The Avenger 17 - Nevlo (13 page)

“He is here, Mr. Blake. Nevlo.”

Instantly the room became so still that the sound of Ryan’s choleric breathing seemed loud. Then Blake’s ragged sigh sounded out.

“Show him in, Pearson.”

They all heard it. The dragging, shuffling steps of a person crippled and abnormal. The ill-timed steps that indicated a mental disorder as well as a physical imbalance.

The steps paused outside the door, and then the maker of the steps came into the room.

Bitter black eyes, a face that looked like the heavy-boned countenance of a gorilla, arms that hung so low they almost touched the floor, lips moving constantly in a soundless muttering.

“Here are the men you wanted to see, Nevlo,” said Blake. His face was strained in an effort not to show the fear and hate and disgust expressed more openly on the faces of the others. His tone was deliberately calm, almost soothing. “Tell us, now, just what you want.”

Harsh words came from the crouching, monstrous form by the door, while the vindictive black eyes went from one man to another of that tense group.

“What do I want?” came the harsh words. “Plenty, gentlemen. I grew up in the power business. I helped it reach the position it has today. My inventions are in use all over the land. I was the one who laid out Plant 4. And what was my reward? I was discharged like any dollar-an-hour electrician! I was cast aside on the junk heap. But I knew too much to stay on the junk heap.” Wild laughter came from the mumbling, stiff-looking lips. “I have proved that. And now I will have my revenge—and a fortune.”

“Yes, yes, you’ll have your revenge,” said Blake soothingly. “But precisely what is your demand, Nevlo?”

They all stared with bated breath at the monstrous, crippled figure.

“My demand?” said Nevlo. “This is it. I want five million dollars, cash, before tomorrow night. If I don’t get it, all power goes off tomorrow at midnight.”

Blake’s gasp could be heard loudly in the room as he stared at the gorilla-like figure. The other men suddenly buzzed excited whispers at each other. There was an air of tremendous relief in the room.

Five million. It was a huge sum. But it was so much less than the men had feared would be demanded that it plainly seemed almost reasonable to them.

Ryan, by concerted whispers and nods, became spokesman. He had reconsidered his resolve to pay no blackmail.

“We’ll meet that demand, Nevlo. You will get your five million dollars before tomorrow night. But in return we shall expect you to show us how you are able to shut off power in such a wholesale manner. We must know, so that we can guard against it in the future. We can’t face such demands as this every few months—”

The butler stuck his head in the door again. Blake glared at him. But the glare was wasted. The butler wasn’t even looking at his master. He eyed all of them, helplessly, fearfully, and bleated:

“I . . . sirs . . . good heavens! There is
another
Nevlo here!”

A chair crashed as Blake sprang up, mouth open with amazement and terror.

“Pearson, you’re mad! Another Nevlo—”

The butler was shoved violently aside, and into the room waddled a second monstrous gorilla figure.

Line for line, its face was the same as the first Nevlo’s face. In posture, movement, and in every other way, here were twin monstrosities.

Ryan’s profane exclamation ripped out:

“Here’s a fine one! Which is which? What the hell
is
this, anyhow?”

A scream of rage and fright came from the writhing lips of the second visitor. He turned and fled away down the hall.

And after him went the first one.

As The Avenger pursued the misshapen being who had come to Blake’s home just a few minutes too soon, he took from his eyeballs the tinted eye cups that made black eyes of his colorless orbs. He couldn’t see very well through them, and there was, in addition, the risk of their being broken in any violent struggle and impairing his sight.

But there was not, it seemed, to be violence. At least not the hand-to-hand kind. The racing, crouching figure before him had come with a bodyguard.

As Benson leaped from the front door and crossed the porch in a single lithe stride, shots burst out from both ends of the house.

The Avenger’s body jerked as two slugs hit him. They were stopped by his bulletproof undergarments, but the impact of a .45 bullet is very heavy. The rest of the shots missed their flickering target.

At the curb was a sedan that sagged on its tires in a way to indicate that it was armored. The fleeing figure ahead of The Avenger leaped into this. The car started away.

Out of its leg holster leaped the little special .22, Mike. It whispered twice as The Avenger raced toward the car. A bullet went into each rear tire; but, as Benson had thought, they were filled with petroleum jelly and immune to bullets. The car sped on.

A dozen men were running after Dick Benson, now, shooting as they came. With so many, some one bullet would be bound, in a few seconds, to get him either in the head or the legs, where his celluglass garment did not extend to shield him from slugs.

Down the street, a little distance from where the sedan had been, were two other cars, used also by this gang when they came with their crippled, mad leader. Dick reached the first of these and sprang in.

Bullets ripped through windshield and windows. This was an ordinary stolen car, not bullet-proofed.

