Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6

by G. T. Fleming-Roberts

  “The wood blocks left in the hands of the victims—were they a sort of insignia used by the original Ghost society?”

  The killer nodded his hideous head. “Exactly. Sometimes in their criminal jobs they adopted disguises. The toy blocks were used for identification. ‘G’ was for George Jerrico, ‘H’ was for Henri Raybon, ‘O’ for Oliver Pontius, ‘S’ for Sam Horn, ‘T’ for Tom Warwick. The final ‘S’ stood for Sara Clara, the only woman in the society.”

  X knew that his deductions were absolutely correct up to that point. And he knew who the killer was, mask or no mask. But how was that to help Betty Dale? He asked hesitatingly: “And the woman, what was her name? Did you treat her the same way as you did the other Ghosts?”

  THE Faceless Man did not answer. At that moment he was replacing his bandage-fashioned helmet and connecting the wires which operated the acid-releasing valves. “My dear doctor,” he said mockingly, “in order that you may get an idea of what your face will look like when I am through with it, I have three excellent specimens of my handiwork.” The Faceless Man, his headgear back in place, went to a large folding door and pushed it wide open. The room beyond was dark. He pressed a switch.

  A startled, horrified gasp from the Agent. Never had he seen a more revolting tableau. Chained to the wall of the room, side by side as they must have died, were three eyeless, skull-faced bodies.

  Frash pointed with a yellow forefinger. “On your right, your thieving brother and former member of the Ghosts. Next to him, the little slip of a girl who had such a pretty face, was Ann Dryden, Ghurst’s model who would have helped him blackmail me. Next to her, the woman with the hennaed hair—”

  Agent X sprang to his feet and staggered toward Frash. His teeth were grinding. Speech was impossible. For that poor limp form with the bedraggled hennaed hair must have once been Betty Dale!

  The Faceless Man turned his eyes on the Agent. “Softly, Dr. Pontius, I am looking at you, and mine are the eyes that kill.”

  The Agent’s haggard eyes wandered about the room. For a moment, nothing seemed to matter. With Betty gone, his life and work seemed all emptiness. Even vengeance on the fiend who stood before him seemed hardly worth the effort.

  Frash advanced, his unwholesome, killing eyes fastened on the Agent’s face. X gave ground steadily until his finger tips touched the top of the acid vat. Then suddenly hope flickered within him.

  Justice! His duty toward mankind must bring Frash to justice. If he had failed Betty Dale he must not fail the innocent people of the city. Even though the Ghosts were dead, who knew where the killer’s murder march would end.

  X lifted his hands slightly. His fingers crawled over the edge of the vat. He lowered his hands slowly into the corrosive acid.

  “You’re bound for the electric chair, Frash,” he said quietly. There was no indication on his face of what his hands were doing. “In the studio of A.H. Ghurst, there is an original plaster cast Ghurst used in fashioning your mask. That studio is surrounded by private detectives at this moment. They will not fail to find that mask. They will know who you are.”

  “Oh, not at all. Before I killed her, I forced the secret of the location of the plaster mask from Ann Dryden. I filched the mask from under the very nose of a detective who was accusing Hans Haas of the Faceless Murders. Nobody will ever know who I actually am.”

  The Agent’s hands were covered up beyond his wrists in the acid. His face was an expressionless mask. “Do you think that I have not discovered who you are? Mask or no mask, I could pick you from a thousand men. During the past two weeks I have collected every scrap of evidence I need.”

  “During the past two weeks? I was under the impression that when I ran you down with my car you were confined to a sanitarium. You were suffering with amnesia.”

  X laughed harshly. “A lapse of memory is one thing that has never troubled Secret Agent X.”

  “Secret Agent X!” Frash gasped, “Secret Agent—”

  AT that moment, the Agent jerked his hands apart. The acid in the vat had eaten through the rope. The flesh of his hands remained undamaged because of the film of plastic material which covered them.

  Hands outstretched, fingers dripping acid, he sprang straight at the killer. The man backed with incredible swiftness. X saw his eyelids close. Immediately, from the tops of the black glasses, twin streams of fuming acid spurted straight into the Agent’s face.

