Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Dime Detective Magazine, 1 October 1933, with "The Golden Grave"
Swirling and swaying in their Devil Dance those raving worshippers of Satan lashed their nerves to a murder pitch. And only Craig Kennedy, master scientific detective, realized the doom that was to follow, could curb those frenzied votaries in their blood lust, stop burial in a golden grave.
KENNEDY'S express cruiser was slithering swiftly through the choppy waters of Hell Gate where the tides meet in that balky strait which divides Manhattan from Long Island.
Suddenly Craig's hand reached for the controls. The headway of the cruiser was checked. An instant later the water was churning up white as the twin propellers went into reverse.
"What's the matter?" I demanded. "We'll be late!"
"Matter enough!" he exclaimed quietly as next he slowed up our swift slipping back. He was holding the steering wheel with one hand while with the other he pointed off and down toward the water. "Look!"
I caught a fleeting glimpse in the dull green swirl of a Titian-haired head—and the slender shapely white body of a girl.
Mechanically I grabbed at a boat-hook with one hand and a life-ring with the other.
"Drop the ring, Walter, unless you intend going over with it yourself—she's dead all right! And don't use that boat-hook! I want no more marks on that body than may already be there!"
It was comparatively early in the morning and there did not seem to be any craft near enough to signal for assistance.
Skilfully Craig maneuvered the fast little cruiser until, together, we were able to lift the cold and inert form over the side. It required both of us to accomplish this.
Completely nude, except for the peculiarly woven moccasins on the now swollen feet, the bruised body of a once beautiful girl lay on the mahogany after deck.
"Well?" I asked, looking helplessly at him. "What are we going to do now?" I knew the appointments for which we were running into town were automatically off.
"Do? We're going right on down the river to the dock at the morgue," he answered coolly, reaching again for the wheel and the control mechanism.
IT WAS not many minutes later that we pulled the
cruiser up alongside, in the lee of the city dock, and made
fast.
A prolonged blast of our horn brought a couple of attendants on the run; there was a hurried explanation; and a few moments later the body was in a receiving room under the inspection of Donovan, who was in charge at the time.
On the run down I had snapped our own pictures of the body; now Kennedy was making a quick but thorough preliminary examination of it. What interested me was a round mark on the fleshy upper arm and, more particularly, a series of bruises in which there seemed to predominate abrasion lines that ran, roughly speaking, in the general direction from head to feet.
"Made before death, Walter," observed Craig aside, seeing my curiosity.
He turned to Donovan. "Have an analysis made of the stomach contents and of the organs, for drugs," he directed.
"Then you think she was poisoned?"
"If I were to give a cursory opinion," he returned, "I would say she was drowned!"
"Oh," I hesitated, "drowned then?"
"Off the record still, Walter, I would say she was not dead before she was thrown in the water but stupefied by some drug, perhaps luminal. We shall see."
He turned toward Donovan who was looking on blankly as if in some kind of daze.
"Why, what's the matter, Donovan?" Craig asked quickly.
Donovan walked into a combination office and record room, selected a cabinet and pulled out a drawer in which were folders, each with photographs, measurements, fingerprints and descriptions, a complete case record.
"This is the third in three months—the third red-headed girl—picked up in the river—all naked."
Donovan passed over one folder. "That was in June."
With Kennedy I studied the contents, particularly the photograph. It was quite similar to the figure I had just photographed myself, even down to the loosely plaited moccasins.
"Here's the one in July!" Donovan had taken out a second folder.
Instantly I saw that this case, too, was very like the others. In each the description had set down the hair as "Auburn." Though to Donovan it was plain red, and to me Titian—auburn covered both, no doubt. Then, too, as nearly as I could make out, there were the same loose-plaited moccasins on the feet in the July case. It was the same with the girl we had just picked up.
Kennedy studied a moment. "Very well, Donovan. Have those preliminary analyses made by the medical examiner's office and the chief toxicologist. I'll make more minute analyses probably after we get their reports. My boat will be all right at your dock for a few hours?"
"Sure, sir!"
Craig turned deliberately and I followed outside, up the street to Bellevue where he called a cab in the enclosure.
"Fifth Avenue and West Forty-fifth Street!" he ordered.
ON the corner he dismissed the cab, turned, and we walked down the street, pausing before a rather empty shop window.
In the window were some magazines and pictures, some books and plaster casts of statues. But what caught my eye in one corner was a pile of loosely plaited moccasins!
I cast my eyes upward to see what manner of store this was and was greeted by the words, "The Nudist Shop."
"Come; let's go in," decided Craig. "I want to talk to the young lady in charge, see what they sell and to whom I just happened to run across this the other day."
The young lady in the shop, herself of the henna type, was most gracious and polite as Craig began his inquiries by expressing a close interest in the publications that had been O.K.'d by the redoubtable suppression-of-vice society.
As luck would have it the cop on the beat paused at the window and began studying the magazine covers.
"Selling many of those moccasins this summer?" Craig asked with a nod toward the stock of them.
"Oh, indeed yes."
On a desk nearby his eye fell on what looked like a sales book or a day book. With his usual directness Craig picked it up and began a cursory glancing over of the pages on which sales were entered.
"Say—look here!" remonstrated the young lady.
Craig gave just a flicker of his eyes toward the cop at the window studying the nude statuary. At the same time he gave a flip of the left lapel of his coat, as if under it were the customary badge of a plainclothesman.
"Oh—I guess it will be—all right!" she murmured.
"Sure it's all right, sister," came back Craig in his best city-detective manner.
He laid down the book, nodded good-by, waved in passing to the officer at the window and signaled another cab outside.
"Just as I was looking down the list of purchasers," he explained as we were off, "I caught the name of Natalie Webb among them. You know—she married the globe trotter, Stuart Webb, last year? Was the popular beauty once of the Junior League—Natalie Godwin—you recall. It was Natalie's letter to me yesterday, among other things, that brought me in to town today. We're on our way to see her, now."
"Yes, I remember," I replied quickly. "Natalie Webb—a Titian, too!"
NATALIE WEBB'S words rang out like the cry of a
lost soul. "I am damned—Professor Kennedy—
I am damned!" The look of anguish and of fear written on
her face was terrible as she uttered them. She was mentally
and physically convulsed.
"I was afraid you weren't coming! You're late! And I've been walking the floor in desperation! Oh, I don't want Stuart ever to know that I have asked your help, either!"
"Why, Natalie?" inquired Craig trying to be reassuring.
"In a minute I'll tell you. Then you will understand!" She paused a moment. "I am not much like the little Natalie Godwin you used to know, am I?" she asked hopelessly.
"Well, you must pull yourself together, Natalie," Craig tried to encourage: 'Tell me what it is all about."
To myself I was forced to admit that she was right. She was far from the Natalie who had been Stuart Webb's bride of a year ago. Both the Webbs and the Godwins had been intimate and old Stuart Webb, senior, when he died had left his estate to his son on condition that he marry Natalie Godwin.
Natalie seemed rambling, sobbing out terrible words.
"Oh, Craig—I must call you Craig—I have committed the unpardonable sin—I am anathema—I am damned—damned!"
"Why, Natalie, what do you mean? When did this all begin?" soothed Kennedy.
"On our honeymoon—in Paris!" she blurted out. "You know Stuart has traveled all over the world, has met many strange people, gone in for many curious things—and—and cults!"
She seemed to be swallowing with difficulty as if the very words stuck in her throat.
Was she insane? What sort of hallucination was it? Or was it great physical, bodily fear? In spite of what sounded like incoherent ravings I was inclined rather to the belief that, whatever its basis, this was real, tangible, terrific.
"Cult? Cult?" repeated Kennedy. "What cult?"
"In Paris!" she cried. "We met Professor Rasquin—Raoul Rasquin—High Priest of the Devil Worshippers, and Madame Rasquin, High Priestess!
"Yes!" she reiterated. "I went to their rites in Paris. I was so much in love with Stuart I did everything he did. I joined in the ceremonies. But, Craig, I thought always when we got back to New York, that that part of our honeymoon experiences would be a thing of the past, just something bizarre to look back on."
"I see, Natalie. But what happened?"
"Well, I was right—until just about three months ago!"
"What then?"
"Rasquin and his wife came over here from Paris—fell afoul of the Sūreté and the Paris police or something and had to flee. They got in touch with Stuart—one thing led to another—and now I am deeper in it than ever!"
Natalie's voice was almost a wail.
"But," began Kennedy, "I don't see—"
"No, of course you don't see, Craig! But you would see—you will see—if you will only—" She paused, appealing.
"Craig!" she faltered, growing now more confidential. "Sometimes it is as though I had two souls. One of them is dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs and is frantic at the other that has crept in!"
Almost, I was about to suggest, this was a case for a doctor rather than a detective, but I hesitated as she suddenly asked a most startling question.
"Craig, can people affect you for good or evil merely by thinking about you?" A shudder passed over her. "They may be thinking about me now!" There was terror, real terror in it.
"Not unless you make your own fears affect yourself and so play into their hands," he reassured, sympathetic to her actual physical distress.
NATALIE regarded him a moment, then shook her head
mournfully, apparently answering my own unasked question.
"I have seen Doctor Lenoire," she said slowly.
Doctor Gilbert Lenoire I knew by reputation to be a well-known alienist and psychopathologist in the city.
"He has tried to tell me the same thing!" she cried. "But—oh—I know what I know! I have felt the Death Thought—and he knows it!"
"The Death Thought?" inquired Kennedy, leaning forward keenly. "What do you mean?"
"I am not sure exactly," she replied. "But I can explain it, I think, to you! It's a malicious psychic attack! Someone is driving me to death by it! I have thought I could fight it off. The theatre —music—books. I went to Bermuda to escape it. Now I have come back. And I have not escaped! There it is always—-always directed against me! I know it will—kill me!"
Now I was listening, startled. What did it mean? What terrible power was this?
"You see," she went on heroically trying to control herself yet tell everything, "I have always been interested in the mysterious, the strange, the occult. In fact my father and Stuart's father had that same common interest. So, you see, I come by it naturally."
"And have you got into it deeply?" prompted Kennedy.
"So deeply," she replied in a low voice as if confessing, "that we have been taken into the inner circle—the Red Lodge!"
"I see," responded Kennedy colorlessly. "You told that to Doctor Lenoire, also?" he asked, his eyes on her face to see what it might betray.
She leaned forward as if imparting a dark secret and whispered in a low voice. "He knows! Like us—he—he is a Devil Worshipper, too!"
"What?" exclaimed Kennedy in involuntary astonishment.
"Yes!" she reiterated. "You didn't know it, or about the Red Lodge?"
Kennedy nodded negatively. "Could you," he hazarded slowly, "get us initiated?"
"Per—perhaps!" She hesitated, the tone of her answer a thoroughly frightened one. "Perhaps. I—I'll try—to get you in—tonight! Shall I call up?"
"Yes, please. But no names."
She rose, half dazed, as if her own temerity overwhelmed her. Slowly she went into the next room to telephone and shut the door carefully.
Kennedy moved across the room and turned up the radio which had been crooning softly as we entered.
"I hope it works!" he muttered.
