Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5

by Paul Chadwick

  One leg bent and bowed beneath him. He slipped to the ground with an agonized scream of fear. He tried to rise, and his arm bent also. He pulled himself up with both hands clawing, and his head fell sidewise horribly on a neck that had gone limp. The sound that came from his throat was ghastly, frenzied. He flopped and squirmed like a stranded fish, rolled over, bent his torso, impotently waved his arms and legs that would not raise him. Then with a gurgling sigh, he shivered and lay still. He had become a horrible rubber-like corpse with every bone in his body softened to jelly.

  Chapter II

  THE HORROR HORDE

  AGENT “X” stood frozen. A government man was the next to go. He dropped the machine gun that was blasting lead into the semi-darkness. He took three lurching steps, bowed at the knees, and collapsed with a fearful cry.

  Smoldering horror darkened the eyes of “X” as he snapped himself out of his trance and darted forward. The criminals mentioned by those in the house had arrived. The dwarfs whose existence Captain Crump had scoffed at were here in a ghoulish, destroying horde. The fantastic menace of the bone-softening death was no mere myth. It was the fearful fruit of some unknown weapon of terror.

  The Agent peered again at those flashes of greenish flame. The misshapen dwarf men were now charging across the lawn. Their weird guns flashed and hissed. Detectives staggered right and left. Their shots were going wild. They were cursing, crying out.

  The Agent felt a sudden dizziness. He had left the side of the hedge, run toward the side of the house where the raiders were coming. Out in the open he seemed to be under the range of the green-flaming guns. His head abruptly ached. Ground and sky danced and blurred. Dimly he saw the dwarf men approaching in a gibbering, grimacing horde.

  He tried to draw back, to keep his faculties clear, to see what was happening. But the aching torment that filled his head was bringing on blindness. His eyes wouldn’t focus. Kaleidoscopic nightmare pictures flitted before them. Shadowy, menacing figures oncoming. The hideous features of a flat-headed dwarf. The sprawled flopping body of a detective. Flash after flash of greenish flame.

  The joints of his bones ached. A fever seemed to be in them. His neck felt heavy and weak. His spine was throbbing. Utter blindness came and he tripped over something and fell.

  Yet he wasn’t unconscious. Sounds that seemed the product of a drug-ridden dream were all around him. Blasting, echoing shots. Bestial howls. The hiss of the dwarf-men’s mysterious weapons. Then a sudden crashing of glass from the house itself.

  The Agent, gritting his teeth, clenching his hands against the pain that filled him, lurched to his feet and tried to run toward the spot. He collided with another running, reeling form, and sprawled again. A man began cursing slowly, monotonously close by his ear. He cursed with the wheezing breath of impotent fear and fury. He was a detective or government man blinded like “X” himself.

  “X” and a dozen others had apparently been on the outer edge of attack. Theirs were only the earlier symptoms of the bone-destroying death. But destruction was hovering close. “X” did not know how long he might survive. Often before in his strange work he had faced death in a hundred forms. Never had he seemed so close to it as now.

  Blindly he crawled away from the law officer. He wanted to be by himself. He must not be seen if this invisible torment should lift. He would be questioned, held. The fury of the law might vent itself on him. He must be free to work against these living fiends who had wreaked such awful havoc.

  He pushed through thick shrubbery, batting his head, scratching his face and hands. He thrust deliberately away from the sound of smashing glass that marked the house. As he left the open lawn, some of the torment that racked his body began to go.

  He lay panting, letting his blurred vision clear. Swimming points of light that were cloud-flecked stars registered on his optic nerves. His spine began to grow less numb. The ache in his bones was leaving. He sat up and peered toward the house through heavy foliage. He pulled himself upright hugging the trunk of a tree.

  Like an amnesia victim he seemed to have forgotten time. Seconds and minutes had been condensed while the blinding torment held him. He didn’t know how long the raid had lasted. He didn’t know whether the hideous dwarf men had gone.

