RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
The Spider, October 1937, with "The Devil's Candlestick"
He was a headmaster of horror—that weird tutor who taught small boys to be human torches. When little Abie was snatched by the fire-bug, old Doc Turner had to act fast to save his young assistant from a blazing funeral pyre that consumed the living and wiped out the secrets of the dead!
WITHIN the tight black oval of her threadbare shawl the
woman's face was the disintegrating countenance of a mummy. Her
skin was a yellowish grey parchment netted by innumerable
wrinkles in a tracery of fine lines, and beneath it there was no
flesh but only a skull's hard outline. Age had pointed her chin,
hollowed her cheeks and dried the cartilage of her nose so that
all that was left of it was the short ridge of bone. Her lips
curled inward to fill the space of long-vanished teeth.
Deep within cavernous pits lurked bleared and rheumy eyes. There was in them the dull, hopeless weariness of one who has lived too long and thus seen too much of sorrow, but there was also a terrible fear.
Andrew Turner wondered what could possibly be the reason for that fear. There is so little of which the greatly aged can be afraid. Pain is their daily lot and death but release from pain. Too well he knew this, on whom age rested none too lightly.
"Yes," he asked. "What can I do for you?"
She did not reply at once, and so he had time to observe her more closely. Her tiny frame was so bent, her bones so shrunken, that she came hardly shoulder high to the sales counter of the drugstore in which Doc Turner had spent more years than he cared to count. By contrast, he was straight and tall, though his own body was stooped, his silken mane and bushy mustache a gleaming white, corded veins showing blue through the almost transparent skin of the hand he rested on the counter edge.
"What is it you wish?" he asked again with gentle patience.
"Poison," the woman answered in the shadow of a voice. "Your deadliest poison."
Into the white-shelved, dim-lit cloister of the ancient pharmacy seeped the tumult of a Morris Street Saturday night—the hoarse cries of peddlers whose pushcarts lined the slum thoroughfare, the shrill calls of tatterdemalion urchins, the shuff-shuff of manifold feet on the debris-strewn sidewalk, the crowd-sound of high-pitched polyglot chatter, the honk and blare of traffic, the pounding rumble of the "El" train on its trestle overhead. But all that was muted and distant. Within the store was only a startled, throbbing hush.
Then, "What do you want the poison for?"
"To kill a rat."
Doc's breath hissed from between his teeth in a little puff. He had thought... He bent to pull out a drawer in the rearward face of the counter. Thus hidden, he allowed a frown of perplexity to cross his visage. Shawled and shabbily dressed, the aged woman appeared no different from a hundred others out there on Morris Street, but the purity of her English, untinged by any foreign accent, was utterly alien to the vicinity. Nor had he seen her before, though he was acquainted with every denizen of the drab and dingy tenements for blocks around, with them and with every detail of their poverty-stricken lives.
"This," he said, "is just the thing." He straightened and held out a yellow cardboard box. "KILZEM. It's twenty-three cents, but it's worth it."
A grey, calloused claw came out from within the shawl and closed on the box. The woman peered at its ornate label.
"Harmless," she breathed, "to pets or humans. Harmless." She put the container down. "It is no use to me."
"Why not? Mix it with cheese and put it near their holes and the rats will eat it and die. That is what you want, isn't it?"
"No. The rat I wish to kill is—" paper-thin lips twitched venomously—"human."
"You should have said so." Turner's countenance was placid, except for a minute narrowing of his faded blue eyes. "How was I to know?"
"Do I look like one who would kill a dumb beast that does nothing wrong except steal a little food?"
"No. You are..." Doc hesitated.
"Too old for that," she finished for him. "Too old to slay vermin, but not too old to rid the world of one who steals children's souls and sends them to bring flames from hell to destroy the innocent." The cackling sound that came from her was meant to be a laugh. "Am I, young man? Am I too old?"
"No," the druggist responded. "No. One never grows too old for that..."
"Then sell me the poison. Something he will not taste in his gin."
"Just a minute. I'll have to fix it for you."
Doc went through the grime-stiffened curtain that closed an opening in the partition behind him. In the back-room, a black-haired, huge-beaked small boy in flopping knickers turned to him from a sink where a pile of used medicine bottles were soaking.
"Meester Toiner," Abe Ginsburg whispered, excitedly. "Dun't geeve eet to her. Dun't do eet."
Turner's face was bleak and stern. "Since when," he said low-toned, "do you give me orders?"
"Baht..."
"Never mind the buts. Come here and listen to me." The pharmacist moved to the long, white-scrubbed prescription table, the errand boy following him. "Listen closely."
AS he whispered to the lad, Doc laid out on the counter
three oblong pieces of waxed paper and spilled onto each a tiny
pyramid of white powder out of a bottle he took from the shelf.
