by Don Wilcox
“We’re calling the roll of the dead,” Allan said more to himself than to Jimmy.
“What’d you say, Cap?”
“Nothing.” Allan’s answers weren’t clicking. It was too easy for Jimmy to ask questions. Calling the roll of the dead. Allan kept seeing the old tortured visual image he’d carried for the past two years. It was an image of mangled bodies lying at the foot of the deep precipice. An image of men falling, as if slipping off the side of a sinking ship. An image of uniforms decaying under the swirl of snow; the whipping wind, the torrents of rain, the blistering sun.
“I know what you’re thinkin’, Captain,” Jimmy said very quietly. “Gosh-ding-it, if we hadn’t seen those first few, we wouldn’t be too sure about these.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe these is nothin’ but voices, still echoin’.” Jimmy gave an audible gulp at the thought. “But how do we know, we’re gittin’ nothin’ but voices, now. We can’t even hear ‘em walk. How do we know?”
CHAPTER XIII
Allan agreed that they needed to be seen. He was especially anxious to see some of the ten he had shot down. And above all, he hoped to get one of these men aside and find out what the score was before he revealed himself to the whole crowd.
“I don’t blame you,” Jimmy said. “No tellin’ how they may feel toward their excaptain—especially those you shot.”
“I don’t expect to be popular.”
“They may pounce on you like a pack of wolves. But you’re the captain. And I notice you still carry your pistol handy.”
Allan had been careful to arm himself and Jimmy with a little pintsized artillery; but he wasn’t placing much store by his firearms. He didn’t know whether they would have any value whatsoever in this region.
“We’ve got to get onto the rules, Jimmy,” he said. “If we can bump into Doc Pakkerman, I might get the dope from him as easy as anyone. He had a blunt way about him. His brain had taken a jolt somewhere along the line. But he had flashes of being smarter than any of us. Do you remember Doc?”
“Do I remember Doc!” Jimmy waxed enthusiastic, and Allan had to hush him. Doc Pakkerman had once been Jimmy’s Maple. City hero, and he whispered to Allan the story of how he had been wishing he could carry on for Doc the night he had bumped into the mayor and the Yippee Girl. “Gosh, if we can git Doc on our side, he’ll give us a key to the city.”
“This way,” Allan said, leading on into the darkness. He was determined that there must be a way to the avenue of voices. The dimly reflected light showed ridges of dark green floor stones back down the trail, and he heard Jimmy muttering to himself that that was the way back to the Old Man’s Hand.
“Stay with me and we won’t get lost,” Allan said with exaggerated confidence. “Here, this leads up.”
“I’ve found a path over here, Captain.”
“This way, Jimmy.” Then Allan stopped. “Bum steer. Dead end. S-ssh! More voices coming. I’ll go back where I was. Coming, Jimmy?”
“Huh? What’d you say? Where are you?”
Jimmy’s call sounded faint, as if through a partition of thin stone. Allan couldn’t respond at once, for there were other voices moving close, as before. No steps, but approaching voice. Voices out of the black recesses somewhere overhead. They were passing. They gradually faded into meaningless echoes.
“Do we dare light a light, Cap?”
That was Jimmy’s voice again!
“Where are you?” Allan had an uncomfortable hunch that Jimmy was somewhere above him. The voice was close, yet Jimmy had certainly gone the other way. Allan reached for his cigaret lighter. Instead, he found a forgotten packet of matches. “Where are you?”
“Cap, I’ve got a feeling this floor is moving. Where are you?”
“Right where I was. Jimmy! Where are you going? You’re fading! Are you up there in the shadows?”
“Don’t walk out on me Captain.
I’m sittin’ right here . . . Or am I movin? Jimmy’s voice trailed off. Allan barely caught the last faint call. “Hellooo-o-o-o-o-o!”
Then Jimmy was gone.
Allan had lost three matches trying to strike a light. Now he succeeded. He caught a glimpse of the green and black walls of stone close around him. Some four or five feet above his head was a niche in the perpendicular wall large enough that a child might have crawled through. Allan clambered upward. His light went out. He struck another, regained his footing, then caught a hand over the edge of the opening so that he could chin himself, then hooked his elbows on another edge. Thus suspended for a moment, he ceased to breathe long enough to listen.