The Avenger slid out the other side and went back to the second car. White spots appeared on glass, but the slugs making them did not penetrate. This car was bulletproof. He slammed into gear and rolled after the vanished sedan, with the men behind yelling their fury and fruitlessly emptying their guns at him.

In his made-up face, The Avenger’s eyes were like glacial ice under a polar dawn. He had gotten clear of a death trap, but he had lost that ill-formed, crippled monster who had run screaming from him down Blake’s hall.

However, there was a measure of icy satisfaction in Benson’s pale, awesome eyes. The venture into the conference of the power barons had not been entirely without results, after all.

Smitty, at Marville according to his chief’s orders, lurked in the woods around Plant 4 for half an hour before venturing to go in.

Benson had instructed him to look for a dead man, to start with the plant itself and work out, searching for murder.

The order was still utterly mysterious to Smitty; but he, as well as all the rest of the reckless little crime-fighting band, always obeyed The Avenger’s orders to the letter, whether they seemed to make sense or not.

Start with the plant. Well, that was not as hard as it had sounded, the giant found.

Evidently, Grant Utilities Corp. had given up, temporarily at least, searching for the trouble at their glittering but useless Plant 4. There were no white-collared experts around, and no workmen. There was just one man, middle-aged, who was there as a watchman. Smitty confirmed that fact in his spying on the plant.

The big fellow went back along the path he had taken from his car, parked in a thicket a mile away. He came upon a spot he remembered, which would serve his purpose.

The spot was a low knoll, with bare space around it for forty or fifty yards, and dried, scrubby-looking brush on top of it. Smitty lit a match.

In a moment the brush was blazing, with smoke rising up from it. Actually, the knoll was so placed that fire could not spread over the bare spots to the woods themselves. But the thing, from a distance, would look like the beginning of a dangerous forest fire.

Smitty ran silently back to the plant. As he got near the gate he side-stepped while the middle-aged watchman tore past him to investigate the fire and put it out.

Smitty went on more leisurely, with the plant all his for at least fifteen minutes.

“Search for a dead man.”

A corpse, whether produced by murder or by legitimate accident or disease, almost invariably is buried somewhere. So as Smitty searched, he kept his eyes directed downward.

He was looking for some section of flooring that seemed to have been recently disturbed. And over by the big switchboard, he found such a section.

There was a ragged strip, about a yard wide, in the cement floor from the board to No. 3 generator. It was easy to surmise what had made it. In checking the uncanny failure of the plant, somebody had ripped up the floor to expose the cables from generators to switchboard. Then new cement had been smoothed into place, leaving that slightly ragged strip over the trench.

There was a huge wrench nearby, a solid-looking six-foot spanner as heavy as a sledge hammer. Smitty picked that up.

Concrete hardens very quickly into usable firmness; but not for some time does it achieve its final flinty hardness. This was fresh enough to yield to the giant’s colossal strength.

A dozen whistling blows with the hundred-pound spanner smashed the short strip into jagged fragments. Smitty pried them out and exposed the cinder blanket under the floor. This was scratched aside, too, a little dirt thrown up—

Smitty stared at the toe of a shoe. He touched it with the spanner. Its firmness indicated that there was a foot inside it.

Smitty worked fast. The thing was exposed in a few minutes. And then, shuddering a little, he examined it.

The corpse was that of a man. But of what man it was going to be difficult to ascertain because the torso was headless! The head had been raggedly cut off and taken somewhere else, since it was not in evidence in the exposed trench.

The man, before being killed, had been tortured in a manner to make the blood run cold. Evidences of the inhuman treatment were obvious on the headless body.

Smitty suddenly examined the throat as a rather unnatural thing caught his eyes. The throat muscles seemed a bit scrawnier, slightly withered, on the left side.

Hunt for a corpse, The Avenger had quietly directed. And by all that was mysterious, here was a corpse. Smitty felt the old awe of the man with the death-mask face and the pale, dreadful eyes well up in his vast chest.

A freshly murdered man. Well, that was only partly true, depending on what you called fresh. Smitty could see that this body had reposed in the cable trench for at least a month.

Off through a lofty window, he could see the smoke of the fire he had started fading down almost to nothingness as the watchman got it under control. Not much time left.

Smitty debated whether to take the grisly thing from under the floor along with him, shivered and decided against it, then edged it back into its impromptu grave.

With a broom from a near rack, he swept dirt over it, trod it down, then spread the cinders back in an even layer. The fragments of concrete, he didn’t bother with. There was no disguising the way the fresh strip of cement had been ripped up. The watchman would have to find it and wonder why it had been done in his short absence. Perhaps he would dig himself and find the body. In any event, Smitty’s quest had been successful.

A man showing signs of having been tortured to death, with the head removed to make identification impossible, buried under the floor of Plant 4. Just where did
that
enter into this mad, tremendous affair of power blackouts and insane cripples?