Weighed on the most delicate balance, not one of the small piles
would have deviated from the others by a tenth of grain.
"You understand, Abie," the old man ended his instructions. "You're to come right back here and tell me what you find out." His acid-stained fingers folded the papers dexterously, thumb-nail creasing the edges with the mechanical precision of long skill. "No stopping at Levy's for a salami sandwich."
"Yes, Meester Toiner. Shoor."
"Then get going." Doc slipped the powders into a small, plain envelope, sealed its flap. Abe sidled away to a narrow door that gave access to the back-room from the side-street and went soundlessly out through it. His employer licked a slip of paper on which was printed in red a skull and crossbones and the staring word, Poison.
The woman was waiting with the dull, sodden patience of one to whom time no longer has meaning. "Dissolve one of these in gin," the pharmacist said, "and whoever drinks it will be surprised at what happens to him."
"Huh!" she blurted, as if startled. "What?" Then she saw the red letters on the little packet. "Poison? Yes, yes. That was what I wanted. How much?"
"Ten cents."
The woman's claw slipped ten pennies on the counter, and then she was tottering across the floor, a bent and tiny figure whose resemblance to some hooded witch out of a fairy tale was heightened by the cackling laughter that floated back to Doc— laughter that had in it no mirth but a sort of gloating triumph.
"Poor thing," the white-haired pharmacist sighed. Somewhere outside a distant tower clock bonged ten times. "Poor old lady," Doc's murmur whispered through the slow, muffled strokes.
WORRY cut a V-shaped crease into Doc Turner's brow. The
brawling tumult was dying down as he stood in the drugstore
doorway peering up and down the tunnel the roofing "El" made of
Morris Street. Brilliant lamps, hung above the scarlets and
yellows and greens of the pushcarts, cast shifting shadows among
the homeward shuffling crowds, and there seemed to him to be some
quality of ominous dread in the play of the black, shapeless
silhouettes.
It was not alone that. Though it was well after eleven Abie had not yet returned from the mission on which he had been dispatched. He was a youngster after all. He might have been caught up in a game of Prisoner's Base or perhaps be munching the forbidden salami in some kosher delicatessen. Or so Doc had been telling himself for the past half-hour. Now there was something else, something new to tighten his scrawny chest with apprehension.
It was hardly tangible, this feeling of uneasiness, yet it stemmed from something more than the hunter's sixth sense he had acquired in his years of combating the petty but vicious crooks who prey on the helpless and unprotected poor.
The scene was altogether familiar, nor was there anything unusual in the sounds that came to his ears. Was it a smell that troubled him?
The old man's nostrils widened, testing the thick air. He isolated the tangy aroma of the produce displayed on the carts, the fetor of brown-edged lettuce leaves, blackened bananas and spoiled tomatoes that made squashed pulp in the gutter. He identified the human odors peculiar to the slum; breath spiced by onion and garlic, stench of labor-sweat drying on unwashed bodies, the strange mustiness that clings to the clothing and very being of the Ghetto dwellers, the odor of poverty, itself.
These were familiar. But they were threaded by another scent, faint, tenuous, yet acrid. It eluded him as the lazy breeze shifted, then he found it again and knew it for wood smoke.
Doc looked to see if some huckster was already building a bonfire of the boxes in which his sold-out stock had come, saw none. Why then...?
Glass shattered somewhere down the street. A scream pierced the rain of splintering shards. "Fire!" A hoarse terrified bellow took up the cry, "Fire! Fire! Fire!"
As if the shouts were a stage electrician's cue, Morris Street was at once bathed by an orange-red, wavering glare.
A long jet of flame spouted out of the topmost windows of the tenement from which the cries were coming. Its lurid luminance tangled in the "El's" black net, spilled through and cataracted upon staring eyes, on paling faces which gaped to emit a shrill and terrible chorus.
"Fire! Fire! Fire!"
The block swirled in a frantic maelstrom. Terrified humanity, scattering from the lethal rain of smashed window-panes, collided with shouting humans rushing toward the fascination of disaster, the two streams smashing one another into a mindless whirlpool.
"Help! Fire! Help!"
Doc bumped a burly Italian, ducked past a bearded Hebrew huckster wringing hands over his spilled and trampled radishes, reached the red-painted lamppost box on the corner. His gnarled fingers hooked a loop-handled lever, dragged it down. A bell added its chattering clangor to the commotion, and the old man began to run toward the blazing building.
Somehow, a barrel-chested, carrot-topped youth in mechanic's overalls was ploughing a path for him through the mob. "They're caught, up there," the young man shouted back to him. "They're caught and can't get out." It was Jack Ransom, his friend, his good right hand in their battles against the underworld. "They can't get to the fire escape."