“Whisssssh!”
It was a sound so faint that he compared it to a kitten’s breathing. A continuous, smooth, gliding sound. He thought of liquid flowing. Of sand sifting. Of a serpent crawling. That faint “whisssh” of some sort just beyond the range of his vision. The match flickered out. Hanging on with one arm, he managed to light a third match. He tossed it into the keg-sized opening.
At the same moment, he heard voices approaching. Two men—his men. One of the names came to him instantly. Lieutenant Sully! He had shot Sully! Two years ago.
It was Sully’s voice—he’d have known it among a million voices. Loud, with the scratchy quality of sandpaper, and with unusual range—that was the voice of Sully. Capable of grating on the nerves in low register, or of renting the air with a screech.
The approaching men must have seen the light the instant he tossed it through the break in the stone. On impulse, he reached through the opening, intending to slap out the blaze.
He slapped, but missed. The light was moving away. His hand lifted up over the edge of rock and out of the range of his vision, came down upon a flat, cool surface that was moving!
Instantly he envisioned the structure as a moving sidewalk, or better, a long conveyor belt which served as a mode of transportation.
Instantly he realized that Jimmy had ridden away on this belt without knowing what was up. In the dark Jimmy had somehow found his way onto it. Wherever this tunnel with the moving floor should lead, that was where Jimmy would go!
In less than the time required by a match to burn itself out, Allan, had caught the implications of his discovery, sight unseen. At the same time, he had reared up on one elbow his feet dangling, and had reached through as far as he could, trying blindly to beat out the light of the match. Unfortunately, it had already glided out of reach; and its light was probably just enough to warn the approaching men that here was something very unusual in their smooth flowing world.
Instead of voices, Allan heard the lively whiz of a rope. Snap! A loop fell over his extended arm. He jerked back, but the line tightened on his wrist.
He pulled back with such violence that the unseen man on the other end of the rope must have been jerked off his feet. There was a quick fight for slack. A quick, hard tug-of-war. The advantages were with the man who had tossed the loop. The rope pulled through with a determination that would have done justice to a locomotive.
The slack was gone. Allan was caught. Moreover, his captor must have hooked the line onto the moving sidewalk, for Allan suddenly knew that this blind tug-of-war wasn’t man against man. In another split second his arm would have been jerked out its socket.
He gave a sideward swing of his caught wrist. The relentless tug was fed the last possible inch of rope just as it cut along over the rough edge of stone. A crude knife, that stone! But it shredded the rope in the nick of time. The strands broke, and Allan fell back.
It was the fall, then, that was his undoing! He struck his head.
Scrambling to his feet in the semidarkness, he spun dizzily. He had taken a thudding blow on the side of the head. He was reeling, fainting.
The footsteps were pattering like a race of overgrown rats. The men were running back to a passage that led down to his level. He caught the glint of white uniformed shoulders. Their voices seemed to press down upon him even before the hands seized him. It was Lieut
enant Sully’s sandpaper shriek of excitement. And the swinish grunt of Sully’s sidekick, Lieutenant Bandyworth, Allan groaned to remember his last encounter with these two men. Bullets through the hearts of each! Bullets, without which the mission would have been lost!
A flare of yellowish light blinded his eyes. He was reeling, almost fainting, clutching his head. But with the advantage of light, he regained partial control of himself. The faces of Sully and Bandyworth showed in the weird greenish light reflected from the walls. Bandy held the flashlight.
Allan’s left hand flew up in a gesture that demanded a halt! His right hand dived for his pistol.
At the same time Sully was shouting.
“Invaders, by the devil! Grab him there!”
They plunged toward Allan. His gun hand whipped into action fast enough to have frozen an ordinary assailant. He barked an order for them to freeze or he’d shoot. They didn’t freeze. He shot three times, and the blasts echoed in the walls like cannons. THWANG-WANG-WANG-wang-wang! The last wanging echoes were swallowed up in the grating laughter of Lieutenant Sully.
