by Cave, Hugh
Even as Simms stared, Sanderson came to life. He had been listening intently, fearfully, to the sounds from above. Now, realizing the one-eyed man's purpose, he reached out and dragged Oleg back, snarling at him.
"No, you fool! Not now! Let the dogs loose and release the others. By God, if this is a police raid, and they find those things here—"
Simms groped erect, stepped back into the shadows of the furnace. His gaze shifted anxiously to the door of the prison-room, seeking the shadowed form of the girl. She was standing there motionless, as if fascinated by the sudden turn of events. She cried out a warning as Sanderson took a slow step forward.
Ice-cold fingers gripped Simms' heart then. He stared at Sanderson, stiffened convulsively. He was a rat in a trap, about to be destroyed. Sanderson's outstretched hand held a leveled black object which was a revolver. Unarmed, Simms' stood in the face of cold-blooded annihilation.
The sounds from above meant nothing now, even though they had increased in volume. Sanderson, obviously fearing an invasion by the police, intended to wipe out all evidence of his sadistic ghoulishness. Advancing slowly, deliberately, he held the gun in rigid fingers, waiting for a chance to press the trigger.
For ten seconds Simms stood motionless, protected by the gloom of the massive furnace. There in the shadows he was hidden from the killer's staring eyes. If he moved, even stirring an inch, it would be to invite a bullet.
His body ached from its rigidity, throbbed from the mauling it had received at the hands of the madman who lay inert on the floor. He wondered vaguely why the hellish pounding of his heart did not give him away. Grimly he watched Sanderson's slow advance, stared at the weapon in the man's fist.
Then he lunged.
It was a desperate, headlong lunge, inspired by a wild hope of achieving the impossible. Blindly Simms shot into the open, hurtled across the narrow expanse of floor separating him from the killer's revolver. Head down, arms outflung in front of him, he hurled himself straight at Sanderson's legs.
Too late, Sanderson recoiled.
The gun belched, even as Simms made contact. In the narrow confines of the cellar, the report was a thunder-clap, reverberating wildly from wall to wall, filling the chamber with a mad, mocking cacophony. From the doorway of the laboratory, Claire Evans screamed.
The gun did not belch again. Hurled back by the force of Simms' charge, Sanderson reeled drunkenly across the floor. The gun spun from his hand, lost itself in deeper darkness near the furnace. Simms, carried forward by his own momentum, crashed sideways into the wall.
Dazed by the impact, he clung there, fighting to retain consciousness, anticipating attack. But the attack was not forthcoming. Sanderson, stumbling backward, had no desire to meet the same fate as the madman who lay on the floor. His only thought was for escape.
The stairs groaned as he staggered up them, clawing the railing with curled fingers. Simms, staring with wide eyes, took a step forward, stood swaying. The door at the top clattered shut. Sanderson was gone.
9. Taps
Simms was aware, then, that things were happening in the upper portion of the house. The realization came to him slowly, eating its way into him sluggishly, fighting through a fog of sensations which already crowded his mind. He was aware, too, that his violent handshake with death had left its mark within him. Sickness and nausea possessed him. Body and brain were both numb, slow to react.
He turned slowly, facing the girl who came toward him. She, too, had suffered a reaction. She was sobbing as she put a trembling hand on his arm and said anxiously, almost inaudibly:
"Are—are you hurt?"
"Some," he muttered. "I'll get over it."
She looked toward the top of the stairs, as if bewildered by the sounds from above.
"Something is happening, Mark. Something terrible!"
Simms scowled, moved slowly forward. Whatever was going on up there, he and she would be better off in the thick of it, rather than down here waiting for the hell to descend. He climbed slowly, waited at the top for her to reach him. His hand gripped the knob, turned it, came away again. The door was locked.
The girl stared, frightened. Simms stepped back, lunged forward again, bringing his shoulder in savage, painful contact with the barrier. He tried again, made a growling noise in his throat. A moment later, when his fourth effort brought success and the door clattered open, his face was white from self-inflicted agony, his shoulder was red and raw, beginning to swell.
