RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
The Spider, February 1938, with "Death Rocks the Cradle"
What ghastly influence had caused those children, one by one, to die by their own tiny hands? In that eerie epidemic of self-destruction, Doc Turner battled frantically to snatch his little ones—from a fiend who robbed the cradle to send them to a suicide's grave!
"GOOD LORD, Doc!" Jack Ransom gasped. "What's the matter? What's struck you?" Dropping into the ancient drugstore on Morris Street for an early morning chat, the barrel-chested, carrot-headed youth halted, rigid in the doorway, his eyes widening with wonder.
Doc Turner, the white-haired but wiry pharmacist, whose good right hand Jack had been in so many forays against the petty crooks who prey on the hapless poor, now stood at a showcase near the front of the store—to every appearance a broken cast-down old man.
Slightly built though he had been—wrinkled, somewhat stooped with age, and often weary with his long years of serving the bewildered aliens of this slum—yet Andrew Turner had always reflected a certain vibrant zest, an eager aliveness which even dreary routine could never seem to dull.
But the very integrity of the man was now shattered. A grey bleakness filmed his countenance, blurring the high forehead with its shaggy silver brows, the big, but finely chiseled nose, the resolute chin. Even the bushy white mustache was oddly altered in shape, as the lips it hid were contorted by some overpowering distress. The eyes, whose faded blue usually twinkled with kindly humor, now were sunken and crawling with something akin to horror.
"Doc!" Ransom said again. "What's happened?" He moved to the older man's side, put a big-thewed arm about the pathetically thin shoulders.
Turner's hand, its tight-stretched skin so transparent that a blue network of veins showed through, moved rustling across a newspaper spread open atop the show case. An acid-stained forefinger pointed to a minor headline midway of an inside page.
TWELVE YEAR OLD BOY A SUICIDE
URCHIN HANGS SELF SO REST OF
FAMILY MAY HAVE MORE TO EAT
"Jimmie Gast," Doc's voice was husky. "I sold his mother baby
bottles and nipples for him. When he was three, he used to run
away from her and toddle in for a piggy-back ride and a handful
of jelly-beans. I gave him a box of pencils, with his name on
them, his first day of school. He was here only last night to
show me a prize he'd won at Sunday school."
"Tough," Ransom whispered. "It's sure tough, Doc. I knew him, too. The tow-headed tyke was a good kid. Many's the time I seen him wheeling his baby sister around in a wagon he made himself out of a soap box—when he might have been playing baseball. There's four others between the baby and him, and Dan Gast makes about ten dollars a week washing dishes over at..."
A high-pitched wail, shrilling through the growling rumble of traffic outside, stopped him. The door slammed open. A woman lurched in, pallid lips gaping to emit that keen cry out of a contorted, flabby-cheeked face. Hugged to her pendulous, aproned breasts was a writhing form—a girl too big and heavy to be carried thus except by virtue of hysteria's false strength.
"Doc Turner," the shrill cry split into words. "Poison. Mart'a poison has taken. Safe her!"
THERE was a babble of excited voices, the jamming of an
excited throng in the doorway, as Jack leaped to take the girl
from the agonized mother. The scrawny little form writhed, as he
got his hands on it. The thin, stockingless legs kicked out,
stiffly. The small torso arched. The thrown-back face, framed in
a disorder of yellow curls, was split by a terrible grin. Through
the clenched teeth, exposed by lips tautly drawn back, a greenish
foam bubbled.
The girl's bony body went limp in Jack Ransom's arms—limp, and utterly still.
"Mart'a!" the mother screamed. "Mart'a!" And then no sound at all came from her gaping mouth. One of the child's arms dangled as loosely as the garters pinned to her waist.
Doc Turner, his seemed countenance a grim death-mask, lifted the small, fisted hand. His fingertips rested on the bloodless wrist for a long moment made more awful by the rattle and bang of an "El" tram rushing along the trestle, whose ties threw barred black shadows on the debris-strewn cobbles of Morris Street.
The old druggist let the wrist fall. "Too late," he murmured into the throbbing hush the train had left behind. "Strychnine works quickly. It is too late for me to save her."
"Late," the woman whispered. "It's late, Mart'a." She held out her sleeveless arms, suds of laundry soap drying on them, their skin puckered and white, and Jack placed the small corpse in them. "Sleep," the mother crooned, her eyes glazed and unseeing. "Sleeping time, little Mart'a." Her legs buckled under her so that slowly, very slowly, she sank to her knees on the drugstore floor. "Sweet dreams, Mart'a," she crooned, swaying and singing an old lullaby in German:
"Sleep, my little rose, sleep, my little child,
Tomorrow's sun will come soon."