“Shoot, you devil! We’ve been shot before!”
Sully sliced the air with his rope, and the frayed end lashed Allan’s cheek. Allan flung his gun. Both men should have been doubling up on the floor with bullets in their bellies. But here was the screaming fact, cutting through his own mind like gunfire. These men were immune to bullets. Once they had fallen before his fire, but they wouldn’t fall a second time. Some power outside the realm of common knowledge had taken them in for protection.
They pounced on him, and Bandyworth swung the flaring light into his eyes, so that he didn’t see the club-like weapon that Sully used to strike him down.
He crumpled in pain. As the blackness swept in upon his ebbing consciousness, he heard Sully say, “Well, by the gods of Bunjojop, if it isn’t that damned captain that gave me a lungful of lead! Look Bandy! This is rich! This is pickin’s! The Scravvzek’ll have a holiday over this. This is what I’d call—”
And then Allan fell off into a faint that spared him further words of mockery.
CHAPTER XIV
The abrupt disappearance of the Yippee Girl, following her performance at Maple City, U.S.A., made plentiful headlines over the continent of North America.
“WHERE IS YIPPEE GIRL?” the newspapers blazed.
“RUMOR YIPPEE KIDNAPPED.”
“REPORT YIPPEE FLIGHT TO AFRICA.”
The first day’s headlines were the worst, and the reader who tried to follow them with any geographical logic would have circumnavigated the globe two or three times at one sitting. Yippee was believed to have departed for South America. For Paris. For the Cape of Good Hope. For Sidney. For the North Pole or the South!
Yippee was believed also to have been victimized by thugs in the city of Chicago; in Maple City; in Jacksonville; in Havana.
Then came the more optimistic headlines—the next morning.
Yippee had not been murdered. She had not been kidnapped. She bad eloped. That is, it had been suggested by usually reliable sources that she may have eloped.
“RUMOR YIPPEE ELOPES WITH EX-CAPTAIN.”
“HINTS YIP PEE ELOPED WITH BLIND DATE.”
Some of the papers, however, applied more imagination to the possibilities, and suggested that rumors were being checked regarding her elopement with the mayor of Maple City, with the president of the chamber of commerce, with a petty thief, with a prominent state governor. Columnists threw in Kilroy and the Statue of Liberty for good measure. Then—
“YIPPEE LAST SEEN AT PARTY WITH MAPLE CITY ‘BOYS’.”
The mayor of Maple City was already squirming before that headline appeared. With this fresh turn of rumors, however, he began to dodge and leap about as if expecting momentarily to he struck by lightning. The “boys” must be protected at all costs. He didn’t care to have their activities tossed about in the limelight.
“I’ll get my hands on this newspaper story and see that it turns in the right direction,” he promised the “boys.”
“Then you’d better act fast. The public gets stirred up easy, you know,” one of his cronies advised.
“I’ve got the trick that will quiet them long enough to let me dig into a certain angle.” He reached for his telephone and called for the city editor. Then— “Joe? Mayor Channing. Listen, Joe. Why don’t you fire your half-witted reporter and take your facts from me. This disappearance of Yippee is a cooked-up publicity gag. What else could it be? . . . Of course, I know what I’m talking about. Wasn’t I with her the night before? . . . Sure, I know you want a more exciting angle, but—but—”
“Don’t let him outtalk you, boss.” The mayor was getting plenty of advice from the sidelines.
“But that’s my angle.” The mayor managed to say. “I know Madam Lasanda talked with Burgess shortly before he took off. That’s my angle . . . How did I know it? How?”
“Tell him you read it in the papers, boss,” came from the sidelines.
“I read it in the papers, Joe . . . Well, don’t fire your half-witted reporter, then. But let me handle this Madam Lasanda thing . . . Why? Because I’ve got her on the spot already . . . This license deal . . . No, I’ll take care of it personally.”
