Holding the beam steady, holding his gas gun poised, he crept slowly higher, turning his arms and head as the stairway turned. His hammering senses told him that there was danger here. They told him he was courting possible death. But the memory of those writhing dying men out on the Lasher lawn was strong. The fiendish horror of the rubber-corpse killers which had drawn him into action, was urging him on.
He moved up the last section of stairway to the square of the trapdoor itself. It was open. Here was the landing where the oldtime keepers of the light had stored their immediate reserve of oil. The Agent shoved his head cautiously above the floor level, swiveling his light in all directions, ready to spring back.
THERE were rusty five-gallon tins about; flat-sided, empty, casting cubistic shadows. There were broken pieces of glass, a pair of old shoes, the withered body of a bird that had flown through a broken window during some storm. Wind had swept the floorboards clean of dust. There were no tracks that the Agent could see.
The light platform was higher still, ten feet above. The Agent drew himself through the trap and stood erect. A second flight of stairs wound upward. Another open hatchway gave access to the light. He mounted this quickly, senses tingling with suspense. Surely he had not been mistaken in those sounds of feet.
But there was no movement in the turret, no sign of life. The huge light had been dismantled long ago, its mercury-filled bed emptied out, its lamps and lenses taken away. Only the iron supporting base remained. There seemed no spot here for a man to hide. But the circular windows which gave on the narrow, outside platform were shoulder high. Two narrow doors led to it, one on each side of the turret. The Agent made his choice and stepped out into the darkness and blasting wind.
The platform was barely eighteen inches wide. Its railing was rusty. It circled out of sight to right and left behind the circular bulk of the turret wall. A man stooping would be out of sight on the opposite side. “X” had an eerie sense that he was not alone.
He listened, walked cautiously forward, stopped abruptly. His unaided ears caught a faint sound of footsteps now, a vibration of the boards beneath his feet. The Agent leaped along the circular turret platform. A door slammed somewhere. The footsteps were inside now, behind the turret wall. He turned and whirled back to the door from which he had come.
He burst it open, plunged into the lightroom itself, his flash stabbing ahead. Something slammed directly in front of him now. The whole tower trembled. A slither of broken glass fell with a tinkle. He hurled himself straight to the floor at the spot where the trapdoor was. He clawed at the heavy wood, cursed harshly between his teeth.
For the door was closed now, pulled down by the lurking man who had gone through it. It was closed and would not lift under the Agent’s straining fingers. There was no lock that his scientific deftness might pick open. A heavy bolt beneath had been thrust home. The man who had been hiding here, who knew every detail of the light, had trapped him.
Angling his flash down through a narrow crack, the Agent could see the gleaming shaft of the bolt that held the door in place. He set his light down, took a thin case of chromium-steel tools from his pocket. Here were the clever, goose-necked bits of metal that had helped him open many a lock. But he passed them by and selected a slender strip of hardest manganese steel. It was a tiny file with a hack-saw edge.
The footsteps had stopped. There was an odd, metallic clatter from the chamber below that puzzled the Agent. He pressed the file into the crack, paused abruptly. Wind eddying up bore a sudden pungent scent to his nostrils. Fumes of gasoline.
The Agent stiffened, waited, hardly breathing. There was a sinister implication in those fumes that the Agent caught. A terrible thought flashed in his mind.
As he crouched with grim lips and tautened muscles, the sound of footsteps came once more. Faint vibration stirred the boards beneath him. The gasoline smell grew stronger until it was a cloying, stifling odor. The whole light turret was filled with it.
Swiftly jerking himself into frenzied action, the Agent drew the keen edge of his file across the bolt. Its teeth bit into metal. He drew it back and forth with plunging thrusts of his arm and wrist.
The footsteps descending toward the ground grew steadily fainter. They ceased, and a sudden, volleying breath of air fanned upward, out of the crack where the Agent kneeled. It was laden with acrid vapor. It made him cough. After it a spreading flush was visible. The crack seemed to widen into a slit of vivid, wavering light. Warmth was apparent then. And above the roar of the wind and sea came another sound. The Agent recognized it for what it was, held his body rigid. Fire!
