Harvey Bates, key man of X’s own organization, had gone ahead to make preparation for his chief’s arrival. And Bates’s habitually terse reports had indicated that something more deadly than a poisonous serpent was being nurtured in the Pennsylvania hills.
Suddenly Agent X pressed firmly on the brake pedal. The roar of the motor dropped to a scarcely audible murmur. Head slightly on one side, the Agent listened intently to a sound that seemed to come from the thick woods that hedged the road. It was a high-pitched wail, with something of the animal quality about it and something that was like the cry of a human being in mortal agony. Such a shriek as the legendary werewolf of old might have made when it sought to satisfy its midnight hungering, came from the wood along the road. The hair on the back of the Agent’s neck prickled in apprehension.
A moment later he was forced to tramp the brake pedal to the floor and swerve the car to the side of the road to keep from running down a man who plunged from the woods and threw himself directly in front of the car. Or was it a man? It was more like an eerie, staggering shadow of a man. It would take a few reeling steps, stop, dash blindly around in circles, and all the time it screamed and wailed like a lost soul in hell’s torment.
X SPRANG from the car. The gaunt shadow ran headlong toward the car, struck the fender and sprang back, snarling, to bump squarely into Agent X. His fingers crooked like claws in an effort to rake human flesh to ribbons. He lowered his head and charged insanely, arms swinging like windmills.
X sidestepped, caught one of the flying arms and twisted it up behind the creature’s back. He seized the other arm and held it firmly. The man struggled furiously and kicked blindly, all the time uttering unholy shrieks.
But X’s grip was not easily broken and the staggering man seemed to have used up most of his energy in his pointless battle. Soon, he was hanging as limp as a sack in X’s arms. The Agent dragged him out in front of the car where the yellow stream from the headlights found his captive a thing so horrible to look upon that revulsion almost swept pity aside.
The gibbering creature had four or five days’ growth of beard on his face and the stubble was stiff with blood from many a scratch that thorns and twigs had given him in his dash through the wood. But the creature was a living corpse. So it seemed to Agent X when he looked into the man’s eyes. The eyeballs protruded, looked dry and hard and were encrusted with dirt and grime and numerous bodies of small insects.
Then pity triumphed over horror. The blood raced in X’s veins as he saw what some fiend out of hell had done to this fellow human. The man was blind simply because his eyelids had been completely removed by some satanic surgeon’s scalpel. And his lips were snarling because fine copper wire had been used to sew the upper lip into a perpetual sneer. Mad? Of course he was mad. Nothing made of human flesh could have withstood such cruelty and remained sane.
X started to carry the gasping maniac toward the car. The man was uttering something between his malformed lips. He was wailing one word piteously in a high, quavering voice:
“Shaitan…. Shaitan….”
X stopped. His brows drew tightly together. He held the tortured one tenderly in his arms. “What did you say, old man?” he asked kindly.
“Shaitan. Shai—tan,” the maniac wailed.
SHAITAN. A shiver coursed along the Agent’s spine. He raised his eyes from the malformed face and jerked an apprehensive glance into the shadows. That name awoke terrible memories of things that had occurred years ago in a foreign land. In the days of the red revolt in Russia, when the astrakhan-capped Bolsheviki had terrorized all Asia with their massacres along the Mongolian border, the name Shaitan had brought shudders whenever uttered. Whether man or demon, none had ever known. But there were hundreds who had witnessed his cruelty, unequaled even in the days of the Spanish Inquisition.
Neither a fanatic nor a Bolshevist, a soldier nor a politician, Shaitan had made the most of what history offered. He had scourged humanity to gain gold for his own coffers. He had harnessed the power of one corner of a war-torn world for his own selfish purposes. And like a vulture over a battlefield, he had fattened upon the misfortune of others.
But Shaitan was a man of the East who had inherited the worst traits of various strains of blood mixed in his veins. How, then, had his name come upon the lips of this babbling wanderer of the Pennsylvania hills? Perhaps the deformed lips of the man may have accounted for his utterance of what seemed the name of Shaitan.
