“I’m not sure,” Hyde whispered. He seemed looking through Agent X. “Sometimes I dream that I’ve been walking. That I go where all is silent. I don’t know exactly.”
“To the mausoleum in the center of the cemetery?” X prompted.
“I—perhaps,” Hyde whispered. “I remember that in my dream I go to a place where all is silent. And I grope through velvet blackness almost endless.”
X NODDED slowly. There was just a chance that Hyde was telling the truth. If ever the Agent had seen a perfect subject for hypnosis it was Marcus Hyde. Perhaps he had made those nightly trips under hypnotic influence. Then again, the man might be a clever liar.
“Night before last,” X continued, “you went to the mausoleum. You went to a crypt in the second section. The door of that crypt was open. Why did you close it?”
A low groan escaped Hyde’s lips. His eyes became a little more animated. “The terrible eyes!” he breathed. “I lost the key. That’s why I went to the mausoleum. I wanted to find the key I’d lost. The brass key. I saw the crypt open. There was a light inside. And there was a man. I thought perhaps it was the man with the terrible eyes, crouching in the crypt. It was my chance. I wanted to lock him in the crypt for ever and ever. Because his eyes do something to me. Haunt me—”
“Take it easy, Mr. Hyde,” X cautioned. “Nothing to get wrought up about. What’s so terrible about losing a key?”
“The man with the terrible eyes said I mustn’t lose it. If I lost it, I couldn’t get back in the mausoleum.”
X reached into his pocket and took out the key to the mausoleum which he had stolen from Hyde’s key ring. “Is this it?”
The old man’s face lighted. “Yes. Give it to me.”
X shook his head. “No. Do you really want to go back to the mausoleum?”
Hyde crouched as though he had been struck. “No—no. He frightens me. But he makes me come. I can’t help myself. That’s why I am afraid. He does something to me.”
“Did the man with the eyes ever hurt you?”
“Sometimes,” Hyde whispered, “he pricks my arm with a needle. That doesn’t hurt much.”
Agent X thought a while. Then: “Tell me this, My Hyde, if anything should happen to you, who would benefit by your will?”
Hyde did not answer at once. “This may seem strange to you, sergeant, but you see I have no children. I never married. I never had anyone to make a home for me. But if I had a wife or a daughter, I would like her to be just like Miss Barrie. Yes, my entire fortune goes to Della Barrie when I die. She has been most kind to me. Like a daughter.”
X stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Hyde. You’re pretty well worn out; I’ll not bother you further.”
“You’ll have him back in his sickbed again,” growled Tetwilder. “Don’t you police ever do anything but ask asinine questions?”
X STARTED toward the door. “Quite frequently, Mr. Tetwilder. Good day, gentlemen,”
As soon as he regained his car, X left Long View and drove straight to the house of Dr. Bently Simon, close by. As he pulled up in front of the house, a car shot from the drive and speeded toward the south. X had only a glimpse of the driver, but he was positive that the man was Carlos Carasco, the Herald feature writer. What could Carasco be doing way out here when it was only a few hours before his wedding with Della Barrie? A frown furrowed X’s forehead as he got out of the car and hurried across the lawn to the door of Dr. Bently Simon’s house.
X rattled the knocker impatiently. A few seconds later, the door opened a crack and X glimpsed a battered nose and narrow, shifty eyes.
“I want to see Dr. Simon.”
“Not here,” The man would have closed the door had it not been for the toe of the Agent’s shoe. X gave the door a powerful kick that carried the panel back and its ugly guardian with it. X sprang into the hall. The pocket of the tough’s shabby coat bulged with a gun. The Agent’s short left hook knocked an oath from the man’s mouth and sent him rolling. X snatched out his gas gun and strode to the fallen man. “Where’s Simon?” he lashed out.
“Right behind you,” whined the man.
X swung around. The man who sprang from the stairway wasn’t Simon, and the keen blade in his hand wasn’t a scalpel. X ducked a knife thrust, jabbed up with the barrel of his gun, and released the gas charge, at the same time holding his breath. The man with the knife fell heavily. But by that time, the guardian of the door was on his feet, and then on X’s back. X fell backwards, purposely.