I said nothing. I had no more idea than the man in the moon what he was after. And as far as I could make out there was nothing that he got but louder crooning—and I hate all crooning.
A moment and the door opened. "Yes!" she said. "I have arranged it. I have told him you are an old friend who has studied the occult abroad. I must trust you to carry it out."
"Trust me," reassured Kennedy. "Natalie, I will do all in my power, all in the power of modern science, to help you fight off this—this thing!"
There must have been something magnetic in his eyes for Natalie seemed really more like herself. "I will have to stop for you," she planned. "Where shall it be?"
"The Plaza," he hazarded. "At nine?" she suggested. "Splendid!"
"Now," she hesitated, "you had better go. I wouldn't have Stuart know you had been here, for the world!"
Outside Craig got in touch with headquarters immediately. He was at the phone only a couple of minutes.
"We'll park the cruiser over at the yacht-club landing stage," he planned as he left the booth and turned to me. "By that time Inspector O'Connor will be waiting there for us. You are in for it now, Walter," he added, half humorously, half seriously, "to see the Devil in the Twentieth Century!"
O'CONNOR was indeed waiting for us at the landing
stage below Sutton Place. Kennedy handed him a scribbled
list.
"Now, first, Inspector, I want you to get the addresses to these telephone numbers," Craig requested.
The inspector retired into a booth at the club and at length emerged with a frown on his face.
"Say, Mr. Kennedy," he asked, "where did you get these numbers—I mean this one especially."
Craig smiled. "By induction from a dial telephone on an old heterodyne set. I counted the clicks of the dial and those are the possible combinations. Why?"
"Well, that one is an old warehouse not far from where we are now, right on the riverfront."
"But what of that, O'Connor? It's about what I would expect."
O'Connor shook his head. "Not that, I'd hardly expect!"
"Why?"
"Well, I'll tell you, Mr. Kennedy. There were a lot of these nudists hired that empty top floor last spring. We got complaints. So we climbed up the outside by fire-ladders. The windows were all boarded inside. But we got on the roof and looked through the skylight. There were twenty or more naked men and women in there doing some exercises to a piano."
"Was that all?"
"Isn't that enough—or are you a judge? We raided 'em, collared them all! But the judge threw the case out of court—said there was no public exhibition of indecency and all that, so all we got was the ha-ha from the tabloids!"
"I see. That's interesting. Who was running it?"
"A German named Bauer. Well, after that decision he had an offer from a Frenchman, I understand—Rasquin or something. He sold out and left for California to start another one. There've been no more complaints and even if there was, what could we do after that case was tossed out of court?" The inspector flung his palms outward helplessly.
"Thank you, Inspector," Kennedy said. "You've told me just what I wanted to know. And you, Walter—we have some planning to do."
PROMPTLY that night at nine Natalie Webb called for us at the hotel with a closed car. "Stuart has gone ahead," she explained.
I could see that she was nervous but determined to go through with it.
"What did you tell him about us?" asked Craig.
"I told him only that you were friends and that you had studied the occult abroad. I must trust you to carry it out."
Kennedy reassured her.
We had not gone many blocks east of Fifth Avenue when the car stopped and the curtains at the windows were drawn almost as if we were going to a funeral. I smiled to myself. No one, then, seemed to realize that we knew where we were going.
At last the car stopped.
As we got out, all I could see was that we were within a brick-walled enclosure. It must have been the space where trucks had once been loaded and unloaded at the warehouse.
We mounted a loading platform and a heavy fireproof door opened on a crack.
"Who enters?" challenged a sepulchral voice.
"A member of the Red Lodge!" returned Natalie.
"Give the sign!"
"The Serpent's Tooth!"
"Who are these?"
"Neophytes!"
A whispered parley followed.
"Then enter!" announced the voice.
We rode up in the ponderous slow-moving freight elevator. One—two— three—four—five—six floors.
The door opened, one of those doors that parts in the middle, up and down. We stepped through the wide space and were in a large reception room.
It was an exotic, perhaps I should say esoteric atmosphere. Huge soft rugs in which one's feet sank soundless, covered the floor. Soundless in a sea of scarlet! The hangings, everything was red. The color of blood, of the Devil.
"This place gets me!" I whispered aside. "Somewhere I've heard that red is a color banished from all sanitariums for the treatment of nervous cases. I—"
"Softly! Speak softly!" admonished Natalie.
"I feel as if a thousand eyes were looking at me and a thousand ears listening!" I persisted in a whisper.
"Sh!" cautioned Craig. "One pair of each is enough!"
About the room were enlargements of photographs of nudes, tinted and mostly Titians. The Devil is a good picker, I thought—all beauties!
On one side a mural of Eve and the
Serpent suggested what was to be expected in further decoration. Lights on the floor, everywhere revealed serpents, one stuffed and coiled in the act of striking—red glass electric bulbs in the eyes and thin electric tubes in the open mouth for fangs. There were etchings and paintings of serpents.
Nudity in plaster and marble, male and female, both classical and modern, greeted the eye on every side, leaving little to the imagination.
But over a door, wide and oval in shape, at the far end, extended a huge plaster reproduction of one of the most sardonic of the gargoyles of Notre Dame. Presiding over everything it was a terrible figure in such an atmosphere.
There seemed to be both men and women votaries, perhaps a score of them, already there.
As Natalie introduced us to Stuart Webb, I felt there was something in his eyes I did not like. They had too much of a stare in them, uncanny.
Doctor Lenoire was there, too, talking in a low tone with Madame Rasquin. I saw him shoot a quick look at us and they nodded to each other. His were not eyes but gimlets that seemed to bore into your very soul.
AS we met them, I noticed Stuart Webb chatting
with a very striking woman who seemed keen with repressed
emotion. It was not long before Madame was introducing us
to her, also—Mrs. Peggy Wright.
Where had I seen that woman before? She was strikingly beautiful, dark of hair, with large eyes and a steady look in them that seemed to defy exploration.
Suddenly it came to me. I was convinced I had seen her in a show several years before. Then she had been gazing into a basket full of snakes—and putting them through their tricks.
"Hoffman brought the Devil into modern life," Doctor Lenoire was saying a moment later to Kennedy, for all seemed on intimate terms and were circulating constantly about the room. "Now, Poe, among the authors, forgoes the aid of demons—"
Above the low murmur of conversation I could not help recalling a sentence from Huysmans which I think runs thus: "The worship of the Devil is no more insane than the worship of God. The worshippers of Satan are mystics—mystics of an unclean sort, it is true, but mystics none the less."
In fact, I felt more and more the sense of the mystic as well as of the mysterious—the secret, the unknown, which has always exercised such powerful attraction over the human mind.
And in all that I saw here, I felt, there was not only a fascination for the frivolous, but deep-seated appeal to the intellectual and the spiritually distorted. This Red Lodge had evidently been conceived to attract both types.
How, like Lucifer, had men fallen!
I looked about, studying. One prime requisite, I could already guess, was money!
Was it in the worship of this root of evil that these people of culture had fallen—or was it in an unholy sex worship?
We were at last back with Natalie.
"Well," she inquired anxiously, "what do you think? You seem to be mixing well!"
"Many interesting types here in your circle," replied Kennedy guardedly. "Are there others who are not here?"
"Yes," she answered. "This is only the Outer Circle."
I shot a quick glance at Craig. So, I learned for the first time, this was only the Outer Circle of the Red Lodge! Somewhere, then, there was the Inner Circle!
Now, as when I had entered, I was struck by the blinding glare of the light, perhaps because of the prevailing reds of the reflection.
There came a sudden hush. I realized without being told that the ceremonies were about to begin.
Suddenly the lights were extinguished.
The great gargoyle shone with an infernal light of its own!
"Covered with a phosphorescent paint!" Craig whispered to me.
I marveled. It did not detract from the weird effect to know what caused it.
In the general hush now came a startling reverberation as of a huge Chinese gong.
"The High Priest—Sata!" I heard one of the devotees mutter.
I turned to the others. They were prostrating themselves. Determined to do in Rome as the Romans do, we copied them as best we might.
SLOWLY the oval door was opening. There, in it,
under the light from the gargoyle, appeared the veritable
minister of the Devil—pale of face, nose sharp, mouth
thin-lined and bitter, eyes piercing black.
Never shall I forget that picture. The very incarnation of evil in the darkness!
"Rasquin!" Natalie whispered to us.
For fully a minute of silence that awesome figure stood before us motionless. Then, without a word or a sound, the high priest raised his long, lean forefinger and pointed, began to single out each worshipper impressively.
As he indicated, each one spoke, as if imploring aid. He came to Peggy Wright.
"Master!" she cried earnestly. "I have tried the charm! And the one whom I love still hates me, while the one I hate still loves me!"
"Concentrate!" replied the high priest. "Concentrate! Think always, 'I love him! He must love me! I want him to love me! I love him! He must love me!' Over and over again you must think it. Then the other side. T hate him! He must leave me! I want him to leave me! I hate him—hate him!'"
Around the circle he went.
At last that long, infernal forefinger was outstretched to Natalie.
It seemed as if some imp of the perverse were compelling her unwilling tongue to unlock its secrets.
"Sometimes," she murmured in a low tremulous voice, "something seems to seize me, as if by the hand, and urge me onward! I cannot flee from it!"
"Defend yourself!" answered the high priest subtly. "When you know that someone is trying to kill you mentally, defend yourself! Work against it by every means in your power! Discourage! Intimidate! Destroy!"
I marveled at these cryptic utterances.
What was this—a sort of mental malpractice?
He finished with the circle.
Still under that unholy glow of the phosphorescent light of the huge gargoyle, Sata, the high priest, gave his orders for the initiation of us, the two neophytes.
"Prepare yourselves—all!"
Each beside a chair or table or divan began disrobing, piling up the garments—men and women alike—for all, even the neophytes, must discard everything earthly from their bodies to meet the Devil.
The high priest, Sata, turned as a signal to us all to follow him into the Temple of Satan beyond.
Scattered and in groups, male and female, all crowded through that oval door after the shepherd of the unholy flock.
As we passed in I could see that this other was a huge room, the greater part of the big loft. I could make out also that it was hung entirely in black.
Weird, cabalistic signs were all about on the walls. Above was a huge skylight and that, too, had been utilized to create an infernal lighting effect below.
Here, then, we were to enter our novitiate, if such it might be called.
BEFORE an altar to the Devil in the center, stood
the high priest, Sata, as, slowly, black velvet curtains
were parted. Against a background of more black were
revealed heroic statues of Moloch and of Astarte, glowing
as did the gargoyle over the entrance, facing each other,
symbols of this worship of the nether world.
Slowly, too, a strange mephitic vapor seemed to permeate the room—or was it merely my heightened imagination?
There came a sudden noise—nameless —chill—striking terror—a low, rattling!
I stood rooted to the spot. What was it held me? Was it an atavistic joy in the horrible? Or was it merely a blasphemous curiosity?
Light again—blinding light!
I blinked, scarcely daring to look.
At last, out of the daze, I raised my eyes. There was a live snake, a huge fellow, upraised, his fangs striking out viciously—a rattler!
I would have drawn back and fled the room but Craig caught my arm. "In a glass cage!" he muttered.