Grimly he paced into the kitchen, peered around him. The room was pale with gray dawn-light, seemed cold, sinister. The corridor leading to the front of the house was a murky tunnel, uninviting.
The place was strangely quiet, so quiet that Simms hung back, bewildered, and reached a protecting hand behind him to grip the girl's arm. Cautiously he entered the corridor, paced down the thick carpet. A sound from the floor above caught his attention. He stiffened, strode slowly past the door of Sanderson's study, stopped again at the foot of the central staircase.
Those other sounds were again audible then, not from within the house but from somewhere outside. They were significant, telling their own story. Men and dogs were out there, and at least one woman. Claire Evans stood staring, listening, and stepped closer to Simms as if fearing to be left alone. Again that guttural, throaty sound, strangely like an exclamation of triumph, came from the landing above.
Simms put one foot on the stairs, motioned the girl back as she would have followed. She watched him with unblinking eyes as he ascended noiselessly. Nearing the top, he made fists of his hands, anticipating danger. His gaze encountered a hunched figure standing at one of the hall windows. The man was Oleg.
The top step creaked dismally as Simms trusted his weight to it. Abruptly Oleg swung about, glaring. Judging from appearances, the one-eyed man had been staring hungrily at what was going on in the yard below the window. His face was still a gloating mask as he confronted Simms. With a hoarse growl of triumph he hurled himself forward.
His very eagerness proved his undoing. Had he come slowly, the result might have been different. Simms, acting on instinct alone, dropped on hands and knees as the hurtling body shot toward him. The stair-well, yawning below, was a death trap.
The one-eyed man saw his danger too late. Frantically he strove to quell his momentum. A lurid scream jangled from his lips as he rocketed headlong over Simms' sprawled frame. Arms outflung, body contorted by the impact, Oleg shot into space.
He struck once, midway down the stairs. The sound was a sickening crunch. Rebounding, he crashed sideways against the railing, screaming agony as his broken body pitched the remaining distance to the corridor below. With a dull thud he landed at the feet of the girl who stood, wide-eyed.
Simms stood erect at the top of the stairs, peered down and licked his lips. The upper hallway was empty when he turned to examine it. Slowly he descended, stepped past the girl's rigid form, and bent over the broken thing on the carpet. When he straightened again, he took the girl's arm, led her away.
Claire Evans, looking at him fearfully, whispered:
"Is he—is he dead?"
Simms nodded. The nod might have meant anything. He had more to think about, now, than the fate of the one-eyed man who had assisted Sanderson in making this place a house of hell. Gripping the girl's hand, he moved quickly toward the front door. Upstairs, Oleg had been glaring hungrily down at what was going on in the yard. That was significant.
But was it? The sounds of turmoil had abated now. The baying of the dogs, for instance, which had carried hellish possibilities with it, was no longer audible. There were no more revolver shots . . .
Simms dragged the door open, stood wide-legged on the threshold. Then, instead of pacing forward across the veranda, he stood very still, his fingers tightening on the arm of the girl beside him.
It was a strange scene, and the curtain had evidently not yet fallen on the grim climax of it. A hundred yards distant across that snow-carpeted terrain of death, two separa
te knots of figures—uniformed troopers—were gathering around significant dark shapes which lay on the ground. Simms stared at them, scowling in bewilderment as he recognized Hurley. Beside Hurley stood the man who had called himself Max Ferris, the man who had crawled from the cellar window, a very long time ago, and had been apprehended before making his escape.
There were other things, too, in that grayish-white enclosure. Oleg, the one-eyed man, had evidently succeeded in carrying out Sanderson's orders before going upstairs to view the horror from a place of security. Gaunt, four-legged shapes made dark blotches in the snow, where bullets from the troopers' guns had felled them. Sanderson's dogs, some of them at least, would no longer run wild, terrorizing the countryside . . .
Mechanically Simms released the girl's arm and took a step forward. Then he stopped again, realized that Hurley and the troopers had not come alone. Some of the intruders at the far end of the yard were not members of the police.