  Hoarse, fear-strained voices still sounded. But the shooting had ceased. There was no movement on the wide lawn that stretched in front of the sea wall. The dark wall itself seemed to be deserted. The bay window where “X” had stood to listen was lighted still and gaping. The blinds had been pulled away, the shade ripped out, the sash smashed inward. The killers had made that room the focal point of their raid. Their snatch, he felt sure, had succeeded.

  Weakly, cautiously, he began to move forward, approaching the house again, regaining strength at every step. Only a dull ache in his joints was left when he reached a spot where the shrubbery thinned. Here he stopped to peer intently.

  DETECTIVES around the lawns, blinded as he had been, were getting up. Others, unharmed but driven into the dark gardens behind the house, were appearing shame-facedly. Panic before an unknown, horrible form of death had caused them to retreat. But the still figures in the open space before the sea wall were not stirring. These were the slain, victims of the full force of the uncanny death.

  At least a half dozen had fallen. “X” saw two men run forward, their courage returning, now that the dwarfs with their green flaming guns had gone. He saw them stoop over one of the prostrate forms; saw the ghastly limpness of the corpse that they tried to lift. The arms and legs and spine bones curved like rubber. The head flopped as though only flesh were there. The rescuers dropped the inhuman thing and backed away in horror.

  A G-man ran to the lighted, broken window. Words tumbled excitedly from his lips. “Lasher’s still here—still alive! So is the Captain. I don’t see young Lasher, or his friend, or the girl!”

  Other men crowded up, one vaulting the sill. Their voices reached the listening ears of “X.”

  “Both of them knocked out! Here, give me a hand. Lasher’s been wounded. Those devils grabbed the other three. The girl shouldn’t have been allowed to come.”

  Another deeper voice barked an order. “Search the whole place! Get out to the wall, all of you! Find out where they went. Follow them.”

  Men sprang from the lighted window, grabbing their guns. Grim faces turned toward the dark sea wall. They were ready to face death in the line of duty again, ready to chase the criminals who had made this sinister snatch.

  Straining to watch and listen, “X” suddenly shifted his eyes. Beyond the window, at the rear of the house, came a furtive movement. Some one stepped from a dark angle and darted away. “X” caught his breath, tensed and strained forward. The figure was that of a girl.

  Quick as a flash, he backed toward the hedge again, skirted it, running low, slipping through shrubbery, leaping the flower beds. Detectives had surged toward the sea wall first. But shortly the whole grounds would be searched. Grim men with guns in their hands and rage in their hearts would be eager to shoot. They would seek to avenge their fallen comrades who had gone down before the engulfing tide of death.

  Yet it wasn’t fear of discovery that drove “X” on. It was the flitting mysterious figure of the girl who seemed to be trying to get away. Here was another incomprehensible twist to this nightmare horror.

  He reached the rear of the house, eyes stabbing the blackness ahead. There was a maze of gardens here. Thin starlight glinted on a fountain that was playing. The twinkling reflection disappeared for an instant. “X” moved swiftly, softly toward the spot. He kept to the side of the gravel path, heard the whispering crunch of gravel directly ahead. Fast footsteps were moving toward the garden’s end. The girl, whoever she was, seemed to know her way. But the eyes of “X,” uncannily sensitive in the dark, were adjusting themselves now to the murky light.

  He saw her figure again against the lighter green of the high hedge beyond. He saw it swerve to the left where the hedge seemed to gap
. Here was a gate. The guard stationed at this spot in the early evening had long since left his post, perhaps to meet death. The Agent listened tensely.

  A bolt clicked open. A hinge emitted a ghostly quaver of sound. The girl’s shadowy figure disappeared.

  THE AGENT, following fast, reached the gate close behind her. In her haste she had not even shut it tight. He waited a moment, moved it quietly wider, slipped his body through.

  He dropped to one knee, turned his eyes along the ground, and saw her hurrying form outlined against the dim glow of the horizon. She was heading straight for the shore.

  A blast of sea wind battered the Agent’s face. He could no longer hear her footsteps. But he kept her figure between him and the faintly glimmering sea.

