Ghurst spoke with a barely perceptible lisp: “I am waiting only for the doctor to come to my terms.” He sent a glance at Dr. Leonard that would have made a less conceited man squirm.
Dr. Leonard cleared his throat. “Really no affair of yours, Haas,” he said shortly. “I am very busy at present. Suppose you drop in tomorrow morning.”
Haas sighed. “I tried to see you this morning about your order for supplies for the sanitarium but then, too, you were busy. So tonight I came. And you will be storming because maybe we will have a late delivery this time. But if you are busy—”
Dr. Leonard swelled importantly as he turned to A.H. Ghurst. “I am anxious to have a bust of myself in the main corridor of the sanitarium.” He coughed. “You see, as the founder, I thought it would be the very thing—”
Ghurst was smiling a supercilious smile. The doctor’s vanity was no secret to him, and he seemed confident that if he held out long enough he could get any price he asked.
Hans Haas breathed a hoarse word that sounded like an oath. He turned abruptly and ducked through the doorway. Agent X was forced to press close to the portieres to avoid being seen.
A moment later when X quitted the doctor’s apartment intending to follow Haas, the manufacturing chemist had disappeared around a turn in the corridor. At that moment a cry, that mingled terror and agony in one discordant shriek, echoed throughout the sanitarium.
Blood in the Agent’s arteries surged like a powerful, driving tide. The cry of a fellow-man racked with excruciating pain was something that he had never allowed to go unheeded. Throwing caution to the wind, he sprang down the corridor. Haas had disappeared. Coming toward the Agent, her face a troubled, pale mask, was the sanitarium secretary. Two orderlies, heading for the stair, turned as a single man and looked toward X, then up toward the second floor from whence the cry had come.
X raced the length of the hall and would have mounted the stairs, but at that moment the secretary shrilled: “Stop him!”
The two orderlies threw themselves in front of the Agent, cutting off his advance. Other hospital attendants were swarming from rooms. The secretary came up, panting. “Watch that man! He asked for Mr. Jerrico, but I saw him leaving Dr. Leonard’s apartment not a moment ago—”
Again the cry of agony keened through the building. A doctor, who evidently held a position of some authority, started up the steps. “Hold that man!” he ordered crisply, glancing at X. “Let no one come up those steps. I—I don’t like this at all.”
Unexpectedly, X twisted from the grasp of the orderlies. Other attendants massed in front of the stairs. But this was exactly what the Agent had expected them to do. Instantly, he pivoted and raced down the hall in the opposite direction to disappear through a door that had an opaque glass window.
The cry of that tormented creature on the second floor sounded even in Dr. Leonard’s sanctum. At first, he was tempted to ignore it entirely, so engrossed was he with the arrangements with Mr. Ghurst. But as the sounds about him indicated that pandemonium had broken loose in the sanitarium he was roused from his chair. “Unearthly noise, Ghurst, old man,” he said, scowling at the sculptor. “Have all the patients frightened out of their wits. I don’t see why—”
A man plunged through the doorway of Leonard’s living room, sending the portieres billowing into the room. He pulled up sharply, on seeing Ghurst and smoothed thin, gray hairs at his temples with the palms of his hands. He blinked nervously with first one eye, then the other.
“Leonard,” he said, his fine, well-formed lips scarcely moving, “what kind of an establishment are you running here? A madhouse?” He flung his black felt hat at a chair and strode across the room to seize Dr. Leonard’s hand which he pumped with a furious display of energy.
Dr. Leonard’s white teeth gleamed above his black beard. “Theodore Mulkin!” he exclaimed joyfully. “You’re just in time. You’ve met Ghurst, haven’t you? He’s to do a bust—”
The phone on Dr. Leonard’s table jangled. He cursed it, shook his hand free from Mulkin’s and picked up the instrument. “The director speaking,” he said importantly. Then as he listened, his brow took on the appearance of a thundercloud, “Jerrico!” he exclaimed. “Why—why that’s impossible. I, myself, have been in charge of Mr. Jerrico’s treatment. He simply can’t have had a relapse…. Oh, then he’s not sick.”
A look of relief crossed the doctor’s face, to be instantly supplanted by a cloud of worry. He slammed the receiver into place and stamped across the living room to the door of his private elevator communicating with the second floor.