Jack lurched through into a space cleared by heat and pelting glass, threw himself backward, his shoulder striking Doc and flinging him back against the crowd. A black something hurtled down and thudded appallingly on the sidewalk, just where the druggist would have been were it not for the youth's abrupt lunge.
The shapeless and obscene sprawl that blotched the concrete had been a man, moments before.
"Don't jump," the crowd screamed. "Don't jump! Wait for the engines."
THE rusted iron ladders that zig-zagged the smeared brick
facade were packed with women, children, men, half-dressed and
wholly undressed; but windows on the top floor framed forms
crouched on their sills and backed by a roar of flame—forms
cut off from the creaking, flimsy spiderweb of iron by the fire's
gush from those other windows between. Down the stoops of the
dwelling, on either side of the one ablaze, streamed wild-eyed
fugitives.
From hopelessly far away rose the howl of sirens, the clang of bells. "Wait!" the crowd screamed, but another set of clinging fingers let go their hold and another body shot down, whirling end over end, to thud terribly upon the sidewalk.
Jack's fingers dug into Doc's arm. "Look!" he husked, thick forefinger jabbing.
The vestibule door was moving inward, slowly. The widening slit between its edge and the jamb was a glaring orange, but it was jogged by a blackened hand, low down, near the floor.
"Someone—" Ransom blurted and sprang across the sidewalk to the low stoop, and up it. Swift as he was, the old druggist was as swift. It was Jack who pulled the door full open, letting free a gush of shriveling heat, but it was Doc who went down beside the small form that sprawled over the threshold, Doc who lifted the charred, hardly human little frame and whirled to dash out of the insufferable blast.
Lips stirred in a blackened, eyeless mask. "I—the cellar door— wouldn't..." Then, as the pharmacist's feet pounded on the sidewalk and an outstretched hand caught at him, the body he carried writhed. "Mother! Mother!" came from the tortured lips. And abruptly the small form was very still.
"Dead," Andrew Turner murmured as someone in a blue uniform relieved him of his burden. "Dead. But he said..."
The old man stared unseeingly at the scarlet and silver gleam of the fire apparatus rolling up in an outburst of sound. "Come on, Doc." Jack's hand was on his arm. "The engines are here and there isn't any more we can do. Come on back to your store."
Turner stared at him. "Abe!" he whispered. "What have I done to Abe, Jack? What have I done to him?"
"Good Lord!" Ransom glanced around making certain that no one had heard that. "Abe's all right, Doc," he said soothingly. "Quite all right. We'll talk about it when we get to the store."
The corners of the old man's mouth twitched. "No, Jack, my mind hasn't suddenly given way. But you're right. This is no place to talk."
A pumper chugged busily around the corner, and plump hose snaked before the threshold of the pharmacy. Jack closed the door and turned to Doc.
"All right," he said. "Now tell me what it's all about."
"I sent Abe to trail a woman who is ninety years old if she is a day. He's been gone two hours now, and I'm afraid something has happened to him."
"Wait a minute. What's that got to do with the fire up the street?"
"More than I realized at the time. She asked for poison, Jack, to kill a human rat and I figured her a case of senile dementia. I gave her a harmless powder and sent the kid out to follow her so that I could warn whoever it was she lived with to watch her. If she couldn't buy poison, she might take a notion to use a knife. He hasn't come back."
"You said that before, and it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."
"Will it make sense if I tell you that she gave as her reason for poisoning her intended victim that he was a fiend 'who steals children's souls and sends them to bring flames from hell to destroy the innocent'?"
"No, it doesn't. I'll be damned if I get what you're driving at."
"Smell this." Doc lifted a hand sooted by char from the lad who had died in his arms. "Smell it."
Ransom sniffed, a green film spreading sickly over his big-boned, freckled visage.
"What do you smell?"
"Burned rags and burned... flesh."
"Anything else?"
Jack tried again. "Yes." His pupils widened. "Yes. Kerosene."
"Kerosene. Jack, that lad—that boy who could not be older than twelve—set that fire. It mushroomed out under the roof, but it started from the cellar, and that's where he was caught. The door wouldn't open till it was burned down, and he was almost dead."
The youth's spatulate fingers balled into fists at his sides. "Holy...! You think the old dame wasn't so balmy after all? You think the guy she wanted to poison sent the brat to start that fire."
"Exactly. And that Abe, following her, somehow stumbled on the truth—stumbled on it and was caught by the firebug Fagin. Abe's in his clutches now, or—"
"Or, what?"
Doc didn't answer that in words. He looked the answer, out of faded blue eyes in which anguish crawled.
"He wouldn't dare," Jack groaned. "He wouldn't—"
"That's hope speaking, not reason. A man who would dare train children to the most despicable crime on the calendar, arson, would dare anything to save himself. We've got to find him, Jack. We've got to find Abe!"