A few minutes later he called his secretary at the city hall. “I want you to phone to Madam Lasanda, the fortune teller, and ‘invite’ her to appear at my office in an hour. She is about to be granted a personal interview with the mayor. Tell her that, and try not to sound too sarcastic about it.”
Five minutes later the secretary called back.
“Mr. Channing? Madam Lasanda said she wasn’t in the mood for an interview, thank you. She’s very busy with clients.”
“Busy, is she? Call back and tell her this is a matter of business and it’s urgent.”
“I told her that, Mr. Channing.”
“Ugh? What did she say?”
“She said that unless it was a court order or an arrest, she wasn’t obliged to come. She’s going to lose her license, so she’s making hay while the sun shines. Her time is for clients only.”
“Ugh! Uhmtn.” The mayor waved his cronies away from the phone. “All right, damn it. Make an appointment for me. I’ll go to see her, as a client.”
CHAPTER XV
The mayor forgot the lines he rehearsed for Madam Lasanda’s benefit as soon as he entered her darkened room. The bright jewels in the Oriental mosques around the wall fairly leaped out at him. And before he had gotten used to them, the low rhythmic blaze of Ksentajaiboa was before him. The little Egyptian fire tender waved his arm—it seemed to the mayor that each time he hesitated for the right word, the little fellow waved. Like a director waving his baton at a lagging musician.
“Madam Lasanda, as I was saying—”
“Please make yourself comfortable, Mayor Channing.”
“Comfortable, huh I As I was saying—”
“Would you care for a cup of tea?”
“Tea?”
“Many clients enjoy tea while we talk.”
“Oh, the devil. All right, tea.”
Mayor Channing was forced to admit to himself that the pictures of Madam Lasanda didn’t do her justice. The color photo of her that adorned the wall of the most popular photographic studio had attracted a great deal of comment. And the mayor recalled that he had always stolen a glance at it when passing. But the luscious colors that now played over her face, as the flame waved before her, were something to see. The sight of her, looking at him out of her deep shining dark eyes, gave him a strange physical sensation.
He accepted the tea from her servant, who disappeared behind the red velvet portieres, and then he faced her. He gave a determined thrust to his jaw.
“As a fortune teller, you can no doubt answer any question I ask.”
“You flatter me, Mayor Channing.” She gave a casual smile. “With the ax hovering over my license, you still believe my talent capable of reaching for the unknown.”
; “No flattery intended.” He reached for his billfold. She lifted a finger to restrain him.
“What is your question?”
The mayor cleared his throat. “Where is Yippee?”
She tilted her head back, so that the smile from her eyes appeared to play over him indulgently. She nodded slowly.
“All the newspapers in the country are burning up to know. The entertainment agencies are buzzing like mad hornets to find out what’s happened.
It’s the million dollar question, Mr. Mayor.”
Again the mayor reached for his billfold, and again the flick of a finger stopped him.
“Ah, but you get your answer free! Where is Yippee? At this moment—” Madam Lasanda hesitated to let her eyes dwell pleasantly on the busy fire tender, long enough to exchange a secret smile—“she is in the heart of Africa.”
“The heart. Umm. Kind of indefinite.”
“Where the waterways of the sea meet the towers of the sky.”
“Umm. From the sea to the mountain, huh? Do I find that on the map?”
The response was a raised eyebrow. Then a slight shrug. Then—“Look for the Zamtolor region . . . The little mining village of Bunjojop.” Above the lake . . . Beneath the eye.”
“The eye—e—ye—eye?”
“Aye,” she nodded with a faint smile.
The mayor jotted the information in his notebook. “Er—there must have been a good reason for going to this particular place.”
After he had said it he was rather surprised at the tone of respect in his voice. The boys would have nudged each other if they had been here to see him drinking in these words from a fortune teller. Probably whole cloth. Still—
“The man she went with,” he added, “was a client of yours, I understand. Maybe you had something to do with sending them.”
Her answer was fascinating. “I am rather proud to say that I know how to choose my men.”
“Hmm?” He looked up at her from under his eyebrows, and saw that she was bestowing a very direct and intimate gaze upon him. He drew a deep breath. “You mean—”