“Something’s happened to one of the patients,” he explained briefly.
“Is that the cause of the riot?” demanded Mulkin. “Whole place looks like a madhouse.” He strode across the room to the elevator and thrust himself in behind Dr. Leonard. Ghurst got languidly from his chair and followed without invitation. The doctor slammed the door and the little car shot upward.
ON leaving the car at the second floor, Ghurst’s slender, aesthetic fingers seized Dr. Leonard’s arm. “That screaming. Can’t you do something about it? It’s—it’s begun to unnerve me!”
Dr. Leonard cursed, shook off the sculptor, and took three strides to the right of the elevator shaft. Doctors, nurses, orderlies, and half-dressed patients were running in all directions. Dr. Leonard pivoted and crashed into Theodore Mulkin. The screaming seemed to be coming from the opposite direction.
“Room Ten!” shouted a patient. “There’s a doctor in there trying to do something with it. It’s a madman, I tell you. A raving lunatic. I’ll not stay here another minute!”
Vain and pompous, Dr. Leonard may have been, but he showed no lack of his sense of organization in this emergency. As he hurried toward Room Ten, his two companions at his heels, he issued orders that stung like the lash of a whip. Nurses sprang to restore order among terrified patients. An orderly was dispatched to bring Dr. Wall, the chief surgeon, to the scene. Orderlies were marshaled at the head of the stairs to keep anyone from the floor below, from coming up.
As Leonard gained the door of Room Ten, he stopped. Lunging blindly, like a maddened beast, a man came from the room. His head was half hidden in a fuming cloud of gray that seemed to emanate from his face. There were no eyes at all in his hideous face, only blind, streaming pits where the eyes had been. With a hoarse bellow, the man threw himself across the hall until his lowered head struck the wall. He recoiled, fell flat to his back where he writhed in mortal agony.
Like pale, silent ghosts, men in white rimmed the tortured figure and stared helplessly at the victim’s face. The face was a featureless, scalded pulp.
“Good lord!” Dr. Leonard whispered helplessly. “His face—it—it’s going—going away.”
A doctor, evidently fresh from the surgery, broke through the throng. He still wore his surgeon’s smock, gauze mask, and rubber gloves. He took one look at the blind, tormented creature on the floor and then wheeled on Dr. Leonard. “For the love of heaven give him something to stop that pain!”
Leonard came out of his horror trance. He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a flat, leather case. His trembling fingers thrust the case into the masked doctor’s hand, “Hurry, Dr. Wall. That pain may kill him!”
Standing close beside Dr. Leonard, blinking first one eye and then the other, Theodore Mulkin asked: “Who is it? Or who was it?”
“Surely not Jerrico!” gasped Ghurst. “This—this thing hasn’t any face. It’s—it’s—” And the sculptor, overcome with nausea, turned and plunged back through the crowd.
The masked surgeon worked quickly, opening Leonard’s small medical kit and extracting a hypodermic syringe and a bottle of drug. Taking the stopper of the bottle between thumb and forefinger, he pulled it out and inserted the end of the syringe. Over the top of his gauze mask, his eyes watched unflinchingly the hideous metamorphosis that was taking place on the face of the man on the floor. Flesh became jelly and slid away revealing the blue-white of livi
ng bone tissue. It wasn’t a face then. Just a screaming skull.
A long, crackling sob. Then utter silence. The faceless man on the floor lay perfectly still except for the final nervous quiver of muscles. No one spoke. The hypodermic syringe dropped from the fingers of the masked doctor and tinkled to the floor. “Too late,” he whispered.
“You—you mean he’s dead?” gasped Theodore Mulkin.
“As if a thing like that could live!” exclaimed another.
Dr. Leonard said nothing. His dark eyes were fixed on the masked face of Dr. Wall, and on his brow was a scowl like a thunder-cap. “Dr. Wall,” he muttered softly.
The masked doctor raised his head. “Yes?”
“Dr. Wall,” Leonard repeated, as though the name held some fascination for him. “Dr. Wall, what did you do to Mr. Jerrico?”