Even as Simms stared, a strange procession detached itself from the group and came slowly, menacingly toward the veranda. A woman led them, the same thick-set foreign-looking woman who had accosted Simms on South Beach, long ago. He pondered the meaning of her presence, narrowed his eyes as he peered at her. Maria Senko, the name was. But why . . .
He stepped backward, said quietly to Claire Evans:
"They mean trouble. Better be careful."
The girl did not reply. She, too, was perplexed, gazing fearfully at the muttering men who followed the Senko woman forward. They were denizens of the fishing village. Hard-faced foreigners, all of them, advancing ominously.
What they wanted, Simms could only guess. The guess brought a new thought, a thought which had been crowded from his mind during the rapid events of the past quarter hour. Sanderson! Where—
The Senko woman, stopping at the foot of the steps, glared up at him and said sullenly:
"Where is he, huh? Where's Sanderson?"
Simms made no answer. The woman's face fascinated him. Cold-blooded murder was written in it. The eyes were small, glowing pits, the lips were curled back over unclean teeth. Maria Senko and the men of the village had come here for one reason only—to lay their hands on Sanderson and destroy him.
Trembling fingers made contact with Simms' arm. Behind him, Claire Evans said hesitantly:
"I—I think I know where he is, Mark. There's a prison-room in the cellar—"
Simms hesitated. Glancing quickly across the yard, he saw that Hurley and the troopers were concerned only with a problem of their own. They were lifting those other shapes from the ground, preparatory to carrying them into the house. And the Senko woman was already climbing the veranda steps, glaring as if she believed the girl and himself to be guilty of shielding Sanderson's whereabouts.
Simms turned then, and made up his mind. They wanted Sanderson? All right, they could have him. The more hideous the punishment they meted out to him, the more fitting it would be. This was one time when police routine had to be discarded. Any attempt to enforce it would bring disaster anyway. The villagers were in no mood to be thwarted.
Motioning the girl forward, he said quietly: "Go ahead. Show me." Then he paced behind her as she moved slowly down the corridor, back into the bowels of the house.
The villagers followed eagerly, muttering among themselves. Fists clenched, lips tight-pressed in a drawn face, Simms listened to them, and heard also the sound of Hurley's harsh voice bellowing from the yard outside, as if Hurley had at last waked up to a realization of what Maria Senko and her followers intended to do.
Claire Evans, half turning, said anxiously:
"I may be wrong. He may have escaped. But if he's in the house, he'll be hiding in—"
The girl stopped talking, stood rigid. Simms, too, heard the sound which had startled her, a furtive, half-inaudible sound from the gloom of the corridor ahead. The girl shrank against him, trembling. Even as he pushed past her, a hunched shape appeared suddenly at the end of the passage, racing desperately toward the door of Sanderson's study.
Too late, Simms lunged forward. The study door clattered open, slammed shut in his face as he reached the threshold. Heavy footsteps pounded across the carpeted floor inside.
Savagely he flung the door open again, stumbled over the threshold. At the far end of the room, twenty paces distant, Sanderson was clambering through an open window. For a single second the man crouched on the ledge, stared fearfully as Simms ploughed toward him. Then his hunched body shot from view.
Simms reached the window in a dozen floor-eating strides. It opened on the far side of the house, looked out on a narrow expanse of white lawn. Beyond, not more than twenty yards away, loomed a tangled wall of trees and underbrush.
Sanderson, running on bent legs, crouched low after the fashion of an anthropoid, was already within a few strides of reaching his objective.
Simms put both hands on the sill and hauled himself over, sucking a deep breath as he sprawled to the ground beneath. Behind him the guttural voices of Maria Senko's followers were audible, and when he turned his head, after covering half the distance to the spot where Sanderson had vanished, he saw Claire Evans standing in the window, stiff and motionless, staring. Then his thoughts centered on Sanderson, to the exclusion of all else.
If Sanderson got into the woods, with sufficient head-start to stifle the sounds of his flight, he would make good his escape. There would be a dozen ways open to him. But he needed that head-start.