"It is Ophis!" intoned Rasquin before the Devil's altar. "The serpent—the one active form in nature that cannot be ungraceful!"
Unnecessary to say, the appearance of the basilisk seemed to heighten the tension with a terrific strain. Then followed the most terrible of blasphemies.
The disciples, now all in a veritable frenzy, gathered more closely around the high priest at the altar with the serpent upon it.
They worshipped with howls and obscenities mingled with mad laughter. Pale fear and wild scorn were by turns written on the hectic faces about me. Now the votaries began to spin about uttering a low, moaning chant as they whirled.
It was a mania—the very spirit of de-monism. They were vampires, ghouls! Furies! Something infernal, hellish, unseen seemed to urge them on!
It was pandemonium!
Disgusted, stifled in the surcharged unearthly atmosphere, I would have broken away and fled, but I seemed frozen on the spot. I could think of nothing save of Poe's Masque of the Red Death.
Above all the rest whirled Stuart Webb himself. The laugh of a fiend, for the moment, was in his mouth. An instant he stood—the oracle of the Demon— Devil-possessed. Around whirled the frantic devotees, howling.
Shrilly he screamed, stopping short: "The Devil is in me!"
He reeled slowly through the crowd, as fascinated, the whirling group of stark-naked Devil Worshippers, oblivious to their own nakedness, paused and watched. One of their number had received the "power!"
Natalie was trembling with fear, shame forgotten.
Peggy Wright had worked herself to a statuesque frenzy.
Webb was swaying slowly to and fro.
"Look!" whispered Kennedy to me.
Webb's fingers twitched. His head wagged uncannily. Perspiration seemed to be oozing from every pore. His breast heaved.
He gave a sudden yell—ear-piercing—followed by a screech of hellish laughter.
Stuart Webb was whirling more slowly now, eyes protruding, mouth foaming, chest rising and falling rapidly like a bellows, muscles taut and quivering by turns.
Cries, vows, imprecations, prayers, all blended in an infernal hubbub.
With a burst of ghastly guttural laughter he shrieked: "I am the Devil!"
His arms waved—cutting, sawing, hacking the air.
The votaries, trembling, scarcely moved or breathed as he danced more and more slowly.
Suddenly he gave a great leap into the air—then fell, motionless on the floor. They crowded around him. The fiendish look was gone. The demoniac laughter was stilled.
Doctor Lenoire was in the forefront, bending over him. The others crowded closer between us.
They lifted Stuart Webb, limp, subdued, and carried him into a still inner room. The others followed.
I saw Kennedy stoop down quickly. He picked up what looked like a little broken glass tube. An instant he hesitated. Where to conceal it? He smiled to himself. He could only hold it carefully in his clenched left fist!
NATALIE WEBB, on the outside of the crowd, was asking timidly: "Is Stuart all right, now? Quite himself again?"
"All right?" I could hear the voice of Peggy Wright inside the crowd answering. She lifted her head above the others bending over him. "Himself! Never more so! Honored above you—above all! The Devil has honored him! You"—looking her over scornfully—"have never been so honored!"
Peggy turned to be nearer Stuart Webb with some gentle ministration, and as she turned she shot a supercilious smile over her shoulder at Natalie.
As nearly as I could make it out, they had laid Webb on a huge divan. Piled with pillows it looked, as the crowd shifted, like a mountain of embroidered saffron satin.
Professor Rasquin and Madame, Doctor Lenoire and Peggy Wright stood closest to the divan. It seemed there was no place for Natalie. She was only Mrs. Stuart Webb.
Between the group at one end and a room with an open door at the other, Kennedy was busy taking in people and places. It was plausible for us to remain apart. We were newcomers to the cult.
"That's a complete dark-room in there," whispered Craig, glancing into the little chamber with the open door. Casually he stepped across the threshold, saw a switch and turned it.
Shelves were fastened to the walls, some wide, like tables. Porcelain glass, and hard-rubber pans, containers for various chemicals, everything seemed to be there for developing plates and films.
He saw a piece of thin rubber sheeting-Quickly he tore off a small piece and I saw him, fashion it into a sort of container for the broken glass tube he had been carrying lightly and carefully in the palm of his hand.
He switched the lights off and we continued browsing about the studio.
"Did you notice anything peculiar about that dark-room?" he asked.
"Only the faded, washed-out color of everything in it," I answered. "Colorless, you might say!"
He nodded. "Peculiar," was all he said. "Well, it's evident how they got some of those truly marvelous photographs! They have done it all, from the camera to the framing!"
I looked about more carefully. Above was a huge skylight, like that in the Moloch-and-Astarte room, high, inaccessible except by a scaffold. The only other exits were through the big altar room to the reception room and the elevator. Or into the dark-room, which had no other door and no window, even.
I saw that every window had been cut off by an inside wall, erected probably by the previous nudists who had allowed the skylights to remain, untouched.
I don't know why I felt a premonition, but we distinctly did not seem to be in things. It grew more marked. I fancied Natalie saw it and was frightened enough to betray her fear.
In the doorway to the room of the Devil's altar I saw a group of several worshippers talking. It looked innocent enough. But, again, it might not be so. Quite effectively it blocked off the one means of escape!
"Craig!" Natalie, controlling her feelings, had come over to speak to us. "Don't turn your head or show that you know anything. But Stuart, when he was coming out of it and rambling, has betrayed something of his own half-formed suspicions that it was I who got you to—"
"Yes, yes, Natalie," interrupted Craig. "I have sensed it, something ominous in the very air. I think you had better get back near your husband. Stick to your story and deny everything else. Leave us to shift for ourselves."
Still acting a part, Natalie turned away with a forced smile.
I COULD see Stuart Webb sitting up now on his divan
without the need of pillows. The tall form of Rasquin rose
from the other side of the pillows. Those gleaming eyes
of his were aimed in our direction. Standing tall and
straight behind Webb, he suddenly clapped his hands once;
sharply.
"Now!" muttered Craig. "Stick with me—and we'll fight—"
There was a sudden rush of slippery, slithering naked bodies converging upon us from three directions!
Kennedy was no mean wrestler, and I have had some little practice in the gymnasium myself. But Craig was familiar with several jiu-jitsu holds. He was availing himself of them now.
It was a sharp fight. The first Craig caught and whirled over his head, crashing a lamp and table. I had my man down—but another was tearing me off him. Two, rushing at once for Craig, caused him to give way a few feet to avoid one and get the other.
"Roll over—this way—Walter—keep up—with me!" he panted.
I did so. But sixty seconds was enough for me to see it was hopeless, twenty to two, even if about half the twenty were women. The female Devil Worshippers were proving even more deadly than the male. If anyone thought the orgy of only a few minutes before had used up their energy he had only to suffer the almost hysteric assaults that I now felt.
Against half a dozen, even, we might have had a chance. As it was we were surely, if slowly, being forced back toward that windowless dark-room.
Finally we found ourselves inescapably jockeyed through the door—which snapped shut from the outside!
Above the uproar I could hear the shrill scream of Natalie Webb—then all was silence.
"One thing we have," muttered Craig fumbling along the wall by the door until he found the switch, "is light!"
"If that will do us any good!" I mumbled hopelessly, looking around at the blank walls and especially where a window had once been, now all carefully bricked up by a mason. "Six stories above nowhere—only the river's out there, anyhow!"
Looking around I saw the roll of rubber cloth from which Craig had torn a piece.
"Did you lose your prize in the fight, whatever it was?" I asked listlessly. "No; I've learned from the magicians not only how to palm any small object I care to; but also when I need my hands how to hide it in my mouth!" Craig drew it forth from the pocket of one cheek and switched it to the other.
"Well, what is it? What good will it ever be—if we get out of this?"
"I don't know," he answered. "But I think it is something Doctor Lenoire dropped."
"These walls—pretty thick brick," I observed.
Desperately I threw myself against the door that had snapped its lock outside when we had been squeezed in. All I did was to hurt my shoulder against the metal sheathing that made it fireproof from the inside.
I bent over where Kennedy was fumbling under the shelves. "I haven't much hope but we might rip down some of the shelves to make some kind of battering ram."
"Pretty soft wood," he considered. "Strange—this floor seems to have a crack all along where it joins the wall!"
"I can't see what good that might do us," I replied, first dancing my weight on the floor, then bending down again beside him. "Floor seems to be solid enough."
I coughed. Something was affecting my throat.
"Stand up, Walter, quick!" Kennedy warned, choking also.
"What is it, Craig? What do I smell?"
I realized suddenly that hanging low about the floor but now rising was a stinking, choking, nauseating gas.
"Chlorine!" muttered Craig. "Coming in through that little ventilator there, and sinking down in that far corner to the floor. Stay over here!"
Minutes that seemed hours passed, the chlorine getting worse and worse.
"It's getting me, Craig!" I gasped, clutching at my throat.
At first my mind had been keenly alive to this new danger. Now my lips seemed large and growing larger. I fancied they were covering my nostrils. My legs were wobbling. Kennedy, suddenly busy over by the shelves, seemed miles away. I could just about make him out in a haze. I was going fast....
SUDDENLY pains were shooting through my head. I was
conscious of myself. I could hear Craig, also.
"Walter! Walter! Are you all right?"
"Ye—yes—but you?" I was trying hard to think.
This was the same cursed room and we had had no gas masks. What had happened?
Kennedy had me up, walking me a bit now, walking, walking. "Pull yourself together, man! I don't know what may happen next!"
"Did—it stop?" I coughed, recollecting.
"No—it's still pouring in that ventilator but if must be nearly out of the cylinder."
"Then what happened?" I cried, puzzled.
"The hypo on the shelf!" he exclaimed.
"What do you mean, hypo?" I felt myself getting stronger.
"As soon as I, knew it was chlorine I began thinking of how to fight it. Suddenly I thought of the hypo they use in photography. There were several jars on the shelf. Hypo is sodium thiosulphide—hypo turns chlorine into a harmless gas! I managed to open jar after jar of it!"
"What a relief!"
"This chlorine accounts for everything in here being so bleached, colorless. It must have been used often before!"
He was still holding me up to keep me active.
"Hey! What's that?" I called, grasping at him desperately. "Hang on to me—I'm going, slowly!"
It was as though my legs were gradually giving way under me.
"No, Walter! It's not your legs! It's the floor!"
Slowly the floor was turning under us!
I clutched his arm.
Yet nothing else in the room seemed to come after us. Everything in it had been fastened to 'the walls, everything stayed but us! I felt myself going, but I was conscious!
Now I felt my shoulders, hips, back being scraped! We were sliding down something—down, down, down—slowly at first, but gaining speed!
"Craig! Craig! Are you hurt? Where are we coming out?"
"All right so far, bruised but—" He was trying to save both of us as much as possible. "Remember those lines from head to foot on that body in the river? This must be the shaftway of the warehouse—an old chute in it for loading vessels on the dock below!"
DOWN—down—down we were
being shot into pitch darkness! Into an
abyss—faster—faster—faster!
Would we never stop—scraping, jamming with each other in the chute, then in the scramble to save each other and check our downward course, loosening the jam and starting all over again.
Minutes seemed an eternity.
Suddenly we were catapulted out—a wide arc in the night air—and struck the cold water of the river with a resounding splash that almost knocked the breath from me.