  She was walking along the bluff now, away from the Lasher estate, toward a rocky point of land. The shore was crescent shaped. She was following the half-moon bluff. And her furtive, mysterious flight held the Agent’s interest

  A lighthouse winked and flared a half mile out at sea, sending its intermittent flash over the foaming water. It stood on a hog-backed ledge of rock. Nearer, on the headland that rose before “X,” was another towering shaft.

  This was a lighthouse, too, dark and deserted; evidently left neglected since the new site had been chosen. It was toward this old light that the girl was going.

  A narrow path led through the tumbled rocks. The ancient tower stood close to the point’s end; bulking over the black waters of a cove. “X” could hear the clack of the girl’s high heels on the stones. Her figure blended with the shadowy base of the tower.

  “X” began walking faster. He followed the path, gained steadily on his quarry. He had drawn a small flashlight from his pocket. He held this close in his fingers, ready for use.

  The path curved abruptly, circling the flaring base of the old light. The hurrying girl slipped around it. “X” pressed himself against the peeling bricks, crept forward like a shadow. But a brick that was loose and broken slipped from its crumbling bed and struck the rocky path at the Agent’s feet. A startled gasp came instantly out of the darkness directly ahead.

  Throwing caution aside now, knowing that he had been heard, “X” jumped as a high door opened. He caught the edge of it in his hand, followed the girl through it. In utter darkness she gasped again. The Agent’s flash beam caught her face.

  She was the same girl he had seen in the Lasher house—the girl with the gray-green eyes—Holly Babette. Her pallor was deathly now. Fear pinched her nostrils, made her scarlet lips look thin. Her willowy body trembled. She gave a muffled scream and tried to dart toward a flight of iron stairs that spiraled upward. The Agent clutched her arm and held her close.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t! Let me go!” There was panic in her voice, a note of hysteria that he did not understand. She parried his question with another. “Who—who are you?”

  “I’ve followed you from the house. Why did you run?”

  Her strange eyes searched his face. “Those terrible men!” she gasped. “They tried to get me! They took Ben Lasher and Clifton Hines. I was frightened almost out of my mind. I ran away—because I wanted to hide.”

  He believed she was lying. Her fear was real enough, but her gray-green eyes held a glint of craft. In panic, she babbled on:

  “I came with Mr. Hines and Captain Crump. When I saw those dwarfs—I lost my head.”

  She screamed suddenly and wrenched herself free, shrinking away against the wall as something moved on the stairs above them. The Agent had a prickling sensation along his scalp—a warning of imminent danger. He looked up quickly and breath hissed between his teeth.

  A hideous, grimacing face was staring down. A shortened body on wide-spread arms was suspended weirdly across the railing of the stairs twelve feet above him. A dwarf-man, like a giant bat, was crouched there, ready to spring. The girl moaned in abject terror. The inhuman thing, flashing a glittering knife, launched itself into the air. It came down snarling, black coat flying like evil wings. The Agent drew his gas gun—too late.

  Chapter III

  TOWER OF TERROR

  THERE wasn’t time to aim and fire. The hurtling hulk of the dwarf-man was upon him before he could pull the trigger. He sagged and twisted as the hideous, misshapen gnome struck his shoulders. The knife blade ripped along his right sleeve. Steel sliced his skin in the moment that he hurled himself violently toward the left.

  This alone saved him. The knife had been aimed straight at his heart. The stunning suddenness of the attack put “X” at a disadvantage. His sidewise lurch landed him hard against the floor with the dwarf still on top. “X’s” light had been knocked from his hand. It lay on its side, rocking, casting grotesquely writhing shadows.

  The dwarf’s arms seemed separate from his shrunken, distorted body. They appeared to have a life of their own. The one that clamped itself around “X’s” neck had the crushing force of a constricting python. It pressed on his larynx, made him choke and fight for breath. But the deadly, slithering blade of the knife claimed all his attention.

  The dwarf was trying to drive it down again, trying to thrust it into his side. “X” caught the man’s wrist with the point of the knife a bare inch from his skin. He deflected it savagely with a twist of his arm that brought a vicious snarl from the gnome’s lips.