Heat spurted through the crack beneath him. Black smoke in a thin streamer followed. The boards under his feet grew warm. Ascending flame, pushed by the wind below was creating a crucible. He was trapped on the high top of hell’s own chimney.
Chapter IV
RED HELL
THE HEAT mounted as swiftly as a furnace under forced draft. It filled the light turret, pressed swelteringly around the Agent’s face and body. There was no escape inside the tower. Gasoline had been poured along the walls, running all the way to the bottom. There it had been ignited, and the seething fury of flames was increasing with every ascending foot in an almost mathematical ratio.
The floor began to crack and smoke. In a few moments the entire inside platform would crumble away into sizzling embers. “X” leaped to one of the doors that led to the windswept night again. He plunged through it, out to the circular balcony high above the ground. He peered down at the rocky point. Flames were billowing out of the tower’s windows now; hissing jets of lurid light and twisting smoke that the sea wind snatched away.
The intense glow illuminated the path and broken boulders. It was a straight drop of seventy feet to the ground; a fall that would shatter every bone in a man’s body. A jump overside to the base of the shaft was unthinkable.
The Agent’s eyes turned grimly outward toward the cove. The ocean seemed to be breaking on rocks at his very feet. Boiling foam leaped upward into the glare of the flames. Yet he knew it was a good twenty feet from the light’s bottom to the edge of the cove. It was a thirty-foot drop from the light’s foundation to water level. One hundred feet altogether to the black surface of the sea.
And there was no way of knowing how deep the cove might be. If it was shallow, if there were rocks a few feet down, a dive would spell suicide. But there was no alternative. A crackle sounded behind him. A rush of roaring flame swept up into the light chamber. The inner platform had given away. Flame lashed in imprisoned fury behind the circular panes. For a moment the old light regained its ancient brilliance, shining out over the water as it had done long ago. Then the glass cracked with heat, and a pane burst out. A shimmering devil’s tongue of flame leaped eerily into the night.
“X” climbed to the top of the rusty railing and poised. He balanced a moment in the blast of the chill sea wind, his body outlined against the light behind him. Quickly he flung himself forward and downward into a black abyss.
It was the highest leap of his life, a jump that a professional diver might have trembled at. His body sailed through the air. Wind battered at it. It hurtled toward the black cove far below. It passed as a falling shadow by the windows that lanced flame. It swept like a stricken thing plunging to death.
But the Agent’s arms were before his face. He was conscious of each split second of the dizzy drop. He knew that these few might be his last.
Then the cold water seemed to rise and smite him. He struck cleanly but with breath-taking force; struck with a pounding thrust of momentum that carried him far under. It seemed that he would never cease going down, down. He stiffened his fingers, stretched out his arms, tried to flatten his plunging dive. He half expected to feel the smashing, obliterating jolt of rock against his face. He turned his head instinctively.
But there was only black water on all sides. The cove was mercifully deep. He began to go forward instead of down. He kicked weakly with encumberi
ng shoes, realizing dimly amid a compressing tumult in his head that he was close to unconsciousness. He made the mechanical motions of swimming. He rose slowly through depths of black water that seemed endless. His head thrust itself above the surface at last. He gulped in great lungfuls of air, paddling feebly with half-numbed arms.
The flaming lighthouse rose above him. It bathed the cove with a brilliant veil of light. As his vision cleared and his reeling senses focused, he saw running figures. Men, detectives from the lawn of the Lasher place, had glimpsed the flames and were coming up.
“X,” slowly regaining his strength, struck out for the nearby shore, anxious to slip in among the black rocks before he was discovered. But there was a sudden shouting on the point above him. Men were gesturing, yelling. He had been seen. Two figures began clambering down over the rocks to the shore to meet him as he emerged. His dive, he concluded, must have been seen also.