The surgeon stood up and faced Dr. Leonard squarely. “Dr. Leonard,” he said evenly, “you are not yourself tonight. I understand and forgive you.”
Leonard laughed harshly. “Forgive me? You are not yourself tonight, Dr. Wall. You’re not a doctor at all, in fact! Dr. Wall would have drawn the cork of that drug flask with the crook of his little finger as any other medical man would have in order to have the other fingers of his right hand free. Dr. Wall, eh? You’re a murderer, that’s what you are!” Dr. Leonard’s two hands came up quickly. His fingernails dug into the gauze that covered the lower part of the man’s face and snatched the mask away.
Beneath were the well-formed features of the young man who had entered the building under the pretense of seeing George Jerrico—the gray-eyed man who was Secret Agent X.
Chapter II
SECTOR 12—ZONE 3
WHEN, because of interference on the part of members of the sanitarium staff, X found himself unable to get to the scene of the crime, he had resorted to a simple disguise that required no more elaborate preparation than slipping into a smock and putting a gauze mask over his features. There had been no time for applying make-up materials.
Now, the Agent found himself surrounded and backed to the wall. Dr. Leonard and Theodore Mulkin were both formidable foes. They were ranged upon either side of the Agent, the former scowling like a storm-cloud, the latter blinking first one eye and then the other. Half a dozen male members of the staff formed a semicircle about Leonard and Mulkin, and there was not a single pair of eyes that did not accuse Agent X of the ghastly death of George Jerrico.
But despite the odds against him, Agent X knew that escape was not impossible. A shot from his gas pistol, aimed at the center of his guards would have rendered the most of them helpless.
But such a move would have excited so much suspicion that further investigation might have been impossible.
“Look here, my man, I demand to know who you are and what your business is!” roared Dr. Leonard, giving the Agent’s arm a vigorous shake.
“I’m a reporter,” replied X immediately. “Collins from the Herald. I came here to get a story about the bust of Dr. Leonard that Mr. Ghurst is going to make to stand in the corridor of the sanitarium.”
Dr. Leonard coughed, “Well, now, young man that’s quite another thing. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
Somewhere in the background, X heard Ghurst’s sneering laugh.
Mulkin still retained his hold on the Agent’s arm and regarded him steadily through shrewd eyes. “Did you think it necessary to impersonate a surgeon in order to get to see Dr. Leonard?” he asked.
“That’s beside the point,” said X. “When I heard all the noise and screaming up here, I thought that here might be a bigger story than I had originally come to get. There was no other way to gain admittance to the second floor except in the garb of a member of the staff.”
“That’s very logical.” Dr. Leonard nodded wisely. “But you see now, this really can’t get into the papers. It will be badly misconstrued by everyone. The reputation of the sanitarium will be ruined. As a matter of fact, I don’t even want the police to get wind of—” Leonard stopped. He moistened his lips and looked the picture of embarrassment.
The ring of orderlies around X fell back. There, standing near the corpse, was the secretary of the sanitarium. She was very pale but very firm. Beside her were two stalwart police. The secretary pointed an accusing finger at Agent X. “Arrest that man,” she demanded. “I heard him say he wanted to see Mr. Jerrico. And that wasn’t more than five minutes before Mr. Jerrico—Mr. Jerrico—” She sent a shuddering glance at the faceless corpse.
The eyes of Agent X were not on the police that the secretary had called in. He was staring at the hand of the man who had been Mr. Jerrico. A pudgy thumb and forefinger were pinching a small block of gaily-colored wood such as might be found in a child’s nursery. A child’s block in the hands of a corpse. It was absolutely incongruous.
X knew that there were a few patients in the sanitarium that were mentally unbalanced and might have sought the amusement of childhood. But certainly the wealthy Mr. Jerrico had not been one of these.
Suddenly, a startled cry burst from the lips of A.H. Ghurst: “There’s a woman back of the desk here. She’s been hurt. She’s just coming to.”
DR. LEONARD and one of the police hurried up the hall to join Ghurst who had pushed the desk to one side and was kneeling beside Nurse Vine. The other policeman had taken charge of Agent X.
“You’ll come along with me,” ordered the policeman as he took hold of the Agent’s arm. “I’ve got questions to ask you.” Then he called to his colleague: “Bring the nurse into Room Ten. She’ll be able to identify this man if he’s the one who knocked her out.”