Like two skinned rats we had been hurled into the now deserted river. The coldness of that water was the last shock, if any, that was needed to remove the final traces of the gas coma. I held my breath for the seconds until I came to the surface again.
"Where are you, Walter?" I could hear.
"Over—here!" I spluttered, striking out.
I was smarting all over from the salt water in the open scratches and cuts. But we had negotiated the chute safely.
"Help! Help!" shouted Kennedy.
I joined in with him as best my hoarse and still choking throat would permit me. We shouted again; paused to listen.
A voice in the night was answering from the wharf! There was something familiar about its tone, too. And just then a rope uncoiled in the air over the end of the dock and fell near me. I grasped at it mechanically. But I hadn't much strength left.
Kennedy wound it around me, treading water with his own last strength.
Slowly I was lifted clear of the spiles and deposited on the dock by two pairs of brawny hands.
"Huh!" I heard a grunt. "I told you so!" It was Inspector O'Connor and a roundsman.
Without a second lost the rope was over again and they had Craig dripping, and almost all in, beside me.
O'Connor, flabbergasted, viewed our nakedness. "I ought to take you up for indecent exposure! Like a couple of wharf rats! Bathing with no respect for the city ordinances!" Then his voice became really serious. "Now, how in the name of heaven did you ever get out there in the river?"
Kennedy, beginning to recover his breath, pointed in pantomime to the warehouse.
"They're not nudists," began Kennedy, shivering. "They're Devil Worshippers!"
"Devil Worshippers, is it?" O'Connor did not know whether to be sceptical or not. He eyed us sharply. "Well, I believe you! No one could be out in that icy water so long and not be sobered up, if it was that!"
"It's not the same Bauer bunch," ignored Craig, now shivering, but eager for action. "This Rasquin—"
He started to brief our story, but his teeth were chattering.
"Here, take my coat, Mr. Kennedy!" O'Connor stripped it off and flung it over Craig. "Tom, give your coat to Mr. Jameson! Stay with them. I'm going to the call box. I know what they want—¦ some clothes and then back to the place and raid it."
WE waited, warmed by the kindly coats, our heads
clearing in the fresh river air.
It seemed an incredibly short time when, without siren or gong, the emergency wagon slipped up with a couple of suits for us, loose but at least suits. Up the dock in the shadow was a patrol of reserves, and the officer was reporting to O'Connor.
"Come on, boys!"
Led by Craig they scaled the brick wall, where the wire gate was now closed and padlocked. In the courtyard there was no answer to the emergency night bell.
"The night watchman's beat it!" muttered O'Connor. "Crash it!" he ordered.
Not much hacking at the heavy old door was necessary to smash the lock. In a minute we were inside, made sure the power was still on, and started up in the elevator, guns and flashlights bristling.
At the sixth Craig stopped them. Hack and smash again and we were now in the Red Lodge.
Dark and silent.
They deployed and found the switches. As the lights flashed up there came an assorted series of gasps from the reserves.
"Empty!" reported one. "Not a soul!"
With O'Connor, Craig and I had started through the reception room toward the room of the Devil's altar, O'Connor interspersing imprecations with pious ejaculations as one new evidence of impiety after another greeted his amazed eyes.
"Our clothes are gone!" I exclaimed to Craig.
"Certainly! Not only were they getting rid of us—but of our clothes, every clue to us!"
By this time we had searched everything, including the studio and even the fatal little dark-room, but with no result.
"Well," I said, "at least we hold the Outer Circle!"
Kennedy shrugged. "And a lot of good that does us. We've lost every damned one of them!"
He stepped over to the hand telephone, jiggled the bar, found it connected and gave a number.
We waited a minute.
"No answer!" he muttered, taking the receiver from his ear. "Walter, look up the number of the Marianne Arms."
I gave it to him. It was the big cooperative apartment on Park Avenue where the Stuart Webbs lived, I remembered.
In a moment Kennedy was talking to the hall man at the switchboard. When he hung up it was with a frown of concern on his face. "Neither Mr. Webb nor Mrs. Webb have come in so far this morning!"
He turned to us.
"Now," he said, "we have got a problem—Natalie Webb!"
WE DID not go back to the cruiser. Instead, we went to our town apartment on the Drive overlooking the Hudson near the University.
The high tension of the orgy had been too much for me. It was forenoon before I awoke, and then only to find Kennedy gone.
I fancied I knew where to find him and
I was right—at his laboratory just off the campus.
He was at work and it was several minutes before a word was said. My mind was full of the dangers that beset Natalie Webb.
"How might the high priest use that so-called Death Thought that seems to obsess Natalie—against her, I mean?" I asked.
"How?" he repeated scarcely looking up. "Suppose someone tried to break away, to renounce the Red Lodge, expose its secrets? They might treat him or her so as to make him harmless—perhaps insane, confused, afraid to talk, paralyzed with fear, or even to commit suicide—or to be killed in an accident, as it might seem. To me it appears very real how they would put the Death Thought on that person!"
"Of one thing I am sure," I observed with conviction. "Whatever may lie back of it all, especially back of Natalie Webb's strange tale, those Devil Dancers don't sham!"
"No," he answered. "I have thought so seriously of it all that at the first possible moment I notified my friend, Captain Ames of the Missing Persons Bureau. Besides I am employing a private detective agency to do little shadowing of the principal characters we met last night."
"I see." I glanced up to find Kennedy standing by the light examining something very carefully. I bent over and on the table where he was working I saw some of the pieces of thin glass he had picked up at the Red Lodge, still in the torn piece of rubber sheeting in which he had been able to preserve them. "They look to me like pieces of a thin glass tube, Craig. What are they?"
"An ampoule, I believe, is the technical name of such a container," he replied, holding it closer to the light.
In it were the remains of a dried yellow substance, broken up minutely, resembling crystals.
"Who dropped it? Doctor Lenoire?"
"I think so. At least I saw him nearest Stuart Webb, stooping over him at the time, and I imagine this is what I saw gleaming an instant in the light."
"What is it?" I pursued.
"I have an idea. That's what I am checking on to be absolutely sure."
IT WAS evidently a difficult and troublesome
analysis upon which he was engaged, for he would say
nothing further about it, but buried himself in some of the
technical works with which his library was stocked.
The telephone tinkled and Craig picked up the hand telephone.
"Yes. This is Kennedy. Yes!"
He was nodding vigorously to me to get on the extension.
To my astonishment it was Stuart Webb himself wildly excited.
"Natalie is gone!" he announced, the words tumbling forth before Craig could ask a question.
"When did you see her last?"
"At the Red Lodge last night. I expected to meet her at our apartment. She hasn't come in and no one has seen her!"
"Since when?" demanded Craig.
"Since after the Lodge!"
"Yes—after!" There was a volume of meaning in Craig's inflection on that last word. "How did she go away? Do you know?"
"Yes. She left with Madame Rasquin!"
"I see!" It is rather hard to accept with equanimity the attempted murder of yourself and your friend, but Craig was preserving his cool judgment. "Go on!"
"Then I get this incoherent note from her!"
"Yes? Read it over the wire. Quick!"
"All right! Here it is."
Webb came back. "I'll read it. 'You would forgive me and pity me if you knew what I am going through. Because I have refused to yield my will to the will of the Lodge, I suppose I have aroused the enmity of the Lodge!'"
"Webb!" interrupted Craig. "She means breaking her oath, does she?"
"I don't know! Here, let me go on. 'I feel that my hour has come, that mental forces that are irresistible are being directed against me! For days I have fought against it! At last I am conquered! Good-by!'"
"Is that all? Yes? What does she mean—'the will of the Lodge' and 'fought against it'?"
"I don't now!" Webb's voice was insinuating. "Perhaps there was some mental reservation on her part," he suggested. "You do not yourself know of any reason why she should fear anything, do you?" His question was pointed.
"Do you?" retorted Craig.
"Oh, no; nothing!" He was almost whining now. "Can't you help me find her? I've been looking around—I'm almost crazy!"
"Surely! Where are you?"
"In a telephone booth. Columbus Circle. I'm looking every place she used to frequent. I'll call you later. But I thought you ought to know, that you might help me!"
Kennedy was jiggling the bar in the hand set. "He hung up!"
He replaced the telephone bar, began stripping off his acid-stained smock.
"What are you going to do?" I inquired eagerly.
"I have a hunch, pending some word from the M. P. Bureau or my agency," he replied. "Come on! I got one hunch from that Nudist Shop. Perhaps I may get another!"
HIS roadster was in front of the Chemistry Building
and he made a quick getaway into traffic ahead of another
sedan which already was about to start.
"Look!" I said a few minutes later as he chiseled into some space across from the Nudist Shop. "It's closed!"
"Well, not open, at least!"
Craig strode across the sidewalk to it, tried the door.
"You lookin' for Miss Connie?" A colored man in a jumper was polishing the brass name plates of the tenants of the upper floors. "She ain't come down today yet."
"I see! Yes, I must see her. Important! Do you happen to know where Connie lives now?"—
The porter fumbled in an inside pocket. "Yassuh! She give me this address, down in Rivington Street."
Kennedy thanked him and again we were off.
The place proved actually to be an annex to a settlement. But Connie Harper—Craig had seen her name on the porter's address book—was not there. In fact she had received a message quite early in the morning and had left hurriedly!
We climbed back in the car, and he was off in the direction, I assumed, of police headquarters.
He was swinging around a corner when there was a loud explosion in our left front tire, and the roadster swerved right into an elevated pillar in the middle of the street. Only Craig's instant action and perfect brakes prevented a serious smash-up both of ourselves as well as the car.
Only by a miracle, it seemed, was the car behind us prevented from piling up on ours.
"That was a new tire, Walter \" he muttered, quickly climbing out from under the wheel. "Let me look at it!"
He bent down on one knee while I bent over back of him.
"Look at that! A slasher's been at it! Cut clean through to the fabric and the flap fastened back with just a tip of rubber cement to fool me—until it blew and sent me running amuck!"
"By George, Craig! That's right—" Suddenly everything went black. I reeled and the last I remember was a quick fading glimpse of a goggled woman driver in the sedan that had just narrowly missed piling up on us....
I woke on the sidewalk with a terrific pain in my head, a crowd about, which one cop was keeping back while a white-coated ambulance doctor was bending down on one knee beside me. Craig, his linen dirty and coat torn, stood beside him.
"No fracture," the doctor was saying. "Just a pretty tough blow with a blackjack. Saved you, sir. This kid over here says you fought off three of them, tough eggs trying to hustle you into the sedan behind. Pretty nervy, I'll say!"
"The—the girl—in the sedan!" I muttered, trying to get up on my wobbly pins. "Something familiar about her, I thought."
"Yes," he put in, "the car that followed us all the way down from the Heights. Peggy Wright in goggles—and three toughs."
THE officer at the rail bowed us into the private
office of Captain Ames at the M.P. Bureau at headquarters,
down the hall on the first floor.
"Any news, Captain?" greeted Craig.
"Not yet, Kennedy," returned the captain. "Say, what are you doing—uncovering a murder syndicate or a red-headed girls' club? I've got my best men, all I can spare, at work on that case of Natalie Webb. It's gone out on the police radio and the commissioner has given it his special attention."