X picked up the tortured one, carried him to the car, and propped him up in the seat. The man was utterly exhausted, but his muscles never stopped twitching with the torment of the pain within him.
X reached into his pocket and brought out a small medical kit. He carefully charged a hypodermic syringe and gave the madman a stiff jolt of the drug. Soon, the muscular twitching stopped. For the first time in perhaps days, the madman was at rest. X got in behind the wheel, beside the slumped form with its horrible, malformed face, and drove on toward the city.
The dirt road along which he had been traveling abruptly joined a brick road at the edge of the city limits. But there was a wooden barrier across the road and a watchman waving a red lantern. On either side of the road were two square canvas tents lighted by electric lamps.
Agent X stopped the car and leaned out to speak to the watchman. “What’s the matter? Bridge out?”
The watchman shook his head. “Quarantine. You’ll have to go back. Nobody allowed to enter or leave Brownsboro. We’ve got the plague around here, or something worse. We don’t want to spread it around.”
X frowned. “The plague? What kind of plague?”
A tall man with snarled red hair, crooked nose and bitter lips joined the watchman. He peered at X with slits of eyes, and when he had stared rudely for a few moments, he asked: “What do you want?”
The Agent said quietly: “I’m from Washington, and I’m here on government business. Who are you?”
Stepping closer to the car, the tall man answered: “I’m Reed P. Kennedy, owner of the Brownsboro Bugle, greatest daily in western Pennsylvania. The paper, incidentally, is responsible for waking the people up to the fact that something must be done about this plague of madness.”
“Plague of what?”
“Madness. We have had a number of cases. It is continually spreading. Sometimes, it means violent, choking death, but more frequently, men go mad.”
“Hydrophobia?” asked the Secret Agent.
Reed P. Kennedy shook his head. “Nothing like that. Nothing that anyone knows anything about. No cure, but we’re not going to pass it on to the rest of the world.” He reached out his hand. “You have credentials, of course.”
X produced the identification card he had taken from John Morris. Kennedy compared the small photo of John Morris with the face of the man behind the wheel of the ear. Thanks to the Agent’s makeup mastery, photo and face corresponded exactly. Kennedy turned his head and called over his shoulder:
“Chief Hurd, will you step this way a moment?”
A HEAVY-JAWED man with close-clipped iron-gray hair and worried, squinting eyes, joined the newspaper publisher. Kennedy pointed to the card in his hand. “A secret service man,” he said in a whisper. “Wants in. Has orders from Washington. I think you, as chief of police, had better attend to this.”
The chief of police stuck out a large hand and smiled affably. “Mighty glad to know you, Mister Morris. And mighty glad you’re here. Tell you, the responsibility on our shoulders is getting so heavy that we’d like to have some one to help us out.”
“Not so fast there,” Kennedy butted in. “We don’t know that Mr. Morris has come here to help us.”
“To be perfectly frank, I was brought here on another mission,” X told them. “Of course, if there is anything I can do to help you while I am in town—”
Chief of Police Hurd seized Kennedy’s arm. His heavy jaw dropped. He took a quick step backwards and pointed a fat forefinger at something in X’s car. “He—he’s got
one of the mad ones in there. One of the mad ones must have escaped and he’s picked him up. You’d better get out of there quick, Mr. Morris. That man’s got the plague.”
X frowned. “You mean this plague is something like—” he indicated the unconscious maniac beside him. “But that’s absurd. This poor devil has been tortured. I found him staggering down the road, fighting with his own shadow—”
“That’s it,” Kennedy cut in. “That’s the malady of madness. We can’t let you in town, card or no card, unless you have a thorough physical examination. Dr. Davies, head of our health department, is in that tent. You’d better go see him.”
Kennedy and Hurd backed away from the car while X opened the door and got out. They regarded the Agent with glances of apprehension as he walked toward the indicated tent.