"But how? You don't know the old woman or anything about her. You don't know where she came from or how far."
"Not far, son. She could not have come from far away because she was too old, too feeble."
"And yet you did not know her, although you know everyone around here. There's no way..."
"I know everyone else," the older man interrupted. "I'll use that knowledge. They're all out there, watching the fire—all my people of Morris Street." There was flame in Doc's eyes now, the flame of a sudden hope. "Come on, Jack, we're going to find Abe."
THEY went out again, into the crowd that was watching the
fire. They circled through the crowd, asking the question of
swarthy sons of Italy, of gesticulating representatives of the
Chosen People, of blond Germans and slant-eyed Orientals. "An old
woman, so old that she looks like a mummy—did one like that
move into your house lately? Have you seen her? Do you know
her?"
And they drew a blank.
Weary and disconsolate, they met again in the drugstore door and stared at each other, while about them the firemen were picking up their drained hose and the crowd was scattering homeward from the black and empty shell of the destroyed tenement.
"No use," Jack's tones were flat, hopeless. "It's no use, at all."
"But we can't leave Abe in his hands. We can't—"
"Be the saints, Doctorr Turrner," a burring voice cut in, "Aand it's me good luck to find ye still here." The man with the map of Ireland on his face towered over the two others, a tan smock tight across his burly shoulders. "Will ye be doin' me the favorr to tell me what it is has happened to this shtuff."
He held out a square glass bottle to the druggist, half-filled with a pinkish liquid. "It's the first time in the twenty years I been havin' me liquor storr on Morris Street thot I've had a bottle uv Golden Gin turrn pink on me. I—"
Doc snatched the container from him. "Where did you get this, Tim Flanagan?" he demanded. "Where did it come from?"
"From a new customer who bought a case firrst crrack uh the box. A case, no less, and bid fairr to be comin' back forr another wance a week, if I know my gin drinkers. An' then this must happen."
"A new... But I must be sure. Come on inside, Tim Flanagan." The druggist's fingers fumbled his key into the lock. "Come on inside while I make certain it's what I think."
They followed him between the glass-fronted counters and into the pitch-black prescription cubicle. He switched on the light, twisted the stopper from the gin bottle with a quick jerk of his fingers reached down another bottle from the shelf and opened it.
Then, very steadily, very deftly, he was letting fall, drop by drop, the contents of the second bottle into the first.
"Jabers!" Flanagan exclaimed. "The pink's all gone!"
"Gone is right," Doc grunted, wheeling to him. "Now tell me. Who is the man that brought it back to you?" Except for the throb of an artery in his temple, he seemed to have lost all his feverish excitement.
The liquor seller scratched his tonsured scalp. "I'll be domned if I know his name," he muttered. "He neverr did tell—"
"Listen," Jack cut in. "Listen, Doc."
Plain through the night the howl of sirens rose; the rumble of rushing wheels, the roar of powerful exhausts, the clangor of fire-bells.
Turner's lids narrowed to threadlike slits. "Do you hear that, Tim? There's another fire, somewhere near here. Another fire and more people being scorched to death. There will be more, many more, unless you can tell us how to find this strange customer of yours whose gin turns pink."
"Whut—whut d'ye mean?" the big Irishman gulped, dodging back from the little pharmacist, superstitious fear of the fey flecking his widened eyes. "Whut's this yer blatherin' about?"
"Never mind what he means," Ransom growled, puzzled as the other but loyal to his old friend. "Tell him what he wants to know. Spit it out."
Flanagan stared at him, scratching his head. "Ye can't both be goofy," he decided. "But it's none of my affair."
"What was this man like?" Doc demanded, an icy threat in his low voice. "What was he like and what do you know about him?"
"He's about my size but older, maybe as old as you. He's thin, rat-faced. He come up Hogbung Lane from the river but he can't be livin' there 'cause there's nawthin' but warrehouses that way."
"All right," Doc murmured. "That's all I need to know. Thanks, Flanagan, and good-night."
"What about my gin?"
"Don't worry. The Golden you have in your store is all right. It won't turn pink. Good-night, Tim Flanagan."
The Irishman departed, shaking his head in wonderment.
"Queer," Doc remarked, "how a man can live in a neighborhood so long and yet know so little about it."
"You've got something," Jack said tensely. "How, I can't make out, but you know where Abie is."
"Yes," the old man sighed. "Abe has let me know where he is. Come on, Jack, we're going to him."
FROM out of the river, whose greasy flow muddied the sky's
red glow, crawled a dank miasma; salt tang of the sea drowned by
the reek of waste oil, or rotted flotsam, of bilge water and
refuse from a world's cargoes. The stench had driven from Eastern
Avenue's wide, cobbled expanse the clamor of its brawling day,
and looming warehouse fronts stared blindly down at solitude.