  X shook his head like a dog coming from the water. Plastic material had protected his face. The invisible glasses had protected his eyeballs. Where the acid touched his clothing, the cloth fell apart. But the rubber suit he wore beneath protected his body. He lurched forward, eyes burning with hatred.

  Baffled, despairing because of the failure of his powerful weapon, Frash turned, uttered a cry of fright, and sprang toward the door. But X was upon him. The killer, big as he was, cowered beneath the furious Agent. X threw him to the ground and yanked off the headgear of bandages. The hideous scarred face beneath was incapable of emotion, but the eyes showed fear. The Agent’s long fingers dug into the killer’s throat. Here was the man who had robbed him of the treasure dearest to him. There would be no mercy.

  “I’m killing you, Frash!” X ground out. “Just as I would crush a poisonous viper. I regret that you have only one life with which to pay the penalty for killing Betty Dale.”

  “Betty…. Dale,” came Frash’s strangled gasp. “The girl—who tried to impersonate—Mimi Clarice?”

  The Agent relaxed his grip somewhat. He lifted the killer’s head and beat it against the floor. “What have you done with her? Is she dead? Have you killed Betty Dale who impersonated Mimi Clarice?”

  “No-no,” stammered Frash. “She is in that closet over there. I knew at once she was not Mimi Clarice. It was later that I found the actress.”

  X was on his feet. For the moment, the killer was forgotten. He sprang across the room, his heart bounding with hope. He lifted the latch of the steel door and swung it back.

  “Betty, darling!” he gasped.

  That lovely figure was familiar to him if the face was not. The girl came from the darkness, eyes wide with surprise, lips smiling her gratitude. Suddenly, a look of anxiety crossed her face.

  “Look out!” she cried.

  X SWUNG around. A shot crashed like thunder in the basement room. X threw himself in front of the girl, taking the slug on his bullet-proof vest. Frash had found an automatic somewhere. X hurled Betty’s slender form back into the closet. He turned toward the killer. A bullet ripped through the leg of his trousers and smashed against the steel door behind him. Another shot pounded against the Agent’s bullet-proof vest.

  But in that immeasurable interval between the two shots, X had crossed the room. His right hand closed upon the killer’s gun wrist. He deflected the barrel, twisted the automatic from the man’s grasp, and hurled it to the floor. His left hand balled into a fist. He led a blow with all the strength that was in his well-conditioned body.

  His fist landed on a particularly sensitive nerve center just below Frash’s heart. The murderer stiffened, staggered back, and fell to the floor unconscious. X bound Frash’s hands and feet securely.

  Then he ran back to the closet and opened the door. He gathered Betty in his arms and held her head against him. He looked down at the hennaed hair and at Betty’s made-up features. “You did very well with your impersonation of Mimi Clarice, Betty,” he said gently. “But you gave me the fright of my life. It’s a dangerous game unless you know just how. And your hair, Betty—will that stuff ever come out?” He released her. His eyes were smiling happily.

  “It will wash out,” Betty said faintly. “Oh, I did want to help you. But two men kidnaped me and brought me here. That—that killer looked at me once and said I was the wrong one. I was kept a prisoner here—”

  “Never mind, Betty. Don’t think about it any longer.” X returned to where the bound killer was stretched on the floor. Betty followed him.

  “Who is he?�
�� the girl asked.

  “His real name is Frash, but he hid that hideous face beneath a mask that Ghurst made for him. As soon as I understood how his acid-shooting device worked, I knew who he was. A person must blink his eyes, you know, and as long as Frash wore that helmet of bandages he dared not blink both eyes at once unless he was ready to discharge the twin streams of acid. Blinking both eyes at once completed the circuit that released the acid.”

  X knelt beside Frash and searched the inside of the unconscious man’s coat. He pulled out a flexible rubber-like mask, perfectly tinted to resemble flesh.

  X smiled at Betty. “Recognize this? You see it was necessary for him to constantly practice blinking only one eye at a time to avoid shooting the acid when he did not want to. He carried this habit of winking a single eye at a time into the false life he lived when he wore this mask. Tell me, Betty, did you ever see Theodore Mulkin blink both eyes at once?”

  “Mulkin!” Betty exclaimed. “Then Mulkin is Frash the Forger. He must have worn that mask all the time.”