Instinctive caution made the Agent lift his hand to his face. He tensed in sudden dismay. The apparent surface of his features, composed of thin-layers of the plastic pigment that made him an uncanny master of disguise, was roughened into pits and ridges. A piece of the strange substance, based on a secret formula of his own, was flopping loose.
THE HEAT of the flames in the tower had softened the stuff. His battering plunge into the cold sea had worked its havoc. He knew he presented a startling appearance. He knew he could not hope to get by. If his disguise had been intact, he might have bluffed it out. He had come to the island as “A.J. Martin,” newspaper man, and had registered under that name at the Rock Island Inn.
Out in the darkness, before going to the Lasher House, he had swiftly altered his features to conform to another “stock” role. The disguise of Martin, used many times before, was too precious to be lightly jeopardized. He had played the part of a reporter, “Wilks,” when he went to the scene of the prospective crime. He carried a press card bearing that name in his pocket.
For there had been no time for an adequate disguise. He had learned too late of the kidnap threat against Vernon Lasher’s son that the rubber-corpse killers had made. The police had kept all details from leaking out. Fear had sealed the family’s lips. The Agent had got a last minute report through secret channels of his own. It had barely given him time to come, made his stealthy entry into the Lasher grounds a grim necessity.
But no one there had seen his face. Only the hideous dwarf and the girl, Holly Babette, had seen him as Wilks, and they were gone. As Wilks, with an unmarred disguise to back him up, he could have told a convincing story to these men; claiming that he was a prowling reporter, that he had seen some one in the old lighthouse tower, gone up and been trapped by flames.
But that was impossible now. His disguise was hopelessly blemished. He could not fix it in the water. He faced one of the most dreaded threats of all—discovery as Agent “X,” exposure by the police as the hunted Man of a Thousand Faces. He would be treated as a desperate criminal by them. His presence near the kidnaping scene would bring the full weight of suspicion down upon him. The uncanny cleverness of his disguise, marred as it was, would brand him. His name, his real face, would be discovered and made public. Life imprisonment or electrocution would surely follow.
For a moment he paused in breathless indecision. Fate had played him a strange trick tonight—preserved him in his leap from the flaming tower, only to throw him into the hands of the law.
The Agent’s lips closed grimly. He struck out across the cove, away from the light, toward the next nearest point on the shore. Head down, arms flailing the water, feet churning like a propeller, he used his fastest crawl.
Dimly he heard the two detectives, clambering down the bluff, cry out. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw them begin to run. They were trying to parallel him now. Boulders barred their way, slippery, sea-weed incrusted rocks made progress difficult. But even at that, land travel was faster than water. And the Agent’s shoes and clothing hampered his strokes. Whatever point of land he made for, they were likely to reach it first.
He gritted his teeth in desperation. He turned suddenly and swept straight for the shore again. He broke his stroke, still forging ahead, but purposely kicking up a foam. He lashed the water like a drowning man. Close to the rocky beach he let himself slip under once. He came up expelling water from his mouth with a gurgling cry. A wave caught him and he let himself be tumbled over. It hurled him toward the shore, and the Agent landed sprawling, arms and legs spread out, head hanging. Dragging his feet behind him he crawled weakly up a slanting rock.
THE TWO detectives were close by now. He could hear their slipping, splashing footsteps. Their flashlights were silvering the rock before his eyes. He kept his face turned down. He moaned realistically between clenched teeth. He measured the nearness of their steps with attentive ears.
When their steps stopped, when they stood above him, the Agent came to life like an uncoiled spring. His flying, upthrusting hands knocked the flashlights from their fingers. In the quick blackness that descended, he struck right and left with hard-hitting fists. Knuckles cracked on jaws. Both men, taken by surprise, went down. Their bodies slumped. Their flashlight lenses shattered on the rocks. The gun that one held in his fingers struck a boulder and exploded with a roar.