The sky's lurid shell enclosed the city's never-sleeping growl and, somewhat nearer, the chug-chug of laboring fire-pumpers, the hiss of water turned to steam by leaping flame, muted siren-howls. Close by there was only the lap, lap of the river, otherwise no sound, and there was no movement at all...
Except for two shapeless shadows that drifted along one gloom-curtained facade and vanished wraith-like into the black maw of an alley that cut between it and the next.
"Hidden House," Doc Turner's murmur was less distinguishable at a distance than a whisper. "No windows in the warehouse rears, and so very few remember it, but once I used to visit here."
Crouching at the further end of the alley, the two looked out at a gabled structure that even in the murk sagged wearily, no line quite straight. It seemed on the point of collapse, yet there was still about it some trace of its ancient dignity.
"Someone's there," Jack Ransom breathed. "Look."
A horizontal yellow thread lined the black bulk, low down, and it could be nothing else but light seeping between the sash of a blinded window and its sill.
"Of course," Doc responded. "But not the fire-master. He's still busy at his devil's work. Stay here and watch for him. I'm going in."
"The hell I will. You stay here, and I'll take the chance."
"Wait here!" Muted as it was, the old man's voice was abruptly hard, steel hard. "Obey orders!"
He was drifting, a swift shadow, across the space between alley-mouth and dark-shrouded porch, while Jack's fists knotted at his sides and his cold lips groaned. "It's always like this. I'm more fit to fight the fellow when he shows up, but Doc's going into danger alone. I don't like it. I don't like it at all."
A decrepit porch board squeaked under Andrew Turner's frail weight just as he reached the door, and he froze rigid, listening.
The city's nightly rumble, the far-off, dying noises of the fire-fighters, underlined a brooding silence in which there was no nearer sound, no hint of life from within the house.
At last Doc's hand strayed out and found the mildew-coated door-knob, while his other fished in his pocket for a skeleton key that possibly might work the lock. If he could get in unobserved...
The knob was turning under his fingers!
The door slithered open before the prowling druggist could start his flight, and then he lost all thought of flight. A nimbus of light hung pallid in a shabby hall, its source a door-aperture to the left. Against that pale illumination was silhouetted, gnome-like and tiny, the aged woman who had demanded poison from him three hours before.
"Come in" breathed that shadow voice of hers. "He's not come back as yet, but you may wait. Come in and take a drink of gin."
She turned, cackling, and hobbled toward the doorway out of which the light flowed. Strangely, her tottering footfalls made no sound. Doc, shutting the door behind him and following her, discovered why when he felt under his feet the threadbare fabric of carpeting made soft by padding laid beneath it when the house was young and its lawn sloped down to the river's edge.
"Sit down," the woman said, her palsied claw pointing to a broken-backed chair.
A KEROSENE lamp on a scarred wooden table made the light
by which Doc saw the narrow, bare-floored room. The soft, yellow
illumination lay against walls from which patternless paper
curled to expose broken plaster no longer white and the laths
that were the structure's bones. A black shade was drawn tight
down over the room's one window, failing, as he knew, only by the
merest slit to blanket the light entirely. There were two other
chairs in the room, in a corner an iron cot whose drab mattress
and sheets were rumpled. On the table, besides the lamp, were a
square bottle of Golden Gin, full though the pink tax seal over
its stopper was broken, two tumblers, a spoon and a small box
labeled, sodium bicarbonate.
"Sit there," the woman said again, and turned to him. "Why don't you—"
She was peering at him out of her cavernous eye-sockets, her membranous lips quivering. "You—you're not the one who... But I know you. Don't I know you?" Her skeleton hand brushed the grey wisps of hair from her seamed brow, as if they were the spider's filaments they appeared, cobwebbing.
"Yes," Doc answered. "You know me, mother. I'm the druggist from whom you bought the—"
"Poison!" A sudden malevolence twisted the mummy's countenance and the scrawny arm flung out to him, fingers curving. "You cheat! You scoundrel! It was no poison. He drank it and he still lives. He is out there now, watching the fires dance that his imps have brought from hell."
"No," the pharmacist said quietly, keeping himself by an effort from recoiling from the furious hag. "I did not fool you. The poison I sold you was rendered harmless after it left me. It turned pink in the gin, after a while, did it not?"
Her hand dropped, slowly. "It turned pink," she mumbled. "Pink. But he had drunk it before that, and he lived to curse the gin for turning pink."
"That is why I came. Something happened to the powder, on your way here. Did he know where you had been? Were you, perhaps, followed?"
