Читать книгу The Phantom Detective: 5 Murder Mysteries in One Volume - Robert Wallace - Страница 11

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Jolting movement and the sound of rushing wind and an automobile motor's powerful throbbing rhythm beat into the Phantom's drugged brain.

He tried to open his eyes, but the tight pressure of tape on them kept the lids shut. His hands were fastened behind his back with tape. He lurched helplessly with each swerving plunge of the car, his body held upright between two men in the seat beside him.

His parched lips were taped shut, and hunger gnawed at his stomach, giving him the only measure of the passage of time. Eight hours or longer, he judged, since he had been knocked out with those bluish odorless fumes.

The last physical sensations he remembered were the smell of fulmigated sulphur and the heat in that sub-cellar of the General Electric metallurgical laboratory. But now the fresh odor of pines, an occasional lingering whiff of burning coal, and the rush of cool air assailed his senses.

He listened keenly, trying to pick up the rumbling roar of Niagara Falls, but could hear only the hum of the motor and the swish of the wind. The totality of his blind impressions was of steep long climbs, quick descents and open spaces.

The two men sitting beside him began to stir restlessly. A match scraped, followed by the pungent odor of cigarette smoke.

"Making good time for a long ride," one of the men said in a tired voice. "Almost there now. The other car'll be there already."

"Yeah," the other rider agreed. "Not a hitch on this trip. That's what organization does. You going to try for a sergeant's circles?"

"I ain't killed nobody yet," the other grumbled. "Anyhow, not officially. Soon's I do, though, I'll sure apply for the next rating. Sergeant's get plenty of authority."

"You won't have to wait long for a chance to get a killing credit," the second man prophesied knowingly. "I heard, from one of the district majors, that th' State Militia is commin' after us."

"Better not talk too much," the man on Van's right warned. "I heard somethin' about that, too, but you know what the penalty is for not keepin' your mouth shut!"

Van could tell by the movement of the man's body that the guard had gestured significantly at him.

In the prolonged, moody silence that followed, the Phantom tried to fathom the motives and extent of the mysterious organization that three times now had reared its ugly, poisonous head, There was but the one conclusion—some secret society was plotting to overthrow the government of the United States, and was relying upon some new unannounced discovery of modern science to effect their treacherous ends.

And that the dead Dr. Hugo Junes' metallurgical experiments with aluminum and calbite had something to do with those murderous plans appeared obvious. The Phantom was convinced that Dr. Junes' death had not been accidental, but a deliberate killing.

The doctor's pleading fear and final wild hysteria, the hypodermic syringe visible for an instant in one of the masked men's pockets, the whole set-up in the General Electric underground heat laboratory, in fact, pointed at murder. Junes must have been drugged and thrown against the top of that furnace.

But why should these hooded and masked members of such a secret organization kill Dr. Junes, a scientist whom they were using?

The obvious answer was that Junes had refused to conform to their demands. And now the Phantom himself was purposely letting himself be forced to take the murdered scientist's place in their subversive scheme. The disguise of Professor Paul Bendix had proved more real and convincing than Van had ever hoped.

His unanswered and unvoiced questions were interrupted by the slowing of the car. It stopped and, judging by the sounds, they had driven inside some building which, nevertheless, did not smell like a garage. The binding tape was ripped off his ankles and he was shoved out of the car.

His shoes crunched on cinders and there was a trace of coal gas in the air. Then he was being guided along an earthy-smelling, cool passageway that had the confining feel of a tunnel.

There were four men with him now, their rough voices sounding loud and echoing. They stopped him a hundred paces beyond. Van could feel unsteady board footing beneath him.

Something slammed suddenly, sounding like a gate. Mechanism grated and groaned into action. The Phantom, his pinioned arms still held by two of the men, experienced the sensation of being lowered slowly in an elevator.

The complaining, slow descent went on it seemed endlessly. Van had no way of reckoning how far down into the earth he was being carried, but the air became rapidly more gaseous and damp, the pressure heavier.

The guards with him had ceased talking, but their casual, almost illiterate conversation before had given him no inkling of where he might be, except for an occasional miner's phrase.

The elevator car stopped finally and Van was pushed into a narrow passageway. His shoulders rubbed against damp dirt walls, and he had to stoop to protect his head from the low, wooden beams bracing the roof.

From the voices only two men were with him now one in front and one behind. He was herded through an interminably long and crooked tunnel and several times he could feel with his shoulders different openings leading off. Whether or not they were following the main tunnel or any one of its branches, he had no way of knowing.

The floor was a steady decline, some parts steeper than others, but always descending. Five times, the Phantom counted, he was stopped while the exaggerated clicking and grating noise of a door being unlocked, opened, closed behind them and locked again, filled the accentuated silence about him.

The passage leveled out beyond the fifth door. He felt several more openings in the walls as he was shoved ahead. The tunnel twisted continuously, and the odor of gas increased, made breathing more labored.