“I say, ‘No!’ ” a blustering voice roared from behind the flaps of the tent. “Mr. Garvey, what you ask is utterly impossible. At times like this, the health officer is law in this town. We can’t have this thing spread. We haven’t any means of coping with it and it certainly seems contagious.”
“But my experiments. I’m working on something for the government. I can’t have my work held up because a few people seem to have developed epilepsy or something of that nature. I must have supplies—”
“No! And that’s final, Lorin Garvey. Under no consideration can you leave this city. Now—get out!”
THE FLAPS of the tent swirled furiously and a man plunged into the open, nearly knocking Agent X down. His blond hair was upstanding and his thin, colorless lips were forming silent oaths. He wore large, horn-rimmed, smoked-lensed glasses. He muttered a hurried apology and carried his appeal to Chief of Police Hurd. This was the first time Agent X had seen Lorin Garvey, the man he had been sent to guard. He watched the tall, stooped, scholarly figure of the scientist as Garvey approached the police chief.
Then X raised the flap of the tent and went inside. A bald man with a prolific growth of black, elevated eyebrows, stopped his worried pacing long enough to ask:
“Well, what do you want with me?”
X smiled. “I was under the impression that you wanted me. My name is Morris. I’m from Washington. Mr. Kennedy has my credentials. I’d be glad if you’d take a look at them.”
Dr. Davies sighed, said something with his hands and shoulders, went to the door of the tent and called Kennedy. He took the card X had taken from Morris, glanced over it, and handed it to X.
“It would all be so much easier if we had less so-called help around here. Kennedy, owning a newspaper, thinks he has license to poke his disagreeable nose into everything.” Then Davies returned his attention to the Secret Agent. As his eyes passed, almost enviously over the tall, square-shouldered body, he snapped: “As far as I know, there’s nothing that can keep you from entering the city if you have orders from Washington. Let me warn you, however, that ours is a city with a curse of madness—”
Kennedy put his head through the tent flaps. “Look that man over, Davies. He has one of the victims of this staggering madness out in his car.”
Dr. Davies frowned. “Will you kindly allow me to attend to my own business?” To X, he snapped: “Strip down to the waist, man.” Then he trotted over to a table and procured a stethoscope.
X removed coat, shirt and undershirt, asking as he did so: “Have you any idea what can be the cause of this malady?”
“Filterable virus. Filterable virus,” Davies replied with considerable assurance.
“Which means,” X said with a smile, “that you really have no idea what is causing it. When a medical man is completely stumped, he consigns any new disease to the filterable virus scrap heap.”
Davies grunted, yet the grunt was an admission. “We know this: the mad malady seems to affect the heart and lungs, sometimes causing death as soon as it strikes. Then again, the patient suffers such terrible agony that he becomes deranged. How’s your heart, young man?” He started to apply the stethoscope when he noticed a jagged scar on the Agent’s left side—a sear that bore a crude resemblance to the letter “X.” He demanded: “What’s that?”
“A bit of shrapnel landed there once upon a time,” said X, quietly.
“Huh! Perfect wonder you’re alive. Matter of fact, you ought to be dead.” Davies listened to X’s heart a moment. Then his right hand reached up abruptly and nipped X’s cheek between thumb and first finger. X stepped back. His eyes darted to the doctor’s fingers. There was a small piece of makeup material between thumb and forefinger.
Davies nodded shrewdly. “Watch for the man with the ‘X’ scar on his left side. Didn’t you know that ever since the police discovered that the man disguised as Mark Brady who escaped from the New York morgue some months ago, was Secret Agent X, that a means of positive identification of the mysterious Mr. X has been passed along to other members of the medical profession?”
X had often feared that this scar would serve to identify him some day. But his face remained impassive when he asked: “Has it ever occurred to you that others might have a similar scar?”
“Never for a moment. None but a man too wicked to die could have received such a wound and lived. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind but that I have the singular pleasure of arresting—the most notorious criminal in the world today.”
