly finished cement and the floor of earth. Near the far end of the room the floor fell sharply away in a pool some ten feet square. And from the stagnant black water of that pool, looming in the yellow-tinged gloom like some monstrous creature of the Pit, was a figure that was Horror incarnate!
CHAPTER IV
The Dweller in the Pool
The creature’s hideous head rose sharply to a rounded point, from the crown of which sprouted two stubby appendages that looked like rudimentary antennae. The eyes were lidless, bulging blobs of viscous black. Two small nostril slits occupied the space where a nose should have been. The mouth was a mere gash, lipless, toothless, and chinless.
The Thing rested on its elbows on the low bank facing them, with the lower half of its body still hidden in the black waters of the pool. The shoulders were massively broad. The left hand was grotesquely deformed, the fingers bound together by a horny membrane and the nails enormously developed until they resembled talons. But it was in the right hand and forearm that the creature’s transformation had reached its grisly apex.
From the right elbow to the wrist was what looked like a solid mass of chitin. The appendage that grew from the horny wrist was a giant pincer-claw fully eighteen inches in length, with razor-sharp edges that looked capable of shearing through flesh and bone like a hot knife through butter.
Where normal human skin should have been upon the Thing’s head and torso, the creature was sheathed in what was apparently the horny carapace of a crayfish. Darkly glistening chitinous armor covered every visible inch of the Thing’s body, and made of its crustacean-featured face a gleaming mask of nightmare horror.
Between the door and the pool the earthen floor was littered with gruesome fragments of the monster’s food, broken and splintered beef bones, and chunks of meat, discolored and rotting. Kent’s senses reeled from the putrescent carrion reek, blended with the dank, slime-wet scent of the obscene monster in the pool.
The Thing stirred sluggishly, and faint sound whispered through the chill gloom, the sibilant scraping of horny, chitinous surfaces against each other. It jerked itself stiffly forward upon its elbows, then clambered awkwardly to its feet. Its lower body and legs were sheathed in the same dully gleaming armor that covered its head and torso. Horror crawled like a worm of gray ice in Kent’s stunned brain as he saw that the contours of the thick body were marked in faintly segmented areas like those of a giant crayfish.
The monstrous figure started slowly toward them, stumping along with a curiously stiff gait on its chitin-armored legs. The giant claw at the end of its right arm opened and closed with the snicking rasp of steel shears. The murky blobs of the lidless eyes glowed redly chatoyant.
“Oh, Raoul! Raoul!” Terror and grief were pathetically blended in Dorothy’s trembling cry. Before Kent could realize her intention the girl flashed by him to meet the advancing monster.
“Raoul! It’s Dorothy, Raoul!” she sobbed desperately through terror-whitened lips. “Don’t you know me? I’m Dorothy—your sister!”
Her pleading words had no discernible effect whatever upon the brutalized brain within the monstrous armored skull. The Dweller took another stiffly awkward step forward until it was within arm’s length of the slender little figure confronting it. The great pincer-claw began to rise, moving steadily toward the g
irl’s bare throat.
Dorothy sobbed aloud and instinctively threw up her right forearm in a guarding gesture. The path of the claw shifted slightly. The great jaws of the claw gaped hungrily wide, scant inches from the slender wrist of the guarding arm.
Kent’s heart went sick within him. The unspeakable condition of Vanders’ mutilated body had given terrible evidence of the cutting power of those pincer-jaws. They could shear completely through Dorothy’s wrist as effortlessly as a gardener’s shears would sever a flower stalk!
Kent reached Dorothy with a hurtling leap of desperate swiftness. He snatched her left wrist and flung her bodily to one side just as the pincer-claw clicked futilely shut in the empty space where her arm had been a fraction of a second before. She stumbled to her knees on the earthen floor, shaken but unhurt, and safely out of the Dweller’s reach for the moment.
Insensate hate glowed redly from the bulbous eyes in the armored skull as the Thing confronted Kent. The malformed arms rose in menacing attack.
Kent feinted a blow with his left hand, then slipped lithe ly to one side. The Dweller started to turn with him. One of the chitin-armored feet slipped on a slime-covered fragment of putrescent meat. The Thing staggered momentarily in an awkward effort to regain its balance.
Kent took instant advantage of the opening. His lithe body flashed in with every ounce of his weight solidly behind the left fist that he smashed home on the lipless mouth.
Pain grated in excruciating agony up Kent’s forearm as the bones of his fingers splintered against the horn-hard armor of the hideous head. The Thing, seemingly uninjured by the smashing blow, lashed out with its great pincer-claw.
Kent dodged frantically to one side, far enough that the clicking jaws missed his throat by a scant margin, but not far enough to evade the ponderous lunge of the chitin-sheathed forearm. The steel-hard bulk of the malformed arm crashed against his cheek. He reeled backward, half-stunned by the blow.
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