"Followed?" the aged woman repeated, ponderingly. "I saw no one, but right after I returned he ran out the back way. It was then I put the powder in his gin. He came back with a boy whose arms he had twisted behind his back, and he was black with anger. He said the boy had been spying..."
"Ah," Doc sighed. "That was to deceive you. The boy was one of his imps, and it was he who transformed the poison. I must find him before I can make it deadly once more. Where did the boy go?" The druggist's countenance displayed no emotion at all, but within he was quivering. Did she know? Would she remember, and would she tell him if she did remember? "Where shall I look for him?"
The hag stared blankly, made a little, hopeless gesture. "In hell, if you know the way."
JACK RANSOM twisted to a sudden footfall in the alley
behind him. His fist swung back... Light glare dazzled him.
"Reach," a gruff voice commanded. "Reach high."
A nickeled gun barrel snouted beside the white eye of the flashlight, pointblank at Jack's midriff. His heart thumped his ribs! Behind gun and light, rays glinted from brass buttons, from a silvered badge!
"Douse that light, officer," he blurted. "Quick. I—"
"Douse it, is it," the cop roared. "Say, what kind a nut do you warehouse prowlers think I am? Me catching you sneaking behind here, and—"
"But listen. You've got to listen. I'm no thief—"
"Shut up that talk, or I'll shut you up with lead. Maybe the judge'll take it from you. I'm pulling you in. Come along and keep your mouth buttoned or I'll let you have it in the guts. I'm aching to do just that—after my side-kick being found right in this here alley with his gullet slit. Come along."
Jack shrugged. There was nothing he could do but obey.
The lurid light was gone from the sky as the policeman and his handcuffed prisoner pounded down Eastern Avenue toward the station house and it was very dark in the cobbled street. So dark that only the slither of fabric against brick told of a stealthy figure slipping down the alley between the sleeping warehouses, the alley that Jack Ransom should have been guarding.
DOC TURNER said calmly, "I know the way. It begins right
here— at the trapdoor on which you are standing." It had
been her gesture, that had brought back to him out of the dead
years the last time he had been in this room, his courtly host
coming up into it from below, bearing a cobwebbed and dusty
bottle of precious vintage, holding it tenderly on its side so
that the dregs might not be stirred up. Her claw had taken his
eyes straight to the countersunk ring, concealed by the table's
shadow, that was the trapdoor's handle.
"And you dare descend?"
"I am not afraid." Doc pushed the table a little, and the woman moved, and he bent to raise the door. It came up easily, so that he knew that it had been frequently used of late, but it was heavy and almost pulled him off his feet as it hinged down to the floor.
The lamplight drifted down to lie cold and dim on worn ladder steps that descended into pitch-black mystery. Out of the tarry murk rose a pungent, familiar odor—and a muted whimper!
The old druggist started down the stairs. His shadow went, long and black, before him to merge with the obscurity below. The kerosene smell was stronger, more powerful than the earthy basement dankness. That shadow of his lengthened, the light that cast it inexplicably brighter, more far-reaching, Doc turned and saw that the woman had caught up the lamp and was following him down.
That gave him illumination enough to see into the low-beamed, dust-choked cellar. To one side there was a five-gallon can from which the kerosene odor came, and beside this a pile of newspapers the top one of which was torn into long, narrow strips. The pharmacist's gaze probed beyond these, past an adzed-wood upright column.
"Abe!" he exclaimed, and darted to the small form that lay there on the cracked stone floor, arms and legs bound, mouth gagged. He went down to his knees beside the urchin and his fingers tore the gag away.
"Ai, Meester Toiner," Abe husked. "I knew you vould come, bant you took eet so long I vass begenink to be afraid."
The lashings of the lad's wrists were knotted too tightly to be quickly freed. "What happened, Abe?" Doc asked as he worked at them.
"De lady come straight here an' I vatched her go eento de huss from de alley. So far so goot, I says to myself, baht Abie de Boy Detecatiff alvays makes a complete report. So I sneak up to see vot I can trough de vinder.
"All meet a sudden somevun grebs me from de beck und says he veel break my neck eef I make a sound. He tveests mein arms; he pulls me in de huss. He makes me seet down und he esks me who sent me to spy on heem.
"Dees guy ain't ahp to no good, I teenk, hideenk in dees old huss an' beink afraid of spies. Mebbe I ken find out vot eet's all about. So I says I vasn't spyenk. I vas a cabin boy on a boat an' I run avay an' I saw de huss an' tought dees vas maybe a good place to hide teel dey stop lookeeng fahr me. He takes anodder drenk an' he makes a face, like eet's sour, baht he esks me do I vant to voik fahr heem.