Men on the bluff above were staring down. They had heard the shot. They had seen the lights go out. They knew something was amiss. One called in a bellowing voice to the two men whom “X” had felled. When there was no answer, a concerted shout went up.
Flashlights waved and danced as detectives swarmed down the rocky face of the bluff. A beam brighter than the rest played over “X,” gleaming on his sea-wet figure. He leaped away behind a boulder and drew a coughing shot. Lead slapped on the brow of the stone above him and screamed off into the dark. Trigger fingers were nervous tonight. He was under fire, already hunted.
He took a chance, lunged from cover, and crossed an open space to deeper shadow. The rocks here were low. He flung himself flat, hugged a table of granite, pressing his body out of sight as well as he could. A volley of bullets spanged and whined close by him. Men were shouting hoarsely, running forward.
“X” slid on his stomach between barely sheltering boulders. He inched closer to the overhang of the bluff. He rose and ran swiftly while flame-splitting guns sought for his life.
Chapter V
TRAPPED!
ALONG the crescent-shaped shore of the cove he raced, widening the distance between himself and the armed men behind. Guns continued to bark. Bullets came dangerously close. In his mad flight to save himself from exposure he was risking a slug in his back.
Some of the men had not come down to the shore. They turned and ran along the top of the bluff, constituting a still greater menace. For the flaming tower made the ground lighter here. The rocks were not so big. Progress was faster. They were overtaking “X.”
Glancing up over his shoulder, he caught the silhouette of a racing figure. He would be cut off, trapped if he stayed on the shore. He’d be shot down if he took to the water. To turn back would be suicide. Up over the edge of the bluff was the only way—before his pursuers got too near.
He turned left and scrambled up rocks that formed a sloping cliff. He crouched at the summit of them, lifted his head cautiously, propelled himself over a windswept space that gave no protection from bullets. Running detectives were only a hundred feet away; but they had not expected this bold move. They thought the man they were chasing would continue to skulk along the shore.
Bullets whined through the air, but the aim of the men who fired was erratic. The Agent found safety again behind an upthrust boulder. The light from the gasoline flames was dimmer here. A few feet ahead, he knew, was the path along which he’d followed Holly Babette. Keeping the rock between himself and the onrushing men, he sped away.
At the edge of the path he had to expose himself again, but only for an instant. The detectives set up a shout. He turned and raced over the winding path, away from the poi
nt toward the darkness of the island.
Yet armed men were still all about. Only a few of those at the Lasher place had come to the blazing light. Those who had not were circling, searching for the horrible dwarfish raiders. They would be told of the man of mystery who had jumped from the burning tower. The hunt for him would be reenforced. There was no chance for “X” to pursue his investigation till he removed his wet clothing and changed his present imperfect disguise. His soggy suit and marred features would betray him. He must reach his room at the Rock Island Inn somehow.
With long, swift strides, he moved through the darkness, passing other rich men’s estates, avoiding the flashlights that circled and glimmered. On all sides lights in houses were springing up. News of the terrible, murderous snatch was spreading. The island community was being electrified into wakeful terror. The siren of a fast car moaned like a mad thing, tearing along a white shell road.
Headlights goggled, making “X” leap back to stand motionless for a moment behind a tree. Chief Swope, head of the summer colony’s dozen or more police, swept by, racing to the scene of the raid. Crime had fallen like a sudden, awful blight on this peaceful community.
The Agent continued his way swiftly, warily toward the inn. It was the island’s largest building. It stood on a rise of ground. It had been built to look like a flamboyant, foreign chateau, to appeal to a wealthy class. But the depression had ruined most of its clientele. Rates had been slashed. There had been a frantic effort made on the part of the management to create entertainment that would draw trade.
A late dance orchestra was playing as Agent “X” approached across spacious, landscaped grounds. The throbbing music seemed in weird contrast to the sounds he had heard and the sights he had witnessed during the past hour. Here was gaiety, laughter, love. Behind him was horror, mystery, death.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 5 Page 28