He came down, the full weight of his body upon the man who grappled with him, driving the breath from his assailant’s lungs. X squirmed from the man’s shaky grip, and took a moment to knock the man over the head with his gas pistol. Then he sprang up the steps.
He went through the upstairs like a typhoon, turning order into chaos. Nothing. Positively not a hair of a clue. But why the two hoodlums downstairs? Somewhere, there must be an explanation. He yanked open one last door—that of a closet in the front bedroom. But as the door swung open, a familiar odor came to the Agent’s nostrils. It was something like the smell of fresh-cut balsam—the odor of spirit gum, to be more specific. To what possible purpose could a medical man put spirit gum, that gluey substance actors used in make-up work?
X pierced the gloom of the closet with his flashlight beam. The searching, yellow eye revealed a small, zipper bag. X kicked it out into the room and zipped it open. The smell of spirit gum was much stronger now. And suddenly, light of reasoning dispelled mystery. Inside the bag he found a monocle, a large, black brush of false whiskers, boxes of nose putty, grease paint, and spirit gum for attaching the beard.
The bag in his hand, Secret Agent X knew, held all that he would ever find of Dr. Bently Simon. For the learned doctor was a mere myth—an alias for the man X had just seen leaving the house. An alias for Carlos Carasco.
X ran down the steps, carrying the zipper bag in his hand. He sprang over the two unconscious men in the hall and entered the living room. He picked up the phone and dialed frantically.
“Let me speak to Mr. Hyde,” he rapped. Things were clearing up at a remarkable speed. Now he understood the purpose of Marcus Hyde’s trips to the mausoleum. And as he waited for Hyde to get to the phone, he was formulating plans to trap the master of the invisible death.
“Hello. Hyde?” X retained the voice of Sergeant Keegan. “Keegan speaking…. Sergeant Keegan. Listen, get out of the house at once. This is of vital importance. Go to the nearest airport and take a plane…. I don’t care where you go. Simply get in a plane and stay aloft for a couple of hours…. Well, if you must have it, your life is hanging by a thread. I don’t know what the invisible death is, but it will be less apt to reach you if you will get out of town at once. And one thing more—go out quietly. Don’t let a soul know you’re going. Got that? No, police protection wouldn’t help at all. You’ve got to clear out. We can’t shoot at something we can’t see.” Agent X hung up.
He glanced at his watch. It was just an hour until Carlos Carasco married Della Barrie. Perhaps just an hour before Della Barrie inherited a fabulous fortune from Marcus Hyde. For Hyde was marked for the invisible death. His visits to the mausoleum under hypnotic influence had been for the sole purpose of preparing him for the invisible death. He had been given sensitizing injections of something so that his system was keyed to the point where a final injection of that same something would produce anaphylactic shock—and instantaneous death.
X dropped into a chair and took out his make-up box. In his mind’s eye, the picture of Carlos Carasco formed. This must be a perfect impersonation. For Agent X was going to attend a wedding and assume a role he had never taken before. And as he laid his plan, detail by detail, he thought that for sheer, brazen daring, he had never conceived anything more surprising.
Chapter IX
THE LAST IMPERSONATION
IN the silent, infinite night through which she was living in the house of death, Betty Dale’s heart throbbed in her throat, stifled her. The
chill walls of the crypt seemed to press nearer and nearer until eventually they must crush her. Fear burned like fever in her brain and she imagined that the darkness was peopled with the corpses from other crypts, taunting her with ghostly laughter.
She had explored every inch of the walls with trembling fingers. Her small fists had beat upon the unyielding bronze seal. Then panic had come and she had shrieked like one gone mad. She had not been brought there by Agent X. Her old friend would never have asked her to do such a thing. She should have known better.
She dropped flat on the cold concrete, praying that suffocation would come before she became a raving maniac. At the moment she would have traded death on the rack for this death of awful confinement, slow strangulation, and blindness.
The very slightest of sounds. She raised her head. Another trick, perhaps, of nerves strained to the breaking point. No, there was a ray of light, coming from the stone slab at the back of the crypt. She watched, breathless. The stone dropped slowly. The light that filled the square was yellow, varying like the light of a moving lantern. Then a face was framed in the opening.