"So I says sure t'eeng. I vould do anyteeng radder dan go beck to de sheep. Vot kind from voik vas eet? He starts to say somet'eeng und den he shuts ahp, like he teenks, 'I'm talkeenk too mahch'!"
The cords came free from Abe's wrists and Doc went to work on his ankles. "Yes," he queried. "What next?"
"He started ahp cussin' at de jeen. He says eet tastes fonny an' geeves heem heartboin. So I teenk maybe de old lady put eet de powder een it already an' dot's vy eet tastes fonny, baht I vant heem to dreenk some more so he'll tell me vot de voik ees. So I tell heem vy don't he put eet some bicarbonate een, den eet von't geeve him heartboin.
"So he hollers to her to get heem some bicarb an' a spoon an' meantime he says to me do I know I vas in trouble mit de cops fahr jumpeeng sheep. So I says don't I know eet and I cry please he shouldn't geeve me ahp. I'll do anyteeng he says.
"So he takes anodder dreenk an' he says all right. He'll tell me vat de voik ees. Eet ees to go an' make fires in de cellars of buildeengs. Leetle fires, but enough to scare de people oudt so he ken go een de empty flets an' look fahr de money dey got hidden dare. He says eet's a good recket only in de poor neighborhoods like dees. In de reech vuns de people have deir money een de benk. He's got a couple boys doeenk eet baht he ken use vun more.
"Choost den de old lady comes een meet de bicarb an' he puts ah beeg spoonful een hees gless, an', vot you teenk? Eet toins peenk! He gets all excited an' mad an' pours de jeen beck in de bottle an' says he's goink to take eet beck to de guy vot sold eet, baht foist he takes me down here an' ties me ahp. He says he aint sure yet dot I von't doubelcross heem an' he's not takin' no chences. So I lay here in de dark vondering vot veel happen ven he comes beck..."
"You'll find out right now." Doc heard the husked interruption, spun around. "Both of you."
THE man at the foot of the stairs had a gun in his hand,
and it nosed unwaveringly at the old druggist. He was tall,
cadaverous, his head a wedge pointed by his nose and his chin.
His hatchet-face was marked by evil, and death itself, glinted in
his burning eyes.
"You don't dare shoot us here," Doc Turner observed, his voice very steady. "The waterfront is being carefully patrolled because of so many warehouse robberies lately and the sound will bring a flock of police."
"No," the man responded. "If I have to shoot you, I'll get away. But I'd rather not. I'll make a deal with you. Give me a chance to get away and I'll let you live."
Turner's eyes narrowed. If he was any judge of character, this man had neither mercy nor fear in his makeup. His look wandered to the old lady, who was as immovable, as expressionless as some grotesque caryatid made useful as a lamp-holder.
"Yes," the husky voice answered his thought. "That's why I make the offer. I could get away if I shot you, but my mother could not. I would not wish to leave her behind."
"What is your plan?" For himself, Doc Turner would have made no dicker with the killer, would have gambled with a sudden leap, a sudden attack. But there was Abe, his ankles still bound. He had no right to stake the youngster's life on as hazardous a toss as that. "What do you propose?"
"We'll tie you up and leave you here, with the trapdoor open. It will take you a long time but you'll manage sooner or later to hitch yourself up to the top of the stairs and crawl out of the house."
Doc shrugged. "All right." How had the fellow managed to get past Jack? What had happened to the carrot-headed youth?
"Mother!" The old woman stirred. "Put the lamp down on the floor." She obeyed, with the mechanical precision of a robot or a sleepwalker. "There's rope and rags behind that pile of newspapers. Get them and tie these two up. Gag them."
The druggist's last hope faded. If the thin man had come within his reach, he might have attempted a sudden attack. But this way...
The old woman shambled to him and was binding his wrists. A pulse thumped in Doc's temple. The gnarled shaking fingers were making a poor job of the task. These knots would be easy to force open...
He was lying on the floor, gagged and bound, and the woman was raising from Abe, similarly treated. A grin crossed the hatchet-shaped face and the man prowled forward.
"Now we'll fix these knots right," he husked. Where his fingers touched Doc's skin they were cold and clammy, sending a shudder of revulsion through the old druggist's frame. The lashings cut cruelly into his flesh.
"You won't get out of those in a hurry." The man straightened. He started away.
He didn't go far. He stopped at the kerosene can, bent and lifted it. He was coming back to Doc! He was standing over the pharmacist and he was pouring the water-white, inflammable liquid over him, and over Abe!
"I'd be a fool, wouldn't I, to let you live? You know what I look like, you know my game. There will be no shots, friend, to bring the cop, but you and that brat will never get out of this house."