CHAPTER II
The City AccuRsed
THE agent’s left hand shot to Davies’ throat, his fingers closing like steel jaws on the man’s windpipe. His right fist lashed into a particularly sensitive spot beneath the doctor’s heart. Such a blow when accompanied by sufficient force had the power to kill, but the Agent’s masterful control of muscles enabled him to simply paralyze with it.
Davies’ body stiffened. He fell forward like a fence post. X caught the doctor and held him up while his eyes darted about the tent for a place of concealment. The only possible place in which to put the doctor was a small steel cabinet.
X opened the door of the cabinet and found it contained one of the doctor’s smocks and little else. He flung out the smock, stood Davies in the cabinet, and just managed to squeeze the door shut.
He hurriedly put on the smock over his own clothes, first removing his pocket makeup kit from his coat. Outside the tent, all was confusion—confusion that promised success to X’s enterprise. Lorin Garvey had carried his appeal to the police chief. Hurd, Garvey and Kennedy could be heard loudly arguing the matter.
The Agent opened his makeup kit and began another miracle of transformation. In the pocket of the smock, X found a surgeon’s white skull cap. This, pressed tightly over his head would conceal the fact that he was not bald. He hastily pressed plastic volatile material from a tube and applied it to his face. Since Dr. Davies was light complexioned, little coloring material had to be added.
X’s own brows were smoothed down and covered with the plastic material. He removed a pair of artificial eyebrows from the kit, went over to the cabinet and opened the door. Using Davies as a model, he pressed the artificial brows into place and arched them carefully.
He was then ready to start forming features from the heavy application of plastic material on his cheeks. But at that moment, X heard the tent flap rustle. His heart leaped into his throat. He turned, at the same time slamming the door of the cabinet. He sprang across the room toward the electric light hung temporarily from the top post of the tent.
His keen eyes found the bakelite connecting plug near the canvas wall of the tent. X’s back was toward the door, he instinctively assumed the position that would to some extent enable him to simulate the doctor’s drooping shoulders.
“That man Garvey,” said a voice that X recognized as Kennedy’s, “says he simply must get out of town. Can’t you waive the rule, doctor?”
“Garvey be damned!” snapped Agent X, and his voice could not have been told from Davies’. And at the same time, he kicked out, caught the light connection with the toe of his right shoe, and broke it. The tent was instantly plunged into darkness. X did
two things in a split-second’s time. He leaped to the table and scooped up his pocket makeup kit. When he shoved this down into his pocket, his left hand brought out his pocket knife. He flickered it open, at the same time shouting:
“Agent X! He’s escaping! That man who called himself Morris is a fake. Get him, Kennedy. Get the police in here. Secret Agent X. Makeup all over his face, I tell you! He must have turned out the lights.”
And all that X was shouting was perfectly true, but it was uttered in the voice of Dr. Davies. Knife in hand, X sprang to one side of the tent and ripped a big slit in the canvas. Then he stepped back, pocketed the knife and drew out his flashlight with the same hand. He turned the beam in the direction of the slit he had made in the tent, shouted:
“Look! Just went through there. But he can’t escape. The place is surrounded by police. Close in, everybody!”
X SET an admirable example, by stepping through the slit and running squarely into a policeman. “Did you see that man who called himself Morris?” he cried. “It’s Agent X. Get him!”
There was immediate pandemonium. And among all those who hunted the darkness in search of Secret Agent X, apparently no one was more active than X himself. But he did his hunting in shadowy places where his skillful fingers, working blindly and entirely from memory, gradually modeled his plastic mask into a passable resemblance of the doctor’s own features.
Then X scurried to the roadster that he had borrowed from John Morris. There he found very suspicious evidence of the hiding place of the man they hunted—a handkerchief he had used to keep the rumble seat door from locking and thus smothering the unconscious John Morris.
X beckoned to nearby police, gave whispered orders, had men surround the roadster with guns in their fists. Then, one finger pressed to his lips, X mounted the step plates and opened the rumble compartment. He turned the beam of his flashlight into the opening. The light ray fell upon the placid features of the real John Morris.
Secret Agent X - The Complete Series Volume 7 Page 23