Someone sobbed, in the silent crowd that jammed the doorway.
Brazen bells jangled, on some passing junk wagon...
Jack tried to wink away the wet blur that obscured his vision. He saw Doc bend and tug at Martha's hand that lay boneless on her mother's knee—the hand that had been pressed against the youth's chest seconds before.
"So," the bereaved mother whispered. "So sleep, little Mart'a, while I go make from my wedding dress a graduation dress for you. All night I will sew, and in the morning wash and iron it so you will be pretty w'en they gif your diploma to you."
A muscle twitched in Jack's cheek. "That's right, Doc," he said, low-toned, as the druggist straightened. "They're having graduation in the public school this afternoon, and Martha Englander was the head of the class. Ann Fawley was telling me..."
"Look." Turner was holding out a crumpled paper to him. "This was in her hand. Read it."
The paper was a sheet torn from a cheap tablet. The writing was in pencil and it was round, unformed, childish. It said—
Mom—If you don't have to worry about buying things for me, the money from the company Pop used to work for will be enough for Greta and Carl and you, and you won't have to break your back any more taking in washing. I know where the rat poison is and I'm going to take the whole box.
Don't worry.
I wish I could kiss you good-by, but you'll guess and won't let me do it. So I'm putting a kiss here—X—for you. And these—X—X—are for Carl and Greta. Pop and I will be waiting for you in Heaven, so don't cry too much.
I love you all so! Good-by, Mom.
Your Martha.
"God!" There was no blasphemy in the word that came from the
youth's icy lips. "She's the second one who—"
"Not the second, Jack." Doc's hands were closing and opening, at his sides. "Yesterday, they found little Tony Linasso's body floating in the River, fully clothed. He didn't leave a note, but this is February so he couldn't have been down there to go swimming. He was captain of his basketball team at the Settlement and he wouldn't have been fooling around the docks instead of attending basketball practice."
THE mother's lullaby was still going on, sung in that
cracked, strange voice to the ears that would never hear again. A
policeman was thrusting through the crowd at the door into the
store, and the shocked silence was breaking up into a chatter of
polyglot tongues. The slum smells came into the store—the
odor of decaying vegetables, of breaths laden with exotic foods,
of sweat-impregnated clothing, the peculiar mustiness that is the
odor of poverty. But those two, the squat, powerful youth and the
feeble seeming oldster, were shut away from sound and smell by
the shared knowledge of a new, and most terrible, threat to the
people whom they loved and for whom they had fought so long.
"Three dead, then," Ransom murmured, after his long silence. "There have been three already. There will be more." Inarticulate, he could not have put into speech the reason for his certainty that the child suicides were not ended, but would go on—an epidemic of self-inflicted death.
"There will be more," Turner agreed, "now that it has started. Thousands of children killed themselves in Germany, during the after-war years. It happened in Russia. Now it has come here to Morris Street."
Tiny muscles, knotting, ridged Jack's blunt jaw. "We've got to stop it, Doc," he growled.
The pharmacist made a little, hopeless gesture. "Stop it? How? We've battled enemies, Jack—against what seemed unconquerable odds. We won out. But this is an enemy we cannot battle. This is something within these children—an enemy no human weapon can touch."
"Hey, Doc," the policeman interrupted. "I can't get the old lady to let go the stiff. Mebbe you can give her something to keep her quiet till the morgue bus gets here."
LIFE, teeming and lusty in the poverty stricken warrens of
Morris Street, has a merciful way of quickly overlaying horror
with forgetfulness. By mid-afternoon the roar and pound of
trucks, the raucous shouts of pushcart peddlers, the screams and
laughter of the children released from school and playing
dangerously in the street, had risen to its full chorus. That in
a tenement flat on Hogbund Lane a boy's body lay in a wooden
coffin nestled between two chair seats, that in a drab hospital
near the river a woman crooned unendingly over arms crossed to
cradle a little girl who was not there—were matters of no
particular moment.
To one old man, only, the scene of the morning was still vivid. Doc Turner stood in the doorway of his store, watching the familiar turmoil. On his wrinkled face was still the bitter hopelessness and brooding dread that had settled there when he said, "There will be more, Jack—now that it has started."