"Well, here's another!" Craig reached for a blank and shoved it before Ames, "Now, put this down!"
"What—another!"
"Yes. Name—Constance Harper. Address—Rivington Street. Business address—West Forty-fifth Street—The Nudist Shop. Age—about twenty-two. Color of hair—auburn. Height—"
"Just a moment! Just a moment! The Nudist Shop!" Captain Ames pressed a buzzer on his desk and his door opened. "Lieutenant Weinstein, bring in those three folders I had you get out of the files." He returned to Kennedy. "Three girls who have worked in that Nudist Shop have disappeared since the First of June. We had the inquiries from out of town but—"
"Why, probably they're the very three cases Donovan showed me over at the morgue. How come both departments have slipped up on connecting the two things?"
"Slipped up—nothing! In the first place two of them were given to us as blondes and the inquiry about the third, the one you picked up in the river, just came in this morning. None of them gave the working address as the Nudist Shop. We just developed that ourselves this morning. I suppose the girls were afraid to let their folks at home know exactly what their jobs were. So, you couldn't expect us to be mindreaders. The Nudist Shop never gave us a squeal, naturally. But my bureau gets its girl, no matter if they dye their hair or the relatives give us incorrect or insufficient information."
"You have Donovan's records?"
"I'll get them all."
"Thanks, Captain!"
"The boys haven't stirred up anything yet—but they will, any minute, now. Tell me some more about this Harper girl. When was she seen last?"
"I saw her yesterday at the shop. But she didn't come to work this morning. At her room they tell me she got a telephone message this morning and went out in a hurry."
Kennedy was thoughtful a moment. "You see, Captain," he went on, "if I am thinking straight, that devilish bunch has outguessed us. They know I was up there at the shop yesterday. Probably knew it last night, which inspired that attack on Walter and me then. They knew I might go there again today. Which inspired the second attack that miscarried just now. So, I reason they would fix it so that this Connie Harper would never be seen by me again, alive at least. Clever—but they don't know that it's dead women who do tell tales to those who know how to read them!"
KENNEDY had been studying the bureau's records that
Weinstein brought in along with copies of Donovan's records
of the morgue.
"There's not a doubt but that these three cases are identical in all their features," he concluded.
"But what gets me, Kennedy, is that they're always Titians as the newspapers call 'em. And this Natalie Webb is a Titian too! Now how do you account for that? Has somebody got a passion for red-headed girls to love 'em and drown 'em?"
"I don't think you're far wrong," returned Craig cryptically, "only there's something much deeper in it!"
"Why, what do you mean? Something psychopathic?"
"I'd prefer not to say until I can check up some more," avoided Kennedy. "It's why I am so worried over Natalie Webb."
Kennedy was nervously pacing the captain's office.
"Your three are without a shadow of doubt the same three whose records are down in the morgue. I found the third one. I think I'm going to call up Donovan and put him wise."
He seized the telephone and the girl at the switchboard dialed the morgue.
"Hello, Donovan! Kennedy speaking. Has anything else come in today, Donovan, in my line—I mean red-headed girls?" There was a short pause. "You were calling the captain? I'll put him on!" He turned to us. "Get on extensions on the switchboard outside! I want you both to get this! All right, Donovan!"
Captain Ames and I strode into the outer office and grabbed two of the phones just in time to get the end of Donovan's answer.
"—and what are you, a mindreader or something, Mr. Kennedy!" Donovan was exploding. "I was just about to call Cap'n Ames when you rang up, not knowing at the moment where to locate you! Well, it's not five minutes ago one of the police boats in the harbor picked up the body of another pretty little red-head!"
"Yes? Any details?"
I felt my own heart almost in my throat. What if it were Natalie Webb—and we were too late!
"We're just checking up by the radio. She's wearin', if you please, the same kind of moccasins the others wore!"
"Yes, yes! Go on! How old is she—about?"
"Oh, they say about twenty-one or-two."
"Anything else?"
"Yes. She has a birthmark or a mole or something on her abdomen, funny shape, like a turtle."
"Thank God!"
"What do you mean, thank God!"
"I mean thank God it's not Natalie Webb! Nudists have no secrets everybody doesn't know. She has no blemish on her skin. Look!" He was reading off rapidly the blank Captain Ames had been filling out. "How does that sound to you? Does it fit?"
"Exactly!"
"Then it's Constance Harper, Rivington Street. Say, where did they find this body? In the East River?"
"No, sir. In the Hudson River—well up—under the Palisades. Between you and me I think it might be a Jersey case!"
"Captain!" I heard Ames' operator. "Long distance is holding the line for you—some police chief over in New Jersey!"
Between the two now, I did not get all of what was happening on either line.
Craig finished and a moment later Captain Ames turned from his telephone.
"Kennedy!" he called, his hand over the transmitter. "They've just got a report from a town on the west shore of the Hudson up in the Palisades, near the Park. Some children have seen what looks like the body of a girl on the cliffs at Rockwall, a couple of hundred feet above the river and a hundred and fifty or so below the road on the top. What do you make of that?"
Craig was doing some quick thinking. I could well imagine the general trend of it. Connie Harper's body had been located on the side of the river toward the Palisades. Here was another body of a dead girl. Murders to destroy witnesses and cover a trail were coming fast.
"What do you say?" pressed Captain Ames, hand on the transmitter still. "What shall I tell this police chief over there?"
"Tell him to hold everything!" decided Craig quickly. "Give us one of your best department cars. Let's throw in a coil of a couple of hundred feet of rope. We'll get out there before any hick detectives can muss things up! I am worried over Natalie Webb! Let's go!"
UP at Rockwall the local authorities had not yet recovered the body, more, I felt, from inertia than as a result of any request that Captain Ames had hurriedly made.
We sped up the river on the west side to a point where the broad highway for a time debouched from the top of the Palisades and from view of the water. We had to abandon the car and follow a little path along the top of the Palisades, evidently not much used for the low-tangled shrubbery and brambles interrupted our progress. The place was lonesome with an austere quiet that in itself breathed menace.
We stopped. Craig was pointing down the precipitous side of the cliff, over a hundred feet below. Quite as it had been reported, there indeed was the body of a girl—naked!
We were excited but silent. Was it, could it be the body of Natalie Webb?
At that precise point the sheer cliffs were impossible of either ascent or descent, it seemed, unaided, with bare hands and ordinary shoes.
Near the edge where we were, was a huge oak ideal for support. Craig swung the rope about it securely, and started to descend himself, first. Captain Ames went next and then I came.
At last we had let ourselves down to a ledge along which we could make our way with comparative ease and safety.
Craig was bending over the body. The captain, next, cut off my view of it completely. However, I nerved myself, at a bit of risk for my curiosity, to lean outward to see what might have happened to Natalie.
"It's Madame Rasquin!" I exclaimed in relief.
The next instant my relief was succeeded by curiosity. "What happened to her?" I called. "Was she flung over here?"
Kennedy was still examining the body where it was caught on the ledge in the stunted trees. He looked up quickly, with a peculiar expression on his face, and uttered just one word.
"Drowned!"
"Drowned?" I looked about, incredulous. How could it be?
Captain Ames looked in astonishment first up the almost perpendicular side of the cliff. Only by herculean strength could she have been hurled down from the road or path above. Nor did it seem probable that her body could have rolled only so far and have lodged on the ledge. Besides, there were no bruises on it.
As for us, we had had to use a rope to get to the body where it was caught in the tangle growing bravely over the river a couple of hundred feet, perhaps, below.
Ames and I looked again, this time down. How could she have been carried up from the river, either? It might be barely possible to scramble up or down, from or to, the river bank at this point. But is was not merely herculean, it was impossible to do it with such a burden, in fact with any burden.
"This thing," remarked Captain Ames, his eyes now on the lordly river below, perplexed, "recalls to me other bodies found floating in the river, set down as suicides. True, some of them were found miles down stream. It's like a suicide club!"
Kennedy was making his way with difficulty some twenty or so feet up the face of the cliff. I could no longer see him, so I climbed after.
"Walter, look!" He pointed. "It's like a dry watercourse here. There is a sort of tunnel, a cave in the rocks, just above where the body lodged. I explored it. It's damp in the rocks. And it's shallow. But it ends—in an iron door!"
"An iron door!" I exclaimed looking upward. "Hung here—in mid-air!"
Above there seemed nothing but rocks and trees, no house, no habitation visible, at least from where we were.
"That was no suicide, either!" Craig muttered to Ames.
"But if it is murder," I queried, "who did it? How?"
Kennedy made no comment for a minute. Instead, he kept looking up. "We'll make a thorough search above," he muttered. "There's no use even considering the river below."
"What?" exclaimed Ames. "And the girl drowned?"
"No one could come up. Not a trace of anything—except that it looks as if there had been a freshet down these rocks!"
AMES was peering down at the sheer drop. His foot
slipped. He caught himself. But a loosened stone fell. I
watched it, thinking how fortunate that the acceleration
due to gravity was acting on the stone, not on Ames.
"See? Just as I thought!" Kennedy's voice brought me back and I saw he was carefully leaning over observing the fall of the stone. It struck the water with a splash, quite out from the edge of the river.
"There's a rise and fall of the tide here," he observed. "It's low water now. Let's look around at the top of the cliff."
We retraced our ascent and on the top of the cliff began our search. Where we had left the car was a real-estate development known as Rockwall Park. But beyond, above where the body was, between the road and the cliff stood a huge house known as the "Chateau." On the other side of the road from the Chateau was the state park.
In the Chateau one would have imagined that a bit of continental Europe had been transplanted to the Hudson.
Built of stone, gray and sombre as its cliff foundation, the tower reared itself skyward, challenging the winds and storms of over a century. It was bare of ornament, with long, narrow casement windows set deep in its stone walls. The entrance was a heavy door studded with bolts, arched, suggestive of spaciousness within. Its air of mystery intrigued me, more so as I soon perceived it was the real focus of Kennedy's attention as well.
Craig continued to study it as we chatted with the constable, whose men were making arrangements to haul up the body of Madame Rasquin by ropes fastened to a basket, whence it was to be transferred to the morgue of a local undertaker.
The Chateau faced the road that followed the cliff edge several hundred feet away. Across this road, I saw now, lay a lake, with the hills rising higher and higher, almost mountains, beyond. On the other side of the Chateau, far below, lay the river.
"I fancy now I recall the history of this 'castle'," remarked Kennedy. "If I remember rightly it was built over a hundred years ago by the old Duc de Rien, a wealthy refugee from France at the stormy time of the Revolution. But who owns it now? What is it used for?"
The constable wagged his head. "Well, once it was a road house in the good old prohibition days. It had a certain rich clientele from the city. Outsiders, if they got in, got rotten food, rotten service, no liquor. Just to discourage them. People here in Rockwall hated it. Didn't add to the tone of the village as a home-owning community."
"Ever raided by enforcement officers or state troopers?"
"Yes; I'll say it was. Raided and padlocked."
"But there's someone in it now. I see a car parked."
"Surely. The courts terminated the padlock period and a very wealthy man from the city bought it, they say."
