The Avenger 16 - The Hate Master (2 page)

Morel laid down his work and padded to the door of the lab. His feet, clad in slippers, shuffled a little on the cement floor, and the sound rose to the ceiling and whispered there like disturbed bats.

He went out into the night.

The stars were fading a little as the black of dawn came over the world. Nothing stirred; nothing moved. Morel was smiling at his own imagination, now. But he started conscientiously to make the round of the fence.

He started at the gate and worked back.

There was the drawn-out howl of a wolf. Then, right in the clearing, it seemed, there was an answering howl!

Lila, tossing wakefully in her bed, heard that second howl and shivered. She got up to go and see if her father couldn’t be pried from his work.

Packer, the elderly servant who took care of father and daughter when they came to the Maine laboratory, padded into the room. He was a kindly, fatherly looking person whose lips were always set in a slight smile. In fact, even now, they smiled just a little, though eyes and expression were grave and did not at all match the small curve of his lips. Lila hastily put a robe over her night clothes.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered.

“You mean the wolf’s howl, so close?” Lila said. She felt like shivering, and Packer’s ghostly whisper added to the feeling, which annoyed her. So she spoke in a deliberately loud tone.

“Yes,” said Packer, still whispering. “It sounded as if the beast were right outside the building. And Mr. Morel isn’t in the laboratory. I just looked.”

“Dad’s not out there?” Lila said hastily. “Oh, but he must be!”

She went to the lab, herself. Its ghostly emptiness confronted her. Complete emptiness. The man with the blue eyes and the gray-blond hair was not at any of the workbenches.

“He . . . he must have gone out to walk around for a minute in the fresh air,” Lila faltered. “Packer, put on the lights.”

The servant clicked a switch. The great windows became pale-white jewels as floodlights outside lit up the clearing. Lila stepped out. Packer slid back out of sight.

Every pebble, every blade of grass, showed up in that pitiless light. You could have seen a field mouse scurry over the close-clipped lawn.

But there was no movement anywhere; no sound.

Lila drew the robe closer around her bare white throat.

“Dad,” she called.

There was no answer. She half ran and half walked around the laboratory building.

“Dad!”

No answer. And the gate was locked and could be opened from within the house only.

Morel had stepped into a clearing from which no man could go, and into which no man could climb. He stepped into it and disappeared!

There had been the far howl of a wolf, then one so close that it seemed in the clearing itself—and that was all.

If only Lila Morel had had something to work on! But she hadn’t.

A man walks along a city street, we’ll say. That man gets to a certain spot, and then just vanishes into thin air. How would you trace him?

That was Lila’s problem.

In the twenty hours that had passed since her father’s disappearance in the Maine laboratory, she had gotten over the feeling that there was something supernatural about it. She had decided there was a natural explanation. There simply
must
be! As her father had said, she was a scientist’s daughter and hence ought to be beyond superstition.

Her father must have had some way of getting out of the compound gate that she didn’t know about. He must have suffered an attack of amnesia or something and simply walked off into the night.

But inquiry all over that part of the country had not turned up anyone who had seen Morel. And besides, he was in splendid health with not one thing to hint at brain trouble such as amnesia.

So he must have gone off, sane but in some suddenly conceived hurry. Or he might have been kidnaped!

Lila was trying not to think of the latter possibility. She was acting as if her father had left of his own accord and in full possession of his faculties.

So she was coming to talk to his oldest friend.

The house she was approaching was set in acres of lawn, sloping off to the Hudson River, not many miles north of New York City. It was a beautiful estate that belonged to a well-known figure.

The owner was Edwin C. Ritter, wealthy owner of an inherited shoe company, who was now high in power in the political party which had always had his allegiance.

Ritter was Arthur Morel’s closest friend. The two men had gone to school together and had kept in close touch with each other ever since. Lila felt that if anyone would know where her father had gone it would be Ritter.

Anyhow, she hoped so.