Which would be the next? Rosario Morales, who, teeth flashing whitely out of his olive-skinned countenance, darted, just in time, out of the path of a lumbering van? Mary Forbes, squatting here on the sidewalk, so absorbed in a game of jacks that the shuffling throng of shawled housewives were only shadows to her, flicking past? One of those youngsters, playing handball against the window of the vacant store next door?
Doc knew them all. They were his children, almost as truly as if they had been his flesh and blood. He had agonized over their illnesses, rejoiced with them over their small joys, prayed for them that they might sometime find their way out of this abyss of poverty.
One of them, as surely as that the sun would set in an hour or so, would die tonight—by his childish own hand. Nothing that Andrew Turner could do would save him.
Strange, he thought, how abruptly the impulse must have come to those youngsters who already had died. In Tony's sodden clothes, they had found the diagram of a new play he had promised to teach his team at the practice from which drowning had cheated him. Jimmie's eyes had glowed with anticipation, as he had talked to Doc about the coming week-end. Martha had stayed up late last night to memorize the valedictory she had not delivered. To them, there had been no anticipation at all of death...
One of the handball players tripped, sprawling across the sidewalk. He rolled as if in pain, face going white, lips tight against a moan.
Doc jumped to the urchin. "Where are you hurt, Leo?" he asked quietly, aware of the other boys crowding behind him.
"It ain't nothin'." Leo Bernstein's grimy hands were pressed tight against a new rip in his ragged knickers, but he smiled up at Turner with white lips. "I just scraped my leg."
"Well, come inside. I'll put some iodine on it." The druggist helped the youngster to rise. Something dropped on the sidewalk with a metallic thud, and Doc bent to pick it up. Leo limped into the store, Doc following.
THEY went through the dim quiet of the old pharmacy, through a
curtained doorway into the back room. "Sit down there," the
druggist said, "and roll up your pants leg." He turned to get
down the bottle of iodine, dropping the object he had picked up,
on the white-scrubbed wood of the long prescription counter.
"Geez, Doc Turner," the urchin said, "I hope this won't make my leg stiff. I'm running anchor on the seventy-pound relay team in the P.S.A.L. track meet, an' if I ain't in form, we'll lose out."
Doc's hand was on the iodine bottle, but he was staring at the thing on the counter. It was a clasp-knife that had dropped out of Leo's pocket. It was also brand-new. On a miniature metal shield, set into its bone handle, was the mark of a well-known manufacturer of fine steel implements. The cheapest knife made by that manufacturer would retail at two and a half dollars. It was beyond all reason that Leo could have had that much money to spend.
The druggist's pause was only momentary. He turned to the boy, swabbed the raw flesh of his wound clean with peroxide, dabbed the brownish-red antiseptic on it. Leo caught his breath with the sting.
"That's a swell knife you have," Doc remarked. "Where did you get it?"
"A man gimme it."
The pharmacist stripped the covering from a bit of bandage. "What man?"
"I dunno," said Leo. "A guy what was hangin' around school, when we come out. He called me over an' asked me how many brudders an' sisters I had. When I said five, he said I was just the kinda kid he was lookin' for, that he was advertisin' these knives an' I should try it, an' if I liked it I should tell the other kids about it."
Doc covered the iodine-painted spot with the bandage. "All right, Leo," he said, turning to the counter. "We're finished now." He picked up the knife and his thumbnail pulled out a blade. It was long, narrow and keen. It glittered evilly in the light, seeming to thirst for young flesh, for young blood.
"Leo," Andrew Turner said, "will you do me a favor? How about delivering this package for me?" He turned to the boy, a wrapped bottle in his hand. The prescription had been ordered weeks before, then returned—because the old woman for whom it was intended had died by the time it was delivered. "It's down at the River end of Hogbund Lane."
"Sure t'ing, I will," Leo grinned, taking it. He scampered out.
Turner sighed. "I'm getting morbid," he murmured. "The man is just some eccentric who takes this way of giving pleasure to boys who, the Lord knows, have little enough of pleasure in their lives." Yet, opening the other blades of the knife, he did a curious thing.
He took down a glass-stoppered bottle in which a clear liquid shook with the sloth of an oil. When he extracted the stopper, white fumes seethed from the opening. He took a glass medicine-dropper from a drawer, dipped it into the liquid. With infinite care, he let drops fall into the inside of the knife, upon the rivets that held the case together, and also on those around which the blades pivoted. He closed the blades then, and carefully wiped their edges with a towel. All this he did carefully.