  X was busying himself about the room, putting mask and headgear beside the unconscious killer. Now that Betty was safe, he wanted Frash, or Mulkin, to live to meet the electric chair.

  “It was more than a mask he wore,” X explained. “He was a pretty good actor, too. It must have required every bit of his self-control to prevent him from giving himself away when he entered police headquarters and found Sam Horn in Commissioner Foster’s office. You see, I was impersonating Sam Horn. Mulkin must have known that because he had already killed Horn. Yet he pretended to be just as surprised at the hoax I pulled as any of the members of the police force.”

  X and Betty met with no resistance in leaving the basement which they learned was that of an east-side tenement. He put Betty in a cab, then re-entered the house. In one of the basement rooms, X found Dr. Leonard and Hans Haas. The two admitted having been taken prisoner by Mulkin and his underworld aids after they had left Ghurst’s studio.

  X took Hans Haas aside. The German chemist and ex-forger looked into the Agent’s face with his small, frightened eyes.

  “Mr. Haas,” X said kindly, “your past record as a criminal made me extremely suspicious of you from the beginning. And the fact that the killer used an acid which you might well have compounded—”

  Haas interrupted with a bob of his bristle-topped head. “That is right. It was my formula. It must have been Mulkin who stole it. I thought he was my friend, he came to see me so much. But who are you that you know so much about me?”

  X smiled. “That matters little. As far as I am concerned, you will henceforth be a perfect stranger to me. A man who has lived down an unsavory reputation deserves a great deal of credit. Your secret is safe with me.”

  As soon as X had called the police, he left the scene, telling Inspector Burks where to find the bound killer.

  From the window of her taxi, Betty Dale watched in vain for a glimpse of the man whose real face she had never seen but who had long ago won her heart. What new dangers faced him?

  As the taxi started, Betty heard a strange sound that seemed to come out of the cold morning air—an eerie, vibrant whistle, the musical signature of Secret Agent X. Betty smiled. The Man of the Thousand Faces was near, though she could not see him. Close to her always, his long, powerful arm ready to protect her.

  Subterranean Scourge

  Chapter I

  THE INVISIBLE LASH

  MIST of the night trailed its chilly veil across Long View Estate. It softened the jagged outline of Marcus Hyde’s mossy, stone mansion. It muffled all in eerie silence, and gave Watchman Thomas a fearful sense of uncertainty.

  Thomas walked down the drive that described serpentine curves from the house to the gate. His dangling electric lantern made long, scissoring shadows of his skinny legs. His narrow, stooped shoulders twitched nervously. His faded eyes darted this way and that, for there were shadows about him that the swinging light lent terrifying animation.

  “Funny things happen hereabout,” Thomas muttered huskily to himself. “The master ailin’ and growin’ white like a corpse. His eyes always wide and sort of empty. Not my business what he does at night. Still—”

  Thomas had reached the end of the drive. Keys tinkled frostily in his trembling fingers as he unlocked the gate. “Still,” he soliloquized, “I allow to make it my business. I’m not goin’ to work for a madman, even if he is a millionaire.” The watchman’s gnarled hand clutched at the rough stone of the gate-post, and he craned his neck to see out along the highway.

  A man approached on foot. His round-toed, yellow shoes stamped loudly. He was a bit above medium height. His body approached the contour of a barrel. A “U” of bristling gray mustache continually tickled his indescribable bulge of a nose.

  Thomas bobbed his head and shuffled his feet. “Good evening, Mr. Tetwilder.”

  “Evening? You call this evening?” Herman Tetwilder snorted. “Night I call it. And if it was evening, what would be good about it? You dragged me out of bed to—to what? Now that I’m here, what the devil do you want to show me?” Mr. Tetwilder gouged at the side of his nose with a knuckle.

  “It’s Mr. Hyde, sir,” replied Thomas in an awed whisper. “It ain’t right for him to do what he does at night. About this time, I’ve seen him go out of the house and take a walk all by hisself. A strange light in his eyes. Like a dead man lookin’ at you.”