It was about ten o’clock at night, but lights blazed from most windows of the country place. It looked as if her luck were in and that Ritter, a busy man seldom at home, was now here to be seen.

Lila stopped her modest coupé, got out and walked up the stone steps to a ponderous door. She pressed the button there and heard soft chimes within. Then the door opened.

For a moment Lila felt as if she were in a dream and was seeing a nightmare.

From the crack between door and jamb, peered out at her one of the ugliest faces she had ever seen. And it was set on a form equally ugly.

The man was hardly five feet high, with shoulders and back twisted subtly so that the malformation didn’t actually show, but was more sensed than seen. Over this dwarfish body was a face that seemed to have come from the Stone Age. The features were so heavy that it was like a mask of a face twice life-size. He had a great, jutting jaw, heavy cheekbones and a beak of a nose. The whole countenance was almost hairless so that it looked curiously naked.

But the eyes reassured her. In the midst of this grotesque, almost repellent malformation, the eyes were intelligent, clear, kindly.

“Yes, miss?” the ugly, dwarfish man said. Only then did Lila see that he wore servants’ livery.

“I’d like to see Mr. Ritter, please,” she said. “My name is Lila Morel.”

The twisted little man showed her into a small drawing room, then disappeared. In a moment the famous Edwin Ritter came in.

Ritter was over six feet, very handsome, with black eyes and heavy black brows and prematurely white hair. He had an orator’s large, mobile mouth. He came to Lila with both hands out.

“Fine to see you,” he boomed. “How is your father? I haven’t seen you and Arthur for much too long.”

Lila’s heart sank, and it must have showed on her face. For Ritter said quickly:

“What’s the matter? Anything wrong?”

“I was hoping you
had
seen Dad,” Lila answered. “I came here to ask if you’d seen him or heard from him.”

“No. I haven’t. What—”

Lila told what had happened. Ritter sat there with a slight frown on his handsome face.

“That
is
odd. Yet, there must be a natural explanation,” he decided at last.

Lila shook her head.

“Why would he simply walk off, in carpet slippers and with no money or anything else, at two or three o’clock in the morning, and without saying a word to Packer or me?”

“It does seem odd,” said Ritter. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything you
can
do,” said Lila. “Except to get in touch with me right away if you hear from him. I’ll be at our town apartment.”

Ritter nodded. His hand touched her shoulder in a fatherly way.

“Now don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be all right.” He stopped. “Hang it, I’m not at all sure of it! Tell me, is Packer still with you?”

“Yes,” said Lila.

“Is he perfectly all right? Are you sure of him?”

“Absolutely sure,” said Lila. “He’s above suspicion.”

Ritter chewed his lip, then shrugged. “This hits me as hard as it does you. Should we get in touch with the police?”

“I hate to do that, yet,” said Lila. “Dad has sometimes done eccentric things. Maybe this is one of those times. I’ll go to the apartment and wait. Tell me if you hear from him.”

She started toward the hall door, then looked at Ritter.

“You have a new butler?”

Ritter nodded, smiling a liitle. “Nothing of beauty, is he? But he is the perfect servant. In fact, he is more than a servant. Knarlie is my right-hand man, and I think I’ll make him my confidential secretary one of these days.”

“Knarlie?” Lila almost smiled, too. “What an odd name for an odd man!”

She said good night and walked out. She got into her coupé, turned south along the Hudson toward where the lights of the great city glowed in the sky. And that was almost the end of Lila Morel!

There was a big truck taking up over half the road ahead of her. She paid little attention to the van. There is always a lot of night trucking. She simply blew her horn, started to pass, then got one glimpse of a face.

The face was reflected in the closed truck’s rear-view mirror which stuck out at the left side of the cab. The mirror was highlighted by her headlights so that the reflected face swam out at her like the head of an evil monster.

Deadly, slitted eyes; a sort of grin shaping a thin gash of a mouth; face like a hatchet blade and with just about as much human emotion to it.

Then the truck had stopped with all the swiftness of oversized airbrakes, and Lila’s coupé slammed into its rear.