Wide-eyed with terror, Betty screamed. For the man who held the lantern was the most hideous person she had ever seen. His features were coarse, his head bald and scaly. In spite of his cadaverous looking flesh, every muscle of mouth, cheeks, and eyelids was alive, constantly twitching, until his face writhed itself into a ghoulish grimace.
“Come out, dearie,” he croaked. “You ain’t ready for the corpse shelf yet.”
Betty shrank back against the wall of the crypt, her eyes glued on that twitching face.
“Guess I’ll have to persuade you, dearie,” The man hung his lantern on a hook, extended himself through the secret opening in the crypt, and seized Betty’s ankle in his talonlike hand. “You want to be dragged?” he demanded.
“N-no. Wait. I’ll come.” Drawing a long, shuddering breath, Betty wormed her way back toward the opening. She stared down into a narrow, chimneylike shaft, walled with mossy bricks.
The man with the twitching face seized her arm and jerked her on to a narrow stairway of half-rotten wood. “Come along, dearie. Not many people alive today have seen this place, so take an eyeful. It’s been forgot years ago. First underground vault built around here. Of course, the boss has added some modern improvements. We got electric lights and everything.” He chuckled evilly as he dragged the terrified girl down the shaft to a narrow, stone-walled passage below.
The passage widened into an underground room that had once been the old vault. What might have once been crypts to hold coffins, were now glass covered niches in the stone walls. Betty stared in horror at the contents of one of these niches. Inside, the corpse of a man extended full length. Decay had commenced its conquest, yet the flesh seemed actually to be in motion.
A sensation of nausea passed over Betty. She closed her eyes and suffered herself to be dragged the length of the room. For that corpse behind the glass was teeming with a myriad of minute, living things. This was not the natural process of decomposition, she knew. Here, filth was cultured. Here, horrible, creeping things were nurtured on rotting human flesh.
“Open your eyes, Miss Dale.”
That was not the voice of the man with the twitching face. It was the voice of some one at least partly sane. Betty looked up. Her eyes scanned a figure in white. A gauze mask concealed his features.
“Look on your left, Miss Dale.” Betty stared through the heavy iron bars of a prisonlike door into a lighted cell beyond. There stood a tall, broad man who stared unemotionally in front of him. It was Harvey Bates.
“Is that man Secret Agent X?” the man in white asked.
Betty shook her head vigorously. “No, of course not.”
“You are positive.”
“Positive.” She wasn’t sure, of course. This might be X, impersonating Harvey Bates. But Betty was too loyal to run the risk of betraying her friend.
“Very well.” The man in white seized her arm. She gazed in terror at the hypodermic syringe in his hand. “I’m going to ask you that question again, later. Perhaps you will realize that it is wise to speak. At present—” the needle jabbed cruelly into her flesh—“I shall give you a sensitizing inoculation of what you call the ‘invisible death’ in your interesting newspaper stories.”
The man in white pushed Betty into the arms of the man with the twitching face. “Take her to the cells,” he directed.
THE knob, on the door of the office of the Thornton Beem Detective Agency, rattled. Thornton Beem lolled in his chair, watched the door through frigid eyes, and chewed gum. “Why don’t yah come in?” he demanded nasally.
The door burst open. A man staggered through the opening, stood for a moment, swaying, then collapsed across Thornton Beem’s desk. Beem, who wasn’t sufficiently human to be surprised, got out of his chair, took the man by the shoulders, and pulled him from the desk. He put him down in a chair and brushed a tangled mop of black hair from his visitor’s eyes.
“Hey, Carasco,” he said, “wake up.”
The newspaperman seemed to be completely exhausted. His gaping mouth slavered, his eyes rolled. “Scotch, Beem.”
Beem obliged by tilting a bottle to his visitor’s lips. The man swallowed gratefully. Almost at once, the liquor seemed to put starch in him. His lean face became animated. He rubbed a lumpy bruise on his forehead and groaned.
“Thought that you were getting married today,” Beem said. “What is this? The first fight, maybe?”
“I—I’m not getting married,” came the gasped reply. “It’s somebody else.”
“Jilted at the church?”
“No. Listen. This is important. Della doesn’t know it, but she’s not marrying me. The bridegroom may look like me, but he’s not me. Do you get it?”