  “X” got a glimpse of the strange face above him. The head seemed monstrous compared to the size of the body. It had the weight, the diameter of a fully developed man’s. The dwarf’s stature was hardly larger than a boy’s. The features were adult, too, seasoned with evil. But the oddest, most horrible thing about the murderous being, was the flatness of the skull and the broad, compressed forehead. There was a distortion here that spoke of imbecility, yet the dwarf’s eyes were pinpoints of cunning.

  With murderous agility, he loosed his hold on the Agent’s throat. His left hand swung over, snatched the knife from his right. Again, he flashed it downward. And for the third time the Agent barely escaped.

  “X” used both hands now, seizing the knife arm at elbow and wrist, squeezing and twisting till the dwarf gave a howl of pain. The dwarf arched his neck and tried to butt with his horrible head. His bowed legs clamped over the Agent’s thighs with the strength of a vise. “X” turned his face away as the man’s grotesque skull glanced off his temple. With lights shooting before his eyes, he twisted both hands again, heard the spang of steel as the knife fell to the floor.

  He freed his hold, drew his right arm back to deliver an upward blow. Then, as suddenly as he had come, the dwarf leaped away. He was a bounding, spidery shape as “X” rolled sidewise. He slammed through the door, out into the darkness.

  The girl had gone, too. She had slipped away quietly during the course of the fight. “X” leaped to his feet. Frowning, he scooped up his flash, crossed the floor in three strides and stepped out into the windswept night. He fanned the flash beam in circles. He stopped and peered into the dark. Rocks showed up all around but no sign of movement. He swung around the base of the tower, still stabbing his light. No one was there.

  “X” turned back grimly toward the door of the lighthouse. The tower seemed empty now. The gleaming knife on the floor was the only reminder of the life-and-death struggle. “X” dropped a handkerchief over it, found that the blade collapsed into the handle, and dropped the weapon into his pocket. He was careful how he held it. There might be fingerprints to study.

  His eyes turned toward the iron stairs from which the dwarf had leaped. They, too, seemed deserted. They spiraled upward and disappeared in inky black shadow. Wind moaned in the tower’s summit far up above him. Wind rattled a loose fastening with a sound of clawing fingers. It gushed in and eddied chilly around the concave sides of the tower. The sea on the rocks in the cove below broke with a hollow rumble.

  THERE were no other sounds, but the Agent abruptly reached into an inner pocket. He took out a contrivance that looked like a vest-pocket camera. It was black, cover
ed with pebbled grain leather, rounded at the ends, with small, circular side handles that appeared to be film winds.

  He snapped the front open, drew out a metal disc attached to a cord, pressed that against the stairway railing, and put the black camera-like box to his ear. The instrument was one of the smallest sound-amplifying devices in the world. The “film winds” were electric rheostats. It operated on two midget dry cells.

  The wind became a thunderous roar as he turned the sensitive controls. The moan of it rose to a banshee scream. The breaking surf became a deafening cannonade. But the instrument had selectivity. The tiny disc microphone was directional. He moved it to focus on the clawing rattle of the loose shutter. He passed on to other distinguishable sounds in the light turret far above. He strained and listened with a sudden tensing of facial muscles.

  For a series of intermittent noises came that did not appear to be the wind. There was a soft scraping to them, a measured quality. They were caused by the cautious slither of human feet. Some one was lurking in the black heights above.

  The Agent put the disc of his microphone away. He snapped the case shut. He put it in his pocket. He moved to the first step of the stairs and mounted in darkness on his silent, rubber-soled shoes.

  The Agent gripped his flashlight in tense fingers. He held his gas gun on the other side. It was a strange weapon which did not kill, but which at close range, could knock a man unconscious as quickly as a bullet. It held a cartridge containing a volatile, anesthetizing gas which the Agent himself had perfected. It had not saved him from the onslaught of the dwarf, but now it might be of use.

  Twenty feet from the old light turret above, he turned his flashlight up and clicked it on. He stood with muscles taut, ready to leap and fire if movement showed. But there was no movement. There was only an empty chamber, with the black hole of a trapdoor through which the stairway led. The Agent centered his flash on this half expecting to see another hideous face.