Nurse Vine, leaning on the arm of Ghurst and accompanied by the other policeman and Dr. Leonard, followed X into Room Ten. There X was forced into a chair. He looked calmly about at the faces of his inquisitors. Dr. Leonard looked sternly majestic. Mulkin constantly stroked his gray temples with the palms of his hands. Nurse Vine had been helped into a chair. She touched her bruised throat gingerly with the tips of her fingers.
“Now, lady,” began one of the police, “you tell us the whole story. This the man that knocked you out?”
Nurse Vine shook her head and shuddered. “Goodness no! It was the patient in Room Sixteen. The amnesia patient, you know, Dr. Leonard. He came from his room, asked me about Mr. Jerrico, then when I said I was going to call you, Dr. Leonard, he tried to strangle me.”
Dr. Leonard went over to Nurse Vine’s chair and put his hand on her shoulder. He scowled darkly into her face. “Nurse,” he said sternly, “that’s a lie and you know it. The patient in Room Sixteen is unable to move from his bed. His leg is fractured. And he certainly would not remember the name of Mr. Jerrico if he cannot remember his own name.”
Nurse Vine flushed. “It was the patient in Room Sixteen. I tell you it couldn’t have been anyone else! His head and face were completely covered with bandages and I watched him come out of that room.”
“Look here, Leonard,” said Theodore Mulkin, “maybe there’s something to what she says. I’ve heard of people trying to fake amnesia before—”
Dr. Leonard swung around. “What are you insinuating, Mulkin? You do not seem to realize who I am and what I have accomplished in medical and psychological research.”
“Don’t get hot under the collar,” one of the police intervened. “You can settle the whole argument by letting us have a look at the patient in Room Sixteen. If his leg is broken, then we’ll know the nurse here is making up a bedtime story. If it isn’t broken, we’ll know you’re the liar.”
Dr. Leonard drew himself up indignantly. “You’ll not pass the door of Room Sixteen, officer. Such a visitation would be detrimental to the health of my patient and I cannot permit it. Furthermore, I consider your conduct toward me insulting. Doubting my word—” He tapped his barrel of a chest significantly.
The two police looked at one another. Neither one cared to take the responsibility of breaking into Room Sixteen and perhaps endangering the life of the patient
within.
“We’ll just wait until Inspector Burks arrives,” one of the cops decided. He turned suddenly and poked a finger at Agent X who had risen to his feet. “You sit down. We’re not through with you yet.”
X shrugged and smiled. “I just wanted to get a cigarette out of my pocket. I’d like to smoke.” His long fingers extended into the side pocket of his coat and extracted a package of cigarettes. He shook one out and put it to his lips. “May I trouble some one for a light?” he asked pleasantly.
MULKIN flipped a lighter and held the flame for the Agent. A close observer would have noticed that the Agent’s eyes were upon the door of the room rather than the lighter in Mulkin’s hand.
“Thanks,” X murmured, after a grateful puff. Then holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, he crushed it, and at the same time he flipped it into the corner of the room.
Immediately, a dense cloud of black smoke hissed from the cigarette. All eyes turned upon it and saw the black screen billowing across the room. Through the smoke, a shadow moved. A policeman shouted:
“Watch the door. He’s trying to get out!”
Mulkin and Dr. Leonard sprang forward and bumped into each other. A policeman grappled with a man, only to discover that his captive was Mr. Ghurst. The smoke continued to spread, blocking out light and filling the hall with its dense clouds. And all the while the gray-eyed young man who was Secret Agent X was walking unhurried down the length of the first floor corridor, clutching in his hand a gaily-colored nursery block which he had snatched from the hand of the skull-faced corpse of George Jerrico.
It was an innocent little article, that wooden block. A simple inch and a half cube, bearing printed pictures of Rover at play, a soldier in green outline, a train, a sailboat, the numeral two, and a red letter “G”. It might mean little or much. The Agent was absolutely convinced of one thing: that some secret of vital importance to the solution of the mysterious death of Jerrico, lay behind the door of Room Sixteen, but he would require help if he were to carry out his plan of investigation.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 33