  “Nonsense! Utter nonsense!” Herman Tetwilder entered the grounds and kicked at stones with his yellow shoes while Thomas closed the gate. Tetwilder thrust his hands into his trousers pockets. He wore no overcoat and his suit coat was unbuttoned, exposing a wool sweater-vest. “Still,” he added a little anxiously, “Hyde shouldn’t take walks on a night like this. A man with anemia chills easily they tell me.” Then he turned sharply to Thomas. “Well, lead off, my man. You know what you’re doing, I suppose. I don’t.”

  Thomas retraced his steps up the drive. Tetwilder followed in moody silence. Close within the deep shadows of the house, Thomas left the drive for the lawn. A large clump of shrubbery flanked the front entrance of the house. Behind the shrubs, Thomas stopped. Tetwilder collided with him, cursed.

  “Now, watch, sir. Just watch.” Thomas sent a shuddering glance up at the forbidding walls of the old house towering above them. “He’ll come out in a minute or so.”

  Three minutes passed in which Tetwilder fidgeted and grumbled imprecations beneath his breath.

  “Shsh,” Thomas cautioned. “He’s comin’ now.”

  TETWILDER craned his neck. Thomas looked out of the corner of his eye as though he wasn’t sure that he wanted to see. The front door opened and thumped dully as it closed. The man on the steps was gaunt and stiffly erect. So thin his face, so sunken his cheeks that it appeared as though the heavy shock of his silvery hair was sapping his strength.

  His eyes, protruding slightly, stared in glassy fixity at nothing—or perhaps at something beyond the ken of normal man. His body moved smoothly, without a hint of muscular effort, across the rolling lawn. The almost luminous whiteness of his flesh, and the purling mists about him, lent a ghostly aspect to this man who walked alone.

  Herman Tetwilder muttered an oath. He sprang from behind the shrubs. “Thought Marcus Hyde had better sense!”

  Thomas caught Tetwilder’s arm. “Hush. Didn’t you notice somethin’ queer—like as if that wasn’t really Mr. Hyde?”

  Tetwilder nodded vigorously. “I know what you mean. Walks like a man asleep. Does he do this every night?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Not every night. Least I haven’t seen him. But when he does go, it’s always the same way—out toward the cemetery. You think we ought to follow him?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Just look at him. Seems to know just where he’s going.”

  Indeed, Marcus Hyde walked like a man of indomitable purpose. He skirted flower beds, fountains, and pools, never stumbling or faltering.

  Tetwilder, though considerably younger tha
n Mr. Hyde, was having all kinds of difficulty in following. His yellow shoes seemed to have a magnetic attraction for everything that it was possible to stumble over. If Hyde was sleep-walking, then it was a miracle that Tetwilder’s frequent cursing did not awaken him.

  Suddenly, a cluster of dwarf pines rattled noisily, branches parted. A head and square shoulders jack-in-the-boxed from the evergreens.

  “Heaven preserve us!” Thomas whispered. He almost hugged Tetwilder in an effort to keep out of sight.

  “What—what—who the devil!” Tetwilder exploded. He turned, pushed Thomas, and, at the same time, grabbed the watchman’s electric lantern. He sent the electric beam at the man who was nonchalantly stepping from the cluster of evergreens.

  The prowler wore a wrinkled blue serge suit and a battered brown felt hat. His thin lips twisted and smacked in the punishment of chewing gum. His piercing, dark eyes stabbed unwaveringly at Tetwilder and the watchman.

  Irritated by the insolence of that stare, Tetwilder shook with fury. “Damn it, who are you!”

  The dark eyes squinted. The jaws chewed patiently. “I was here first,” he twanged nasally. “You tell me.” He pushed back his coat a little. A small nickeled detective’s badge gleamed in the lantern rays.

  Tetwilder gouged at his continually tickled nose with a large knuckle. He coughed. “Why—er, I’m Tetwilder, old friend of Mr. Hyde. Friend and neighbor. The watchman, here, will vouch for me. I’m free to go and come at Long View at any time.”

  “Okey,” said the detective easily. “I guess you’re genuine. Mr. Hyde spoke of you, Tetwilder. I’m Thornton Beem. The Beem Detective Agency. Mr. Hyde engaged me.”

  “Is that so, now? Well, what would Hyde want with a detective?”

  BEEM shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t make sense, but a fee is a fee. Mr. Hyde asked me to keep an eye on him, because he feared that he wasn’t quite himself at night.”