A tiny black spot was on the towel when Doc hung it up again. Before he had re-stoppered the bottle, and returned it to its shelf, that spot had become a hole in the fabric.
Leo had returned now, puzzled. "They say there must be a mistake," he reported. "They say the woman don't live there no more."
"Well," Doc smiled, "I suppose I got the wrong address. She'll come for it. Here's your nickel for running the errand—and here's your knife back. Will you do one more thing for me, son? Run around the corner to the garage and tell Jack Ransom I want to see him right away?"
"Yeah," the urchin grunted, and then, to those with whom he had been playing when he fell, he called, "Save my turn for me fellers. I'll be right back."
JACK RANSOM'S overalls were oil-smeared, and there was a black
smudge of grease across his freckled cheek. He fiddled with a
portable gasoline pump in the door of the garage around the
corner from Morris Street, but his eyes were out on the sidewalk,
where, in the early winter dark, a steady stream of people
hurried toward their meager suppers.
"If Doc's hunches didn't turn out right so often, I'd say he was screwy," he muttered to himself. "But screwy or not, I'll do what he says."
He shrugged... and then tautened. A skinny youngster in tattered knickers went across the doorway, going toward the river. A close cap of kinky black curls topped his scalp, and the eyes in his swarthy, pinched face were two points of black sparkle.
"There he is now," Jack exclaimed. "Leo Bernstein." He slid out into the sidewalk stream. Keeping close to the drab tenement walls, he spotted the urchin's hurrying little figure well ahead. "Good thing it's so dark—he won't notice me... Hey, where's he gone to?"
The small figure he'd been following had vanished. Jack broke into a run. He came to the point where he'd last seen Leo. Abreast of him was the black maw of an areaway, between two slattern tenements. A street lamp, just opposite this aperture, sent its feeble rays into it, and there was movement in the shadows.
A coin tinkled from Ransom's pocket, rolling toward the alley mouth. It clinked against one of three battered, disreputable garbage cans clustered there. Jack vented an exclamation, veered toward the cans, bent to search for it. The movement hid him from the passers-by. Abruptly, he lost interest in the coin he had dropped, went, half-crouched, into the areaway.
He stopped moving, flattening himself against a sidewall that was black with shadow. The vague glow from the street-lamp angled in and showed the weather-stained bricks of the opposite wall. The stink of molding refuse was rancid in his nostrils. Fifteen feet farther down the alley, the Bernstein boy stood close to the lighted wall, facing it. He held a white rectangle of paper against the bricks, laboriously writing on this with the stub of a pencil.
A pulse throbbed in Jack's temple. "Doc's right again," he thought. "Doc's always right." The muscles in his great thighs tautened for action, but he waited. Doc had said to wait and make sure.
Leo finished writing. He scraped the crumbling mortar from between two of the bricks, wadded a corner of the paper and shoved it into the slit thus formed. It hung there like a small white flag—a flag of surrender. Slowly, with a peculiar mechanical quality to his movements, as if they were directed by some compulsion outside of himself, the boy tugged at the knot of his bedraggled necktie, loosened it, pulled open his blouse's frayed collar.
His hand went into his trouser pocket. It came out with the knife the unknown man had given him. He fumbled with it, uncertain for an instant. Then his thumbnail sought the slit-like depression in the edge of the largest blade that would open it.
"Leo!" Ransom croaked, shoving himself away from the wall. "Don't..." Then he went rigid.
Something hard had thumped into his spine. "Freeze," a shadowy voice whispered behind him, "or I'll let you have it." Leo's thumb pulled at the knife-blade. Something snapped—and then there came a sudden shower of small bits of metal and horn, tinkling to the concrete! The urchin stared at his empty hand...
The gun in Jack's back jerked from the sheer shock of that. Instantly, Ransom's foot lifted, desperately drove his heel backward. It impacted on a shin-bone. There sounded a gasp of pain from behind him, as he whirled and flailed snatching fingers at the blued glint of a revolver.
Jack's grasp caught the gun barrel, but, because the blackly silhouetted man that held it was staggering back from that kick, the gun slid from Jack's grasp. His second finger caught momentarily in the sight. The gun jerked from the clutch of its wielder, but Jack couldn't hold it. It thudded down, skidded away.
The shadowy figure leaped at Jack, snarling. Ransom's fist met that onslaught, jolted flesh. The attacker staggered backward, sprawled at the alley mouth.