Doc cried out against the muffling gag and writhed, fighting his bonds, but it was utterly futile. The man emptied the can, tossed it away, and went back to the newspaper pile. He picked up the strips that lay on top of it, twisted them together into a two yard long tube which he laid on the floor, one end dipping into the kerosene pool around his victims. He lifted again, took a cigarette and a book of matches from his pocket, lit the cigarette and took a leisurely puff.
The man stooped and put the book of matches down under the far end of the paper fuse, laid the cigarette down, its unlit end tipped up on the match heads.
"It will take exactly twenty minutes for the book to flare up, and ten seconds after that for the flame to go along the tube to the kerosene drenching you. That is how I taught my boys to lay their fires. It gave them time..."
"Henry!" The aged woman spoke for the first time since he had entered. "They made the fires like that? They did not bring the flames from hell?"
"From hell?" The fellow's laugh was short, and not nice. "What gave you that idea?"
"They were boys, and not imps? You did not sell your soul to Satan, and did not steal theirs from them?"
"What ever gave you that fool notion? There's no magic mixed up in all this. I—"
"No magic? No Satan? Then I'm not afraid." She moved more quickly than seemed credible, kicked cigarette and matches away from the end of the fuse. "Then I'm no more afraid of you than when I spanked you years ago for tearing off flies' wings and letting them crawl—"
"Damn it! What are you up to? What—"
"Henry Dike!" The voice was still a shadow, but there was a new strength in it, a new sternness. "Come here to me. Come here at once while I lather you for your meanness." It was the shadow of a mother's voice who chided an unruly youngster. "At once, do you hear?"
"Quit it, Mother," the scolded son snapped. "Quit your nonsense. We've got to pack and get out of here quick, before the place blazes up..."
"Come here!" The mother sprang to snatch at his arm. Dike jumped to avoid her. His heel struck the lamp, overturned it, just as she reached him. Glass smashed, and there was a soft, almost gentle plop. Flame fountained up about the two, swirled about them. Screams shrieked out of the fire-burst, screams of agony, and Doc rolled, pounding against Abe, sending him rolling too, out of the pool of kerosene.
HENRY DIKE lurched from the lashing flames, beating at his
sparking clothing, his mouth opening soundlessly, his eyes
seared. His mother toppled across his path, tripped him and he
fell into the pungent liquid he had poured over the old man and
the boy.
It was liquid no longer but living flame, folding over the firebug, charring him. Where the floor was wet with the kerosene squeezed from Doc's rolling form flame licked, thin but relentless, toward the bound couple. They kept rolling, faster than the creeping flame, but they were cut off from the staircase.
They could go no further, and in seconds that slow creep of bright death must reach them and ignite the kerosene with which their clothes, their hair, was soaked. Doc lay there, watching death come, and his brain was wrung with anguish.
It was a yard away. Now two feet. It was coming faster now, faster. Abe whimpered, shrinking against the old man. Doc shrugged to cover the boy with his old frame, knowing how useless it was...
"Doc!" someone yelled. "Doc!" And a black form plunged through the whipping flames that were incinerating Dike and his mother. It was stamping out that terrible line of flickering jets. It was Jack Ransom! Steam hissed out there in the basement's center, and a spray of hot water rained over Doc, and the flames were dying down, vanishing.
A fireman was monstrous in black raincoat and pyramidal helmet. "Get 'em out of here while we wash down."
JACK RANSOM explained, "That dumb cop wouldn't let me
talk, and he walked me the four blocks to the station-house. The
desk lieutenant was drinking coffee and he wouldn't come out till
he was through. He knew me then, however, and knew you, and when
I spilled my story we got rolling. The flames were showing by
then and a watchman had phoned a still alarm and we all got here
just about on time."
"Just on time. If you hadn't told them I must be somewhere in the house, they wouldn't have bothered coming down into the cellar and—?" Doc smiled wryly.
"What gets me," Ransom said, "is how you knew the gin's being pink had something to do with where Abe was."
"That was simple. When I was folding up the fake poison, I grabbed the first bottle of white powder that would be harmless that I could reach. It happened to be phenolphthalein, and I remembered that later when Flanagan showed up and the pink in his Golden Gin disappeared when I dripped a little acid into it.
"Phenolphthalein is turned pink by alkalis and white by acids. I knew that was what must be in the gin, and I knew it could have been put there only by the old woman. I couldn't figure out how an alkali had gotten into the stuff, till Abe told his story. Sodium bicarbonate is alkaline in reaction and the brat's advice to Dike was the start of a call for help to me, even though he didn't know it."
"Who says," the hook-nosed urchin put in, "dot I deedn't know eet! De very idee dot Abey de Boy Detecatiff shouldn't know eet dot bicarb makes peenk feen—feenowl—fin—dot stuff from veech Meester Toiner vass talkeenk."
"Yeah," Jack Ransom said dryly. "The very idea."