Another door barred their passage, but there was no key in the possession of the guards for this one. One of them beat against the panel with what sounded like the butt of a gun—five swift blows, a pause and a single sixth.

On the other side a key turned with a click that echoed like an explosion in the compressed atmosphere. A bar scraped as it was slid away from the door on the opposite side. A moment later the door swung inward and the Phantom was pushed through, shoved up against a wall.

He heard the door being closed and locked. Then without preliminaries the tape was ripped off his wrists, torn off his eyes and mouth. Van opened his eyes slowly, slitting them against any unexpected light that might blind him after his long siege of complete darkness. But only a poor indirect glow lighted the cavernous room in which he found himself.

The two men who had brought him in stood on either side of him and one of them held a heavy long-barreled revolver. Both were dressed in overalls and miners' caps in which gleamed small electric bulbs.

Across the chamber stood a tall figure in a black-caped robe. The man had a black hood over his head and his face was covered with a mask through which his eyes glittered ominously. He might have been the same grim specter who had appeared at the General Electric sub-cellar laboratory. Even his voice when he spoke sounded similar in the deceiving echoes of the cavern.

"Professor Paul Bendix," he said contemptuously, "I hope the trip hasn't upset you."

Van eyed the hooded figure defiantly, wet his parched lips. "What manner of science is it," he demanded in the guttural voice of Professor Bendix, "that makes such humiliating experience necessary?"

The hooded man shrugged indifferently beneath his robe.

"Asking questions is not a part of your job here," the tall man stated flatly, and added significantly, "You witnessed what happened to your predecessor, Dr. Hugo Junes."

The Phantom stepped away from the wall, flexing his cramped muscles. In another corner of the cavern his eyes, accustomed to the peculiar light now, slid and settled on the bound and gagged figure of Jerry Lannigan. The big Irishman was watching him eagerly.

"You have my assistant here, I see!" the Phantom exclaimed, making his words ring with anger that covered the relief he felt. "Untie him!" This was no time for feeling his way. They evidently still thought he was an eminent scientist, and he had to continue his bluffing characterization.

"I had your assistant untied before," the cloaked leader in the room said. "He became unmanageable and fought, so I had him tied again to keep him from getting hurt. I hope that the fool will behave himself now that you are here."

"I'll guarantee that he will," Professor Bendix declared gravely. Yet within him was a warming glow at the thought of what damage the Champ had probably done before they overpowered him.

The hooded leader nodded to one of the guards, who went over and ripped the tape bonds from Lannigan's ankles, wrists and lips. The red-headed Irishman got to his feet, came over and stood belligerently beside the professor.

"This joint is ratty!" Lannigan growled at the man in the hood, and turned to Van. "The whole place is overrun with these guys dressed up like Ku Kluxers."

"Enough of that!" the leader snapped. "You'll find our organization very effective if you try any foolishness."

"Quiet," the Phantom warned Lannigan, and addressed the man in the black robe: "If I am to be put to work, I must see the laboratory. And I would appreciate knowing where I am."

The tall, hooded figure again jerked his head at the two mine guards and moved to another door in the chamber.

"You will find where you are," he said over his shoulder, "when the time comes and you are a blood member with us. For the present, the temporary laboratory is directly under us."

The two guards, both of them with guns in their hands now, motioned Van and Lannigan to follow their leader. Van, while he had been talking, had been using his hands casually, feeling of his clothes and secret pockets. His captors appeared not to have taken time to search him thoroughly.

Even though unarmed, he and the Champ might have put up a fight in an attempt to break free. But the information he wanted was evidently down here, not elsewhere.

Escape now would have defeated his purpose.

Guarded by the two armed men, Van and Jerry followed the robed figure through the door which he opened, down a steep incline that turned twice at right angles and brought them out into a deeper, smaller cavern cut into the earth directly below the subterranean chamber above.

Heat greeted them as they entered this room.

Four burly men, stripped to the waist, eyed them curiously. A fifth man who appeared to be a hunchback looked up leeringly with small pale eyes set deep and wide apart in a distorted, twitching and scarred face.

But it was the glow in the center of the room that held Van's attention. Through a small opening in the rock a thin flame stood up from the floor for almost a foot in height. The rock from which this jet spurted was white hot, and the flame itself was perfectly colorless at the base but flowered into vivid blues and yellows before it expended itself.

The room was filled with a constant hissing sound, a miniature roar that made speech difficult.

The Phantom tore his eyes from that fascinating light, and for a moment as he looked away he was blinded. Then vision returned swiftly, but he kept his eyes off that flame, and noticed that about the necks of the four workmen and the hunchback hung thick goggles.

The cloaked leader indicated the short squat man with the hunched back, and said to Van, "This is Doctor Kag. Professor Kag was one of the foremost metallurgists in the world until one of his experiments blew up and crippled him. He is temporarily—" He emphasized the word forebodingly—"in charge of the experiments we are conducting here. The gas flame in this room, with the addition of oxygen, is the hottest torch that has ever been discovered—two thousand degrees centigrade higher than that electric arc oven of Dr. Junes at Niagara Falls."