After that, things were pretty confused.

Lila’s head banged against the side upright of the coupé with the shock and drew a curtain of white wool over her senses. Then she was in a kind of moving room with men around her, and queerly enough she was still sitting in the coupé.

What had happened, though she hadn’t seen it, had been a marvel of co-ordination and planning.

With the crack of her car against the truck’s flat tail, the big thing had suddenly become a cave instead of a closed box. That is, the rear had suddenly lowered, after the truck had gone on a few feet, so that it formed a steep incline up into the van.

Then, from the van, men came jumping. Five or six of them, with their presence inside unsuspected as the truck rolled innocently along.

One of the men shoved Lila away from the wheel and took it himself. There was a roar from the coupé’s motor and a creaking jounce as it took the short, steep incline with a rush.

Then car and girl and men were inside, and the rear of the truck slid up into place again, smoothly, without sound.

The van started toward New York, innocent-looking.

The man at the wheel slouched half out of the cab window, cigarette drooping from his mouth, apparently alone.

There had been a van and a coupé. Now, there was just a van. That was all.

That is, for a moment that was all. Then there came a scream from inside the van that had a great deal of girlish enthusiasm behind it.

There was a small window in the back of the cab. The driver turned his head sideways, keeping his eyes on the road, and snarled out of the corner of his mouth:

“Keep that dame quiet, you punks! There’re cops around.”

The words were not necessary. With the first sound, one of the men had clamped dirty fingers over Lila’s lips. The scream died in a gurgle, like that of a drowning person. Lila felt something prick her arm, hard. And then for the second time a white fog settled over her so that she was aware only of swaying around in the van for what seemed weeks, and finally of its stopping.

The second time she came to, she was alone.

She was still in the coupé, this time shoved back under the steering wheel where she had been in the first place. Her shoulder ached like fire, where a hypodermic needle had been shoved home. In addition, there was a moist feeling on her skin, there, and a slight wet patch on her dress.

The needle, in the hands of men not skilled in such matters, inserted hurriedly, had not discharged its full load into her veins, which accounted for her not being still senseless.

She decided it was the better part of wisdom to pretend she was still unconscious, however, while she looked around from under lowered lids.

She was on a road unfamiliar to her, next to the river. There was a railing along the road, but the railing was broken in one section. Sounds of motors to her right indicated that the main highway was off there a quarter of a mile or so.

Then she shut her eyes in a hurry, as voices sounded.

“O K, Dutch?” somebody said.

The answer came: “O K! I got the marks of the truck tires brushed out where you nosed the railing over. The only tracks anybody’ll find will be the tracks of the dame’s car.”

“I still think we’re makin’ this too complicated,” somebody else protested. “Why don’t we just bop her on the bean, or send a slug through her?”

“You dope! This way she just had an accident and ran her buggy off the road, through the railing and into the river. Start the motor, Jake.”

Lila stayed very still, slumped behind the wheel of the coupé. She felt the car sag as a man got in the right side. Her foot was kicked aside while his felt for the starter button.

The coupé’s motor roared into life.

“Put her in first, Jake,” called the man. “Then slide out and slam the door.”

“The front of her car’s busted where she connected with the back of the truck,” protested the gloomy voice again. “That’ll tell the cops that this wasn’t any accident.”

“The front of her car would be busted up anyhow, from hitting the railing, wouldn’t it?” snapped the other man. “O K, Jake, let ’er roll.”

It was lucky it was dark. Fine beads of sweat were on Lila’s forehead as death yawned for her.

Trapped in a coupé, sent into many feet of water, it might be days before her body was found. Maybe the car would never be found!

Gears clashed as the man beside her slammed into first without bothering to use the clutch. The car began to move slowly toward the place where the truck had battered down the railing to receive it.

Lila grabbed the wheel convulsively, but it was too late. Just then the front wheels slid over the edge of the twenty-foot embankment.

Down its steep slant, the coupé half rolled and half slid, then dove into the water with a great splash.