"They say?" repeated Kennedy. "Do you know his name?"
"Stuart Webb, they tell me."
"Stuart Webb!" I echoed.
"Yes. Know him? Well, they say now he's sold it to a Frenchman, a doctor, named Lenore, or something like that, for a sanitarium."
"Indeed?"
The constable's men by this time had succeeded in bringing the body to the top of the cliff in the undertaker's basket. Quite a crowd of the curious from the village had gathered.
Suddenly Kennedy strode over and lifted the wicker lid of the basket, precisely what the morbid curiosity of the crowd had wanted, but had not dared to do.
There was a murmur of excitement. "Naked—all naked!"
"Did you ever see her face around here?" asked Craig.
"Yes!" exclaimed a middle-aged woman back of him. "Yes, I seen her, several times!"
"Today?"
"No; not today; nor yesterday. But I seen her drive up lots o' times—in a big car."
"I see. How do you remember?"
"I been a kitchen helper hired by the day there, often."
"And your name?"
"Bolan—Bridget Bolan." She pointed to a weather-beaten shack down the road. "I live there."
Kennedy, with his back to it, was regarding the Chateau out of the tail of his eye as he turned his head. He walked deliberately back to our closed car and got in it. So did Ames and I.
"There's only one thing to do," he answered our inquiring glances. "I don't want to be known too well here. I've got to get into that Chateau tonight by hook or crook. I believe that that's the Inner Circle!"
"How to do it!" Craig was thinking out loud. "That's the question."
As for Captain Ames he was no help. He thought in terms of crashing it.
"I have it!" exclaimed Kennedy suddenly. "Bridget Bolan! Just drive around for half an hour until this excitement quiets down. Then drop me off at the little gray house up the road."
CRAIG and I sauntered into Bridget's kitchen and
she greeted us with: "Well and what can I do for yez
now?"
"When do you go up to the Chateau again, Bridget?"
"Tonight. I'm to help out the cook and clean up."
Craig was ostentatiously folding a ten-dollar bill in all the designs, darts and pinwheels, that a schoolboy does with a small sheet of paper. He looked up at her. "Do you think you could let me into that sanitarium?" he asked suddenly.
"Why don't yez go to the front dure?"
"Well, it's this way, Bridget. They have a poor girl, a friend of mine, in there and they won't let her out. Maybe you don't know how hard it is in this state to go to a court and get anybody released from a sanitarium. They say she's an epileptic and she's no more an epileptic than you are!"
"Glory be! I seen the poor young lady! I know where they keep her. In one o' them rooms in the basement, more like a cell, poor thing! They told me she—" and Bridget tapped her forehead significantly. "And she's all right and wants to get out?"
"Yes; we are her friends. Can't you help us?" He crumpled up the bill and handed it to her, holding her big red hand a moment, and looking frankly into her eyes.
"Ah, that's what's after troublin' me, sir! Work's scarce up here now and if I lose me job, well it's just too bad!"
"Open the service door fifteen minutes after you go in."
She shook her head. "No; the cook!" she negatived. "I'll unlock the store-room window. That room leads to the back stairs. I'm due there at six o'clock. Her room is at the end of a passage, toward the river."
"All right. Leave your handkerchief on the window ledge and I'll tie another ten-spot in it for you!"
DURING the afternoon we got Inspector O'Connor
as well as Captain Ames and together they picked about a
dozen of their best men, with whom we arranged an elaborate
system of signals.
"This is the window," indicated Craig as we prowled along the side of the Chateau. "There's Bridget's handkerchief!"
We hopped up, Craig pausing only long enough to leave the reward.
From an open door to the service stairs that ran tip the whole height of the Chateau as well as down to a sub-basement, I could catch a glimpse of the main house. The big hall with large paintings, rich rugs, tapestries blending with the stains of time, indicated that it was or had been, at least, a marvelous place.
As I tried to appraise it, I felt that an intangible spirit of cruelty seemed to pervade the atmosphere. Perhaps it came from a large painting of Satan in modern dress.
"It's the Inner Circle, all right!" whispered Craig. "Now, watch yourself! From what Bridget told me, I think we go down these service stairs another flight—into a sort of cellar. Come on!"
Carefully he descended testing each tread for fear it might emit a tell-tale squeak.
At the foot of the stairs there was a long passageway, quite as Bridget had said. One way led to the furnace room and coal storage, below the level of the ground. The other was closed off by a door with a snap lock. This seemed, by the slope of the land, to be above the level of the ground.
Without a doubt it was at the end of this closed part of the passageway that Natalie was held.
Should we open that door?
Quietly and carefully Craig fingered the snap lock as he shot the snap back and fastened it with the ratchet. Then slowly and gingerly he opened the door, first on a crack, then further.
There was the remainder of the passageway, wide and long and dark. We paused, and listened. Not a sound.
Kennedy took a couple of steps along the passageway. It was creepy, uncertain, but I followed, my senses now keenly alive to every sound, every breath in the blackness.
He pulled out his electric bull's-eye and flashed it ahead of us along the corridor. Sure enough at the far end was a door. It must be, then, that it was behind that door that Natalie was a prisoner.
He took a cautious couple of steps more toward it, his flashlight wavering a bit with the motion of his body.
"Look! What's that?" I was pointing to two gleaming greenish spots in the darkness that seemed to shine in the rays as the eyes of an animal often reflect weirdly in the rays of the headlight of a car. Then they were gone.
On down the passageway we proceeded silently, slowly.
"There's something in this atmosphere, Craig, that gives me the clammy creeps!"
"Sh!" he checked me. "We're at the door now! I wonder!"
He paused; listened. "Do you hear it, Walter?" he asked. "There's someone in there, all right!"
I bent my ear down to it, also.
"There certainly is, Craig. A woman—moaning! By heaven, is that Natalie's voice?"
We both strained our attention.
"It is!" exclaimed Craig, restraining himself with difficulty. Suddenly he rattled the knob gently. Hoarsely but above a whisper he called: "Natalie! Natalie! Are you there?"
The moaning stopped with a startled intake of breath. "Yes! Is—is that you, Craig?"
She opened the door. Through it I could see barred slits of windows beyond.
"Are you all right, Natalie? Safe?"
"Yes—so far! But, Craig, you're not safe in that passageway—Oh! Get out! Get out! Save yourselves while there is time! I can't!"
JUST then a draught of air from her windows through
the open door seemed to sweep down the passageway and the
door with the snap lock through which we had come was blown
shut with a terrific bang!
I jumped. But it was nothing to the sinking sensation I felt a minute later as, for some reason or other, I heard the snap lock on the other side that Kennedy had fixed back with the ratchet suddenly click—locking it!
We were prisoners with Natalie—on one side windows barred like a jail, on the other a probably aroused house of devils incarnate!
Craig's flashlight was directed now back along the passageway through which we had come.
"There it is again—those glowing green spots in the darkness!" I called. "What is it?"
The glowing spots seemed to be slowly waving back and forth. Now they were progressing toward us! There was something malevolent in them!
"Craig! Walter! Why did you come here? It—it's the rattlesnake—placed in that passageway by these demons to cut off my escape or rescue. Quick! In here! Quick—let me shut this door! Quick!"
"No, Natalie! Walter, hold the door open! I must have—light! Hear the rattle?"
There was no chance for more words. A slithering, and the evil gleams of the eyes were coming closer, closer!
I watched, hypnotized, fascinated. The ominous sound came again—that angry rattle!
"Keep that flashlight on it, Walter! The light from those slits of windows is failing—it's not enough! That's it! Play the light on every move! If he turns toward you, bang that door and save Natalie! I'm trying what the snake doctors have taught me! I don't dare shoot. That light's too uncertain and one shot would bring that whole crew down on us! It's our only chance of getting out of here alive!"
"Look out! It's going to strike!"
Up came the head in a lunge at Craig. Deftly Kennedy stepped aside, faster than a boxer in the ring. Like an Indian's, his hand shot out and he grabbed the serpent just below the head!
Natalie gasped.
"Don't fail me, Walter! Play that light! No shadows!" he pleaded thickly through his teeth. "I must see every move!"
Its tail was swishing and rattling.
Around Kennedy's arm, his neck it writhed, a venomous streak of brown! The thing seemed to have the vitality of hell itself.
Suddenly, at last, Craig loosened enough of it with his other hand from his arm that held it. He braced himself, taut like a Laocoon, jamming the striking head against the wall, once, twice, again and again, bruising it, lower and lower to the floor each time, until, himself as infuriated as any serpent, he could bring the heel of his stout shoe upon it, stamping, stamping!
Almost, I could hear the cracking of its backbone as with a final surge of his strength, Craig jumped back. Natalie almost fainted. I was fairly sick with the horror of the thing.
With the last bit of its dying strength the rattler writhed again toward Kennedy, striking impotently!
Kennedy was leaning over, dispatching it with the butt of his gat, when the spring-lock door swung open and the passageway seemed suddenly to swarm with male nurses from above stairs. As they poured in Craig tossed his gat into Natalie's cell. "Keep it to use if you need it!" he called and then they were on us.
There was not a chance for a signal. We were swept along by an insane, superhuman strength down the passageway toward an iron plate in the floor. One of them pressed a switch. The plate rose, yawning, black. It was a trap door!
We slid down into a slimy darkness!
IT TOOK a moment for my eyes to become accustomed to this darkness. There had been none too much light in the long passageway above, even with Natalie's door open in the fast-fading twilight. But this was such a slimy darkness that one did not see it so much as feel it.
"How are you, Craig?" I called. "All right? No bones broken?"
"No bones broken—but am I sore!"
"Where are we, I wonder?" I had picked myself up, moving my limbs, glad at least there were no bones broken, but only a countless number of smarting bruises.
"Look out, Walter! Careful!" adjured Craig, also on his feet. "We're on a sort of platform—there's no rail—and the depth below is untold."
He was poking and feeling around as if for a stone or a bit of anything loose. The very floor of the platform was slimy, soft, but he found what he was looking for.
He tossed it out into the darkness, waited, counting.
I heard it drop—plump! "At least there's no water down there," I observed. "I was expecting a splash!"
"No; but it's somewhere between thirty-two and sixty-four feet deep. We're on a rock platform, with no rail. So be careful how you get near the edge. It's slippery!"
It was then I began to realize that we were in something very much like a dungeon, or perhaps, rather, a well, damp and dark and deep-cut into the very rocks of the Palisades.
"There's not a chance to give a signal down here," I murmured. "We might as well be in the bottom of a mine."
"I wonder about Natalie!"
"There's one thing they can't do—get through that cordon that O'Connor and Ames have drawn about the place!" I answered grimly. "We may not be able to signal them—but the others can hardly avoid them."
"I've been feeling along ahead of me in my direction, Walter," called Craig. "What do you find on your side?"
"Nothing but a slimy wall—and, of course, that cursed door overhead of both of us," I reported. "What do you find—anything? Another wall?"
"No," he answered as cautiously as he was feeling out in the slippery darkness. "But there's something here—not a wall. Hello! It's a flight of steps."
"Well—"
"Are you game to go, down then?"
"Game? Sure I am. Lead ahead, Craig!"