Simms crashed blindly through dense underbrush, hacking his way, with flailing arms. He stopped, heard sounds ahead of him, and ploughed on again. His eyes were no good to him now. Here in the woods, the gray murk of dawn had not yet penetrated. Gaunt trees loomed up in front of him, vicious creepers caught at his legs, tripped him. But those sounds were still audible ahead, advertising the direction of Sanderson's stumbling flight.
Without doubt, the man was making a desperate attempt to elude pursuit. Ahead of him lay the sandy, rock-ribbed cliffs leading down to the sea. If he reached them, there would be a well-defined path, where a man could run without danger of committing suicide.
There was a path already. Reaching it, Simms gave voice to a throaty sob of relief. His body ached savagely, his pounding heart threatened to burst with the punishment it was receiving. Yet he was closing the gap with every stride. The sounds ahead of him were closer. In another moment . . .
The thing happened abruptly. One moment he was stumbling along the narrow path, through an aisle of gloom, next moment a gray expanse of open sky loomed ahead of him, and he made a violent attempt to hurl himself back.
The thing was a trap. Sanderson, realizing the futility of trying to shake loose pursuit, had cunningly contrived to end the matter another way. With the same animal cunning which had marked his every action, he had chosen a shadowed path which led to the brink of the cliff and there ended. Now, crouching there at the trail's end, he waited with outstretched arms as Simms lunged toward him.
His intent was obvious. With a single sweep of those powerful arms, he could send his assailant hurtling through space. Far below, white water hissed over jagged rocks, awaiting the victim.
But Sanderson guessed wrong.
Simms' lean body bent double as it made contact. Skidding to the ground, with hooked legs outthrust, he crashed heavily, dragging Sanderson with him as he fell. Less than a foot from the cliff's edge, the two writhing bodies tangled in desperate embrace. There, with death reaching spectral hands from the depths below, began a silent, deadly conflict which could have but one hideous conclusion.
Stunned by his contact with the hard ground, Simms fought blindly, instinctively, during those first few minutes. His lips clamped shut on the agonized sobs that welled from his throat. Sick from his old injuries, exhausted by his headlong run through the woods, he had no strength left for anything except the grim business of self-preservation. Yet he was conscious of every detail of what was happening.
Sanderson, fearing impending destruc
tion, had become a mad, lunging animal. The very trap which he had so cunningly laid, so triumphantly prepared for his adversary, was now equally dangerous to himself. Furiously he fought clear of the cliff’s edge, where that sickening drop threatened to engulf him.
The man was no weakling. His huge body, despite its layers of fat, possessed enormous strength. That strength was doubled now by his desire to live. His left hand shot out with a sledge-hammer force, clawing at Simms' throat. His right doubled into a hamlike fist, pounded viciously against Simms' heaving body, inflicting agony with every blow.
Simms fought back with equal fury. Savagely he lunged sideways, jerked his legs free of the weight that pinned them down. Sucking great gulps of breath into tortured lungs, he flung both arms around the big man's middle, whipped his legs up and locked them in a vise-like grip.
His fury inspired a cunning equal to that of the man he was fighting. Despite his dread of annihilation, or perhaps because of it, he remembered other things, recalled what Sanderson had attempted to do to a dark-eyed girl, and what the fiend had done to other victims.
Hate and desperation combined in Simms' soul, gave him abnormal strength. Tired muscles clamored for relief, yet he continued to force the combat, put forth every effort to obtain a head-grip and apply killing pressure.
Then he was aware of something else. Somewhere nearby a hoarse voice was bellowing to attract attention. It sounded like Hurley's voice. If that were true, then Hurley and the troopers, and probably those grim foreigners led by the Senko woman, had found the trail, followed it . . .
Triumphantly Simms renewed his attack. With a quick lunge he twisted sideways, hurled Sanderson's writhing body nearer the cliff's edge. His curled hands drove against the man's neck, clamped there. For a moment victory was certain. Sanderson fell backwards.
A liquid gurgle welled from the big man's throat. Then, with hellish abruptness, the tables were turned again. Sharp teeth imbedded themselves in the flesh of Simms' wrist. His mouth opened, released a hoarse cry of pain. Agony surged through him, eating its way along his arm, numbing the whole side of his body. He stiffened, rocked back on his knees.