Читать книгу The Avenger - Justice, Inc. - Paul Barth Ernst - Страница 4

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Four police and three field attendants—all big, husky men—stayed close to Benson at the Montreal airport. They stayed close because twice they’d had to combine to hold him down when his eyes flamed pale madness and his muscles writhed. His face was chalk-white.

“Phone Buffalo!” Benson said. “I told you—”

“We have phoned,” said the airport manager gently. “They have no record of your passage at all.”

“I told you we forced our way aboard at the last minute. Of course they haven’t a record. But the field men—”

“They all say the same thing. You got aboard alone. You had no wife and daughter.”

The police looked at each other significantly.

“My wife! Alice! Where are they? What has happened—Someone believe me! I swear—”

Unbelieving eyes staring down at him! Hand reaching to hold him! Raw electric light battering into his eyes! And at the back of his mind—the lovely face of Alicia and the pink, chubby hand of little Alice upraised to wave—

Something snapped in his head.

An ambulance took him away. But in it was one more interne than the usual pair, and the three of them were extra strong. And they took him, not to a regular hospital, but to a sanitarium—

“Nurse—”

The voice was hoarse, weak. Benson hardly realized it was his own. A girl in white turned from the window of the white-walled room. Benson saw that the window was barred.

“Yes?”

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty in the afternoon,” said the nurse, with a professional smile. Benson noted, though, that in her eyes was a look far, indeed, from smiling.

“Half past four! Then I’ve been out for eighteen or twenty hours!”

“You’ve been out for three weeks,” corrected the nurse. “You’ve had brain fever.”

“Three weeks—”

Benson struggled upright in the bed. “I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve got to look for—”

The nurse pushed him firmly back. And finally he let her. He was too weak to do much, and knew it. He was silent for a moment, watching her.

“Why do you look at me like that?” he said. There was in his tired brain a sort of merciful numbness for the moment. It made dreamy and impossible the tragedy that had sent him here. Wife and child vanished apparently into thin air? Nonsense! They’d come in the door at any moment.

“Why do I look at you like that?” repeated the nurse. She hesitated, then shrugged. “You’ll have to know eventually. You might as well know now. You’ve changed, since they carried you in here.”

She handed him a mirror. Benson looked into it—and saw somebody else, not himself.

This somebody else had snow-white hair instead of coal-black hair. This somebody had a face as white as linen, instead of a face bronzed by sun and tinted by flowing vitality. This somebody’s face, moreover, was as absolutely expressionlesss as a wax mask.

There was something terrible about the expressionlessness. It wasn’t normal. It was that of something dead, not that of something living and merely in repose. It frightened you, that completely moveless face.

Benson, with a suffocating feeling rising within him, tried to smile. He couldn’t.

Lips, eyebrows all the flesh of his face remained entirely still.

He tried to frown, to grimace—and couldn’t.

“The facial muscles are ... paralyzed,” the nurse said gently. “Oh, it’s not permanent, probably.” Her tone showed that she was lying, to help him. “Probably it will go away. But for now, it’s paralyzed. We don’t know whether it was the blow on the head you got in the plane when the copilot had to down you, or the nerve shock of your—delusion.”

Benson could only stare at the immobile face, that was white as linen, with the pale-gray eyes flaming through. The nurse went back to the window, which she had been closing when he first called her. Benson pressed at his face. He could barely feel the press of his fingers. The nurse turned.

She screamed, then stifled it with her hand.

Benson looked at her, then into the mirror again. And he saw why she had screamed.

He had pressed at his face with his fingers. Where he had pressed, the flesh was ridged up over one cheekbone. It gave him a demoniac look that was indescribable, when added to the linen-pallor of his skin.

He pressed the flesh down again. Then worked both cheeks.

He could move his facial flesh only with his fingers. And wherever he moved it—it stayed!

“I ... I’m sorry I cried out,” faltered the nurse. “But you looked so ... so awful—”

A staff doctor came in.

“Ah! Conscious, eh? And how do we feel?”

Benson’s mind was as fast as his body. He’d been conscious only for a few minutes, and after a brain bout that had nearly cost his life. But in that short time he had realized two things.

He must gain strength as rapidly as possible and get out of here.

To get out, he must conceal his colossal agony at the fate of Alicia and little Alice, and indeed pretend as if they had never existed at all.

“I feel much better,” he said.

“Fine,” said the doctor. “Now as to the matter you were speaking of when we brought you—”

“That is all past,” said Benson firmly. He felt a knife turn in his heart—felt as if he were betraying the two who meant all of life to him. But it had to be done.

The doctor’s face cleared. “Good man!” he said in a different tone. “I knew you’d get over your delusion. We can have you out of here shortly, I think.”

In the doctor’s face, Benson saw what he had narrowly missed—detention in the violent ward, maniacs screaming all around him, a padded cell, perhaps. But he had missed it.

In the days that followed, he flexed his muscles and breathed deeply and ate all the rich broths and food they brought. He was storing up strength. And he thought, during the slow hours, tried vainly to figure it out.

What in Heaven’s name had happened to Alicia and little Alice? There had been no way for them to get out of that plane. Yet—they’d disappeared from it.

And why?

During the days when he built strength back and fought to keep from really going insane with anguish, he asked that question a lot.

Why?

In what horrible criminal plot had he unwittingly thrust his family and himself when he shoved his way aboard that plane? He could not guess. But he knew it must be something gigantic; knew it must be something fiendish. And if he had suffered such an awful loss, there must be others threatened with the same. How many? There was no guessing.

He was discharged from the sanitarium. He had gone into the place a man. He came out a machine; a machine of ice and slow fire; a powerful engine geared to only two things—recovery of wife and child and destruction of the force that had acted so fantastically against them.

Benson even looked more like a thing of steel than a man.

Snow-white, his hair was, like chromium. His face, terrible in its utter lack of expression, was steely-white. His eyes, so colorless in his colorless face that you seemed to be looking far, far through them at a chill world of fog and ice, were like pale steel. Even the suit he’d worn in there carried the impression out. It was steely-gray.

At the Montreal airport, he staggered and almost collapsed as he saw a big plane with props idling on the runway. His eyes were dreadful in his white, still face. He knew he could never again look at a plane without feeling that terrific shock. But he also knew that he was going to have to use them—for fast moves of vengeance in the program to which he was dedicating himself.

The agent shrank back a little from the steely-gray figure, moistened his lips at the chill glare of the pale-gray eyes.

“Y-yes, sir,” he stammered. “There’s a seat in the Buffalo plane.”

“Thank you,” said Benson. His lips barely moved with the words. They seemed to come, of their own volition, from great, white, still spaces back of those pale and flaming eyes.

He went to the plane. Attendants made way for him and stared after him. But he paid no attention. Alone in the glacial, terrible world of his grief, he boarded the plane and roared back along the track of tragedy.