We started down what seemed to be a circular flight of stone steps hewn out of the living rock.
"I think we must have made at least one turn around the circle of this wall, Craig'," I said after a minute or two.
"Better. A turn and a half at least. Don't get impatient, I'm taking no chances."
"And all the time in the world. Whatever our rendezvous is with—I'm in no haste to keep it!"
"You can well say that, Walter—with those devils above us!"
I WAS keeping after him but careful not to touch
him, for it was no easy job going down that circular
rock-hewn stairway. The steps were dank, dark, slimy,
slippery and malodorous. An unexpected pressure might
disturb one's balance. There was no way to restore it but
by one's own sense of equilibrium. Besides, we did not know
what jagged rocks might lie at the bottom of this black
hole. There was no water to break the fall.
As often as I did put my hands out, I could feel the thick ooze on the very walls.
Underneath, the steps were treacherous. They were not only slimy, but now and then a piece of one had been broken off at the outer end, perhaps by frost. At no point did the wall offer a thing which the hand could grasp to steady oneself if one slipped. Always on the outer side no railing—just black nothing! One misstep and....
Round and round that dungeon well we crawled as if we were human insects. There was certainly no danger of getting dizzy from it unless you let yourself go and allowed your mind to wander where the imp of the perverse was constantly beckoning.
Cautiously, slowly, with a constant interchange of speculations that resounded hollowly in the rocky depths, we made our way to the very bottom at last!
"Well, here we are!" observed Craig.
"And the rock at the bottom is not particularly jagged. In fact, it's particularly flat. This whole thing is man-made. Nature has had nothing to do with it."
I stood a moment in silence considering our peril. We had gone as far as we could down into what seemed to me to be the very bowels of the earth, yet I knew we must be still hundreds of feet above the river.
"Hulloa!" sang out Kennedy, ahead.
"What now?"
"The bottom slopes gently to a door—an iron door!"
"Well, I'll be—"
Instantly I realized what that meant. This must be the other side of that iron door Craig had discovered in the rock-cave tunnel just above the ledge where we had found the body of Madame Rasquin!
"What in the world can this be, Craig?" I questioned suddenly.
I had been stumbling around in the pitch blackness and my knees had come into painful contact with some obstruction over against one wall.
Kennedy whipped out his cigarette lighter and thumbed it to flame. By its flickering, feeble illumination we were able to discern what appeared to be a huge iron-bound chest, almost as large as a coffin and similarly shaped. There was an ancient, rusted, iron locking arrangement but the hasp was unfastened and the lid sprang open easily when Craig tried to lift it.
We peered in and saw that the huge chest was metal-lined, apparently with lead or zinc, and quite empty.
"Well, whatever it is, Walter, It's been thoroughly rifled," Kennedy remarked. "I wonder—" He paused abruptly and his brows knit in a frown of concentration. Then, shutting the great box once more, he held the lighter down close to the battered lid and moved the flame across its length peering closely as he did so.
"I thought as much, Walter!" He indicated on the lid a spot where there was some faint lettering, stenciled in what had once been black ink but now time-worn and barely decipherable. As I followed Craig's tracing forefinger I could make out several half-obliterated letters.
R—UL—UC DE—IEN
"Raoul, Duc de Rien," Kennedy clarified them for me. "I think I remember reading it now: that when the old Duc escaped from France he managed to bring with him, according to the legend, a chest of bullion, napoleons and louis d'ors. This formed the nucleus of his fortune in America but because of his experience with the Revolution in France and the difficulty he had had in getting his money out of the country, he would never trust his capital to the banks over here. Instead, he built his own impregnable safety vault beneath these cliffs. And this is it! We've been trapped in the old Duc's golden grave, arranged for anyone who might have wished to steal his wealth. And that door there must be his secret exit to the bank of the river, built over a century ago!"
"Yes, Craig; but that door was far above the river—and the trail down to the river looked good enough for only a mountain goat!"
"Perhaps. But it may have been better once. Does it occur to you that someone may have all but obliterated the remains of that trail, by dynamite or otherwise, for a purpose?"
"Perhaps."
"The old Duc lived, so the story goes, in constant fear of death from someone from whom he fled with his gold. There is a legend, I believe, that says he kept a boat always hidden on the river bank. This is the exit from his tunnel by which he planned, if surrounded, to make his escape down the trail on the cliffs below. We are caught in it!"
"Craig!" I cried in sudden alarm. "There's water beginning to rush in here at the bottom of this pit—down the walls! Hurry!"
Sure enough, already the water at the bottom of the dungeon was five or six inches deep—soon it was a foot.
HASTILY Craig groped his way back, found the first
of the rock-hewn steps we had descended and started the
ascent, quite as perilous, perhaps more so, compared with
the downward trip.
Fall over, and one might swim in the uprising water without more than grasping an ineffectual hold on a slimy step that not only could never be maintained, but would offer little chance of getting back on that slippery circular staircase again.
"I was afraid of something like this," Craig considered as we slowly toiled our way upward. "As I felt around, all the walls were wet—and it was a recent dampness."
With me now every sense, every nerve was on the qui vive.
"What about that door down there, Craig?"
"Moved by some secret lever from above," he replied. "I pushed and tugged on it without moving it an inch. It's a water-tight, air-tight door."
"What about the trap-door at the top?" I suggested.
"That has to be air-tight and watertight, also! We know that that opens downward into the place—that's how they slid us in here so easily."
"How high, do you suppose, the water rises in this cavern?" I inquired anxiously.
Craig's answer was far from reassuring. "As high as I could reach on that rock platform at the top I found the walls in the same state! That would indicate, I think, that this well is rather like a reservoir—can be filled to capacity as if it were a tank!"
"But, Craig," I said, "the height up on that platform was over our heads! You mean to say it could rise up there to the very top?"
"I see no reason to doubt it. Rather I see every reason to believe it!"
That was a shock. Rising, rising, rising! The water would ultimately claim us as its own!
"I wonder," I exclaimed next, "what the inspector and the captain are doing! I suppose they think everything is all right because they don't get any signal from us! Much good it would do to call for help from this black hole!"
Somewhere was a breach through which the water now was literally pouring in floods. To me, it seemed I must admit, that the zero hour had come.
To Craig, however, danger was not so imminent, even now, as to prevent him from reasoning. "You know, without a doubt that girl was drowned here!"
"Which one?" I asked.
"The last one, the clerk in the Nudist Shop."
"Here?" I repeated. "But her body was found in the river!"
"Yes! I believe the bodies that they have been finding in the Hudson River—¦ suicides, as everyone seems to think—were not suicides. They were murder!"
"Yes; in everything but appearance!"
"In appearance, too, if you know what to look for, as I shall show if we ever get out of this alive!"
"Yes!" I agreed bitterly. "If we ever get out alive!"
"The bodies in the East River must have come from that old warehouse, the Outer Circle. The bodies found in the Hudson came from the Inner Circle—here, the Chateau!"
"And that's the fate that awaits us?"
"With one exception! Those bodies were cast in here living but stupefied, insensible from some drug. Then, in the rush of water suddenly let loose into this place they were drowned!"
"I see!" I exclaimed. "And finally, by the opening of that door below they were hurled out in the night into the river, hundreds of feet below!"
"Precisely! Only Madame Rasquin was caught in the rocks and the brush that grows on the cliff. Something may have gone wrong with the water-force. Perhaps someone was careless or over-anxious to get rid of her. And we are here to meet the same fate as they!"
"But," I persisted, hoping against hope, "haven't we this advantage—we are conscious! The others must have been unconscious, at least, when they were cast into this pit!"
"We shall see," he returned grimly.
"Perhaps," I murmured, "it was merciful that they were unconscious!"
ON up rose the water, now bubbling and churning
below us, slowly overtaking us when we slowed up in our
ascent. What would it be when we came to the top and could
climb no more?
I was terrified beyond measure. Never have I felt the need of fresh air as I did at that moment. Only that sickening, oppressive odor of the musty, dank walls!
"What's that?" I called in a frenzy of fear as more plainly now I could hear the rush and swirl of the water, once far below, now catching up faster with us.
Down in the abyss we knew the water was rising in a deadly black maelstrom, faster, faster!
We had long since reached the platform. Craig, at this new rushing sound, had gone down a step or two.
"There is mud—and fish—in this water!" he called.
"What does that mean? An end to it?"
"It means, I believe, that it is coming from the bottom of that lake!"
Instantly I could picture the quiet little lake across the road which I had admired so much only a few hours before. My mind was racing—putting it all together. That lake was to be the means of encompassing our death!
"The old Duc de Rien probably had this merely as his getaway," Craig hurried on. "These resourceful, cruel devils have not only blasted away his trail to the river—they have tunneled to the bottom of the lake above in order to fill this huge rock tank quickly!"
The water was lapping up over the edge of the platform now, coming fast.
SO this was to be Kennedy's fate—and mine! Below, there was no miracle that could happen by which we might escape through that tunnel. The weight of such a tremendous rising column of water made that door below more than ever impossible to open except by the secret lever somewhere outside this cavern.
Here we were only a matter of feet, inches the other side of an equally impassable door overhead!
From the platform to which we had climbed once more I could just make out in the darkness that water was rushing in through another tunnel about as large as a fair-sized sewer.
Some ten feet across from the platform in the darkness of the abyss there was pouring in through this tunnel a raging, turbulent stream of death.
Relentless—rising, rising, rising—the water had mounted the steps, one by one—mow to the platform and above it, inch by inch, foot by foot!
As it covered the last rock-level of the platform on which we were, we crowded to what we could feel to be the spot on the slimy platform, highest by inches.
The water lapped about my ankles, then about my calves. I had that helpless feeling one gets in the face of the inevitable.
"Walter! Whatever you do—keep your feet!" Craig shouted.
Like him, I drew myself up to my full height, finally on my toes, with that spirit that prompts the human being to hang on to life to the last, hopeless second.
"Can you hear anything, Craig—overhead?" I asked anxiously, desperately, hoping his ears, often as sensitive as a microphone, might have detected some help coming that had escaped my own, straining though they were.
"No, Walter!"
I marveled at his tone. It was of one prepared to go, if necessary. But I knew his mind was working to the last, leaving no convolution of that marvelous brain of his untapped, lest there might be something that had not yet been thought of to defeat these overwhelming odds.
"If only Natalie has had the breaks!" he muttered.
On rose the murderous, chilling, numbing water to our thighs. Here in this fatal donjon now were racing through my mind all the terrors of all the tortures I had ever read.
Above the waist still bubbled the nasty, muddy, swirling water, stinking with the foulness of the bottom of a pure lake. It was like human lives that sometimes are stirred up revealing all the evil and wickedness that the thin veneer of culture has hitherto hidden.
"It's a mess!" I chattered bitterly. "Like the lives of those above us in that magnificent pile of masonry!"
"God help them!" muttered Kennedy.
I began to feel the buoying effect of the water that my body displaced.
Would I be able to keep my feet much longer in the swirl? It was just a matter of seconds when I, too, would be whirled around, striking out first lustily, then, as time went, more and more feebly in that cauldron.
"Keep your feet—whatever you do!" On up another inch or two—under the arm-pits.
What if we had only done this thing or that thing just a bit differently? Our present plight might not have been!