The Phantom's eyes showed a sharpened interest that he did not have to fake.

The man-made oven of Dr. Junes, built by the General Electric Company for experimental purposes, had the highest temperature of any arc furnace thus far designed. And arc furnaces were the hottest known to man.

Yet, by the statement of one of the engineers in this hooded organization, seven hours of that arc heat had failed to fuse the two metals whose union had been the aim of Doctor Junes. Van did not doubt the statement of the leader standing before him now. And two thousand more degrees of heat, he realized, would be more than sufficient, if properly controlled, to effect that world-important fusion of those two metals.

He was about to speak, when Kag came swaying toward him, leering, pawing with gnarled, crippled hands.

"Professor Junes!" Kag's voice was shrill, piercing.

"He's not Junes," the hooded man shouted. "He's another scientist. Junes is dead, burned up in his own furnace!"

Kag's pale eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. "You're not Junes?" he cried querulously.

"No," Van admitted, watching the man narrowly. There was near insanity in those crazy, rolling eyes.

Suddenly the hunchback's fawning attitude changed. Crazed genius glittered in his rocking gaze.

"Ach!" he screamed. "A scientist, are you? It is I who am the scientist—the greatest scientist in the world! What do you know of science—of fire—of metallurgy?"

"I was a friend and contemporary worker with Dr. Junes," Van answered as calmly as he could. This hunchback, he knew, could trip him with questions, show him up as an impostor. "Tell me, Professor Kag, what experiments you are working—"

"Kag!" The hunchback's shrill voice trembled with frenzy. "Kag! I shall tell you nothing! I shall ask you questions! You do not even know who I am. Kag!"

The Phantom saw the mistake he had made, tried to stop the man's wild screeching by correcting the error. This man was unquestionably Dr. Gulliver Vonderkag, once the foremost metallurgical scientist in Germany—but now only the shell of him, yet his genius still raged.

But Van could not make himself heard.

"A metallurgist, are you? Tell me quickly the fusion point of antimony and copper."

The Phantom's muscles tensed at the suddenness of this crisis.

"Antimony and copper—"

Van had to hesitate, grope an instant before the answer came to him. Then he gave it, watching the hunchback nervously. If the German scientist shot many more such questions at him, he'd be stuck, and his Bendix role unmasked.

"Slow," Kag cried in disgust. "Dr. Junes, he would have been quicker. I could have used him in my work. But you—"

"You've no choice in the matter, Kag," the hooded leader said flatly. "Test him again."

The Phantom's mind fought against Vonderkag's warped brain, beat the crippled scientist's formulating question by sheer audacity and drive.

"Doctor!" Van shouted. "Let us stop this kindergarten child's game. I am interested only in your knowledge of Dr. Junes' work—his experiment which he refused to continue."

"Refused to continue?" Kag demanded shrilly. "What is that?"

"Fusing aluminum and calbite," the Phantom declared in a loud, challenging voice. "Dr. Junes, as you've been told, was killed, but before he died, he had refused to carry on the fusion. He was afraid. I know what he feared. Do you?"

"Afraid?" Kag screeched the word as though it had come from a foreign tongue and had no meaning for him. "Are we men of science?"

Somebody pounded on the door. The hooded leader swung round, unlocked the door, let in a man dressed similarly in hood and robe but without a mask. On the sleeve of the newcomer was a green circle with a zigzag line running through it.

"What's the trouble, Sergeant?" the masked man demanded.

The hooded sergeant saluted briskly, swinging his arm in toward his stomach and out again. He stepped around a water pail, his leg brushing the dipper sticking out of it as he handed over a sealed envelope.

"Something that demands immediate attention," he stated.

As the man in the mask ripped open the envelope and extracted the folded sheet of note paper it contained, Van signaled Lannigan to be ready, and edged closer to the leader whose eyes narrowed dangerously as he read the penciled notation.

For a swift instant, Van caught a glimpse of that note, got a flash view of the words:

Professor Bendix suspected of being sent as a scientist spy from the capitalist publisher—

He managed to catch the name Havens in the note. As he moved, Van remembered he'd used Havens' name in Niagara Falls. The invisible organization had caught up with him!

But what he did now he had already planned to do in that continued moment of suspense when Vonderkag had challenged him as a metallurgical scientist. The crisis demanded instant action; Kag was forgotten for the instant.

With one quick swing, so swift as to be almost undetectable, Van's right arm shot out and downward as his hand gripped the water pail, lifted it, swung its contents straight into the hissing gas flame in the center of the floor.

Instantly the entire room became a dense fog of swirling, blinding steam. The Phantom whirled, and his fist cracked against the jaw of the nearest mine guard. He yanked the gun from the falling man's hand, heard the harder crack of Lannigan's hamlike fist as Jerry slugged the other guard.

"Out!" Van barked.

The next second he was through the door with Jerry puffing behind him. Back of them in the furnace chamber, shouts and shots sounded as slugs pounded into the wall after them.