“More slowly. You’re not the man who’s marrying Della Barrie. She thinks you are. She’s marrying some one who looks like you. Sure, I get it.” Beem’s gum-chewing jaws worked overtime.
“While I was on my way to the wedding,” the man explained, “I was waylaid by none other than Dr. Bently Simon.”
“Go on,” Beem urged.
“Dr. Simon, believe it or not, is the man behind these invisible deaths. I’ve proof. The invisible death is some sort of anaphylactic shock produced by sensitizing the human body with inoculations of some protein.”
“I guess so. Go on.”
“I know that Dr. Simon sensitized Thomas, Marcus Hyde’s watchman, in that manner. Mrs. Thomas told me. I’m pretty sure that Marcus Hyde has been sensitized in the same way. And every victim of the kidnapers has been similarly treated. Dr. Simon is the master of the invisible death. But he isn’t Dr. Simon. He’s a fake—a thing of false whiskers and nose putty.
“The man’s a master of disguise. After he had captured me, he took me to a dingy room. He removed his false beard and make-up and put them in a zipper bag. Then he proceeded to duplicate my features on his own face! He must be at the church right now, marrying Della. What the hell am I going to do? Don’t you see what he’s after?”
“He’s nuts about Della,” Beem suggested. “Most men are.”
“No. He couldn’t love anybody. Just as soon as he’s married to Della, he’ll send his invisible death after Marcus Hyde. That’s why Marcus Hyde has been sensitized. Hyde’s will leaves his entire fortune to Della Barrie. This damned impersonator will have the whole works.”
Thornton Beem took a heavy, German pneumatic pistol from the drawer of his desk and deliberately loaded it. “This impersonator leave you for dead?”
“I suppose so. He knocked me out.”
“Take another shot of Scotch, Carasco. That impersonator, that master of invisible death, is none other than Secret Agent X. He’s wanted, dead or alive. Where’s the wedding taking place?”
“Fifth Methodist Church. But what are we going to do?”
Beem picked up the phone and called police headquarters. “Let’s have the Homicide Office. I want to speak
to Burks.” Beem looked at his watch. “Take it easy, Carasco. We got time. You’ll get your girl back, Burks’ll get his Agent X, and I’ll cop the reward.” He turned to the phone. “Thornton Beem speaking, inspector. I’ve got your Agent X…. Well, if you want him, you’ll have to come get him. He’s the man behind the invisible death…. I got proof. But listen, that reward is all mine, see?… All right. Now meet me outside the Fifth Methodist Church just as soon as you can roll over there. No kiddin’ you’ll get your man this time, sure.”
Beem hung up, seized his visitor’s arm, and dragged him from the chair. “Move your feet, Carasco. My car’s outside.”
BEEM drove with reckless abandonment, square teeth punishing gum. Ten minutes later, he swerved his car to the curb in front of the church. Inside, an organ could be heard droning out the Wedding March. Inspector Burks was pounding the sidewalk out in front. As soon as he saw Beem, he strode to the car and shook his fist under the private detective’s nose.
“If this is one of your cocky tricks, I’ll poke this down your throat!” Then he looked at the battered man at Beem’s side. “Say, aren’t you the bridegroom? Didn’t I see you go into church a moment ago?”
Beem raised his hand. “Calm down, Burks. This is Carasco. The guy who’s in there trying to get hitched to Della Barrie is Secret Agent X.”
Burks turned and started for the church, but Beem sprang from the car and caught his arm. “Hold it! You’ve got motive and evidence this time, if you’ll keep your shirt on long enough to listen. Marcus Hyde is slated for the invisible death. When Hyde dies, Della Barrie gets his fortune, but you can bet as soon as the ceremony is over, Della will be made to sign over her all to her fake husband. That’s the motive. Now, proof—well, here’s Carlos Carasco. He can tell you about being knocked out by Dr. Bently Simon. He also knows that Simon worked the invisible death on Thomas, the watchman.”
“Simon?” Burks roared. “Where’s he come in?”
“He’s the key man of the invisible death,” Beem explained. “He’s Secret Agent X. Carasco saw him switch disguises. Didn’t you, Carasco?”
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 6 Page 49