What if that door had not blown shut—and latched?
I shook my head. There had never been really a chance, after we entered that house, that we had actually been unobserved—with those huskies about, trained in handling the most violent of epileptics.
But what was the use of might-have-beens now?
That fatal water was over my shoulders—up to my mouth—I could grip no more. I felt my toes and feet no longer able to keep to the slippery platform! I was going—into that whirlpool!
"Craig!" I nerved myself now for the end.
"Yes, Walter, old man!"
I felt him grasp my hand firmly. "Strike out!" he shouted. "Keep with me, if you can! If you weaken—grab my belt—but not my shoulders—do as I do!"
IT seemed a terrific whirlpool of a current,
threatening to draw us any instant into the very death we
were struggling desperately against. The most powerful
swimmer could not have made much headway against it.
"Grab the jagged ends of rock in the wall—like me!" Craig shouted.
I did. I saw what he was doing. He was working himself slowly around the edge of the cavern, inch by inch, now that the water had risen almost to the roof. He was making for that sewer-tunnel that, across the black void of ten or twelve feet, had been discharging its stream of liquid death.
Inch by inch frantically gripping the jagged rock-ends with torn and numbing fingers I did the same, following him!
Could we make it?
Now I saw the reason for his strange calmness. As long as the water was below the level of the platform, in fact until it had reached the level of our heads, we could never hope to have bridged that ten-or twelve-foot gap of nothingness.
Lifted now by the deadly water itself we had a chance!
The tunnel was perhaps a bit over half filled by the rushing, oncoming stream. One could never have held one's own against it by swimming. Not even these fish could do that. But with feet gripping the bottom of the tunnel, perhaps four feet below, and hands grasping every jutting jagged rock overhead and on the sides, we might make it!
Craig had come to the onrush of the intake. For fully a minute he struggled desperately with hands and feet to locate any edges, anything that might give him a purchase to hang on just long enough to make that intake tunnel itself.
That minute was enough for me. I felt my hands slipping on the slimy projections of rocks. I could hold on no longer.
One hand slipped. I remembered his last injunction. With it I strove to grasp his belt under his coat.
I could not make it.
The other hand, unable alone to stem the swirl of the water, slipped.
An instant and I was swirling in the muddy whirlpool, helpless as a rotted root or branch drawn in from the lake bottom!
I was done for!
The next moment I felt a tug at my own belt. "Grab that jag of rock in front of you, Walter!"
I put out my hands, caught it.
Instinctively, mechanically my feet tried to aid me. I found a slight ledge, just a bit of unevenness beneath them. With hands and feet and a pull from one hand by Kennedy I, too, was facing the oncoming torrent that was rushing down to fill the cavern.
"Hurry! The thing is filling! The water will back up in here and well be caught just as badly!"
Slipping, scrambling, pushing and shoving one another ahead we scrambled up and up and up the long rock tunnel against the torrent, our hands and feet doing what no mere swimming could ever have done.
One could feel the slowing of the water. The rock tank below was full. Rapidly the tunnel itself was filling.
On up we toiled.
A sudden draught of cool night air!
Something brushed my face, lightly scratching it. Overhanging shrubbery!
I shook the muddy water out of my eyes and tried to form words with my numb lips.
There was the lake before us—with the placid moon streaming down on it! Grasping saplings, undergrowth, tufts of grass we pulled ourselves out of the muddy lake bottom, up on the bank—safe!
GRAIG shook himself like a great Newfoundland dog.
He shoved one hand into his trousers pocket, pulled out
something, gave a quick shake to get out the water, and
then put it to his lips.
One long blast on his police whistle!
Instantly it seemed the very moon-shadows were alive with men.
"Cover the doors and windows, men! Now, O'Connor, Ames, Weinstein"—he was telling off about half of them—"come on, now—crash it!"
Down went the little window between kitchen and laundry through which we had gained entrance. It was merely a matter of seconds before ten or a dozen of us were in and on the first landing of the service stairs.
"O'Connor and you men take this floor and the floors above! Ames, Walter, you others crash this door into the passage!"
Down it went. The passageway was now flooded with light. Across on the floor still lay the limp form of the rattlesnake.
Standing, clinging to the door posts of her doorway, Craig's gun in her hand, tottered Natalie, overcome by the shock of this new incursion.
"Help! Help! Oh—it's Craig!" She just seemed to collapse on the lintel.
Kennedy was almost as all-in as I. It was Ames, fresh and efficient, who at once thought to lift Natalie to her couch, apply restoratives, roll both of us up in blankets and comfortables.
"And now, what about the gentry upstairs?" O'Connor was demanding of Kennedy. "I have them all with the bracelets on—swearing they'll have me broke for it."
"Bring them down here!" smiled Kennedy, warmed up a bit by the blankets. "We'll have our own line-up right here now!"
Kennedy refused to be diverted from clearing up the case immediately, either by dry clothes or stimulants. He wrapped himself closer in the blankets and I did the same.
"Will it never stop? Will no one stop it? Save me! It is—the Death Thought!"
Natalie had risen from the couch on which Captain Ames had been applying restoratives to her. An unnatural strength seemed to suffuse her.
She was staring at Doctor Lenoire, Professor Rasquin, Stuart Webb, and four husky male nurses, all manacled with their hands in front of them, asn O'Connor marched them in surly protest down the passageway.
"It must not catch me! I have been thought six feet underground—I know it! There it is—still driving me—still driving me!"
She was in abject, cowering terror. Whatever it was, it was real and very awful to her.
"They had the Thought on you, too, Craig!" she almost screamed. "Hour after hour, Rasquin and others in the Inner Circle have repeated, over and over again; 'Why does not someone kill him? Why does he not die?' They knew you ¦—even when I first brought you to the Red Lodge! They knew you were here near the Chateau this afternoon and coming in tonight!"
Craig was leaning forward to catch every word. I happened to catch a glimpse of Natalie's husband. Stuart Webb was trembling like a leaf from head to foot, as though he, too, were pursued by the nameless terror.
"Doctor Lenoire," shot out Kennedy, point blank, "what, in your opinion, as a medical man, was the purpose of all that elaborate mummery of the Red Lodge?" Not in the least had the spell of the occult fallen on Kennedy for an instant.
Lenoire gazed about as if waiting for someone to voice an objection.
"You know what I mean," persisted Kennedy, "the mumbo-jumbo stuff."
Still Doctor Lenoire refused to commit himself.
"Persons of a certain type of mind," proceeded Craig, "can be really mentally unbalanced by such methods where the mere fact of another trying to exert power over them becomes known to them! They do, as a matter of fact, unbalance themselves, thinking about, and fighting off various imaginary terrors."
Doctor Lenoire leaned forward critically. "What did you conclude, then, was the explanation of the Devil Dance?"
"It looks to me like hystero-epilepsy! It is well known to demonologists, those who have studied this sort of thing."
"Are you a specialist?" queried the doctor contemptuously.
"In some things. Yes! By the way, Inspector, there is one face missing which I fully expected to see."
"I think not," returned the inspector. "We found her in the servants' quarters on the top floor, hiding in bed. We had to wait for her to dress. Here she comes in charge of one of my men now."
Peggy Wright, decked with bracelets of quite a different character from those she usually wore, was being hustled in.
At the mere sight of her, Natalie Webb's face changed. All the prehistoric jealousy of which woman is capable seemed suddenly to blaze forth.
"I will defend myself!" cried Natalie. "I will fight back! She shall not win—she shall not have my husband—no!"
I could recall a whole series of observations I had made of the strained feeling between the two women. Was it Peggy Wright who had been the disturbing influence, whose power Natalie feared over herself, perhaps over her husband also?
"Here," exclaimed Kennedy, "let us cut out all this mummery and mumbo-jumbo! Let us be realists—and we shall see that, with all its trumpery, this case is, after all, absurdly simple!"
He was unwrapping a small packet in rubber tissue.
"I picked this up at the Red Lodge last night."
He was displaying the cracked remains of the thin glass ampoule.
"It is crotalin that was in that, by my analysis," he proceeded. "The venom of the rattlesnake, crotalus harridus.
"Crotalin," he pursued, "is one of the new drugs used in the treatment of epilepsy. I picked that thing up beside Stuart Webb just where Doctor Lenoire had been bending over him after that epileptic seizure that concluded his Devil Dance when he shouted: 'The Devil is in me!'"
No one said a word.
"But," continued Craig quickly, "crotalin is a powerful two-edged instrument. Its primary purpose is not to save; it is to kill! I found red marks, swellings, on some of the victims. They were not bites of a rattlesnake, which would have been an easy alibi. There was only one puncture; not two, as in a snake's bite. It came from an all-glass hypodermic syringe with a platinum-iridium needle!"
Kennedy was facing Doctor Lenoire. He had at last got under the doctor's guard.
"I joined the cult," he confessed. "I did it in order to observe and treat one of my patients for epilepsy. I can justify myself. I said, 'I will ultimately be the exposer, not the accomplice, of this modern Satanism.' I joined it and—"
"Remember!" It was the low and angry tone of Professor Rasquin. "Remember—you are pledged to keep the secrets of the Red Lodge!" He paused. "And you, too, Mr. Kennedy—"
"I recognize no secrets, no oath of the Devil!" Craig brushed aside the sophistry with a sentence. "And what, Rasquin, of the passion someone has for redheaded girls—to love them and drown them?"
Rasquin shrugged. "Mr. Webb married one! Why ask me?"
"Why ask you? Because it is your passion! It is you who conceived an unending supply of them through that Nudist Shop! But—was it your plot by which Stuart Webb was to get rid of another and marry a fascinating snake-charmer brunette? Or, were you just the parasite who also saw an opportunity to get rid of one wife for another of social position and wealth who you could control by your malicious animal magnetism?"
"All a slandering accusation for which you shall pay dearly, Mr. Kennedy."
"Not as dearly as your wife, who left the Red Lodge last night with poor Natalie Webb, while Stuart Webb was with his Peggy Wright forging messages from his own wife!
"Rasquin—you are nothing more than a poor adventurer, a soldier of satanic fortune! Who bought you with his money to come to America from Paris? For what purpose?"
"More libel!"
Kennedy smiled quietly. "By whom," he repeated, "were you bought to come to New York with Madame Rasquin?"
STUART WEBB, as Kennedy had been developing his
expose, had been looking, fascinated, at a lever on the
wail that controlled the tunnel-door below, through which
might again surge the waters of the deadly dungeon on their
way to cascade over the cliff into the river.
He shot a quick look at the faces of Rasquin, of Doctor Lenoire and of Peggy Wright. Cold, calculating, selfish—nothing of loyalty was to be expected from them.
With sudden, epileptic strength Webb broke from the officer who was holding him. "I brought the Devil from Paris!" he shrieked. And with both hands clasped he knocked the switch—and plunged!
The trap door started to close. Natalie did not even scream.
The last I saw in the maelstrom was the whirling manacled hands of Stuart Webb as he was sucked down into the churning waters. He had followed the victims of his insane cult, built with his money, conceived in the distorted brains and passions of Rasquin and Lenoire.
"The Devil was in you!" muttered Kennedy as the trap closed.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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