The scrape of metal on stone whirled Jack about. Leo was down on his knees, scrabbling among the fragments of the shattered knife. In that instant, the boy's fingers closed on a blade and lifted it to his throat. Ransom leaped the ten feet between them in a single frantic bound, pounded hard knuckles against the side of the youngster's head. The lad slammed down, and Jack twisted again.
There was no one at the end of the areaway!
The red-head's rush took him to the sidewalk. It still streamed with laborers, with shop girls and garment workers whose weariness did not clog their eager hurry to get home. It was impossible to locate the man who, with a gun in his spine, had attempted to keep Jack from interfering with one more child suicide.
But the acid, which Doc Turner had dropped on the rivets holding together the knife that had been intended to consummate murder by the victim's own hand, had averted tragedy. The corroded metal had snapped under the strain of the springs when Leo had tried to open it. The rest of Doc's plan was yet to be carried out. Jack ducked back into the alley.
LEO BERNSTEIN was a pitiful heap, crumpled there on the scum-slimed alley floor. He stirred, as Ransom reached him, eyelids
fluttering open. Kneeling to him, the garage mechanic saw only
daze in the black eyes.
"What made you do it, son?" he asked gently. "How did he get you to do it?"
The urchin's lips twisted. "Do what?" he gasped. "What happened to me? How did I get in here? What hit my jaw?"
Dismay was a sudden lump of lead in the pit of Ransom's stomach. "You came in here all by yourself, Leo. Don't you remember coming in here? Don't you remember writing something, and what you started to do after that?"
"Writing? Say, are you goofy?" cried the boy. "I didn't write nuttin'. Geez, it's late. I got to get home or me old man'll whale the stuffin' outa me." The lad put a hand on Jack's shoulder, pushed himself erect.
"Wait," the latter said, taking hold of the boy's arm. "Wait a minute." He plucked the paper from the wall. "Isn't this your handwriting?"
Leo stared at the sheet. "Yeah," he said. "But I didn't write it."
"Read what it says," insisted Jack.
"'Then other kids got the right idea,'" the boy read. "'If there's one less in the house to buy food and clothin' for, there will be enough money to get Rosie's leg made straight. So long everybody, here goes nuttin'." The urchin's pupils dilated, as they looked wonderingly up at Jack. "Geez, I don't remember puttin' that down. But I been thinkin's things like that, ever since—ever since..."
"The man gave you that knife!" Ransom's fingers dug into the thin arm. "Isn't that it? You've been thinking like that ever since that knife's been in your pocket."
The boy looked puzzled. "Yeah, I guess that's so. But it ain't got nuttin' to do with him. It was just that when I got home, after I saw Rosie layin' on her bed, with her leg all crooked, an' I remembered how I was the best runner in my class, an' I started thinkin'..."
"Are you sure, Leo?" Jack asked. "Are you sure it wasn't something the man said to you that started you thinking?"
"Sure, I'm sure. He talked to me a lot, but it wasn't anything like that."
"What did he talk to you about?"
"About..." The puzzled look deepened. "Geez, I dunno. I can't remember. Maybe I wasn't listenin' so good. He had funny eyes, an' I kept lookin' at them. They got bigger'n bigger, till they was all I could see. An' then... he was sayin' good-by'."
"Got it!" Excitement pulsed in Ransom's exclamation. "Listen, Leo. Would you know him again if you saw him?"
"Sure, I would. I'd know him anywheres. He had black hair an' a thin face, an' there was a scar on his hand like somebody once tried to cut off his thumb." His eyes were wide, awed.
"Swell! Leo, I'm taking you home now, but I'm going to wait right downstairs till you finish supper," Jack said. "You're going to tell your folks you've got to go to a gym for practice for the race tomorrow, and then we're going to see Doc Turner and tell him all about what happened. Do you understand?"
"No. But I'll do what you say." The boy nodded gravely.
"Come on then," was the answer. "No, wait a minute... I want to look for something here."
It was the revolver that he had snatched from the killer's hand that Ransom looked for. He didn't find it. It had skidded out to the alley mouth, and the man must have snatched it up as he vanished.
"THAT'S the story, Doc," Jack Ransom finished. "It's as plain
as the nose on your face. He's hypnotizing the kids into
committing suicide." He nodded soberly.
Andrew Turner rubbed a thumb along the worn edge of his prescription counter. "There's something wrong with your theory, my boy. Hypnosis won't explain it. You see, it has long been proved that no one can be hypnotized into killing himself or anyone else."
"Hell! It's as plain as the nose on your face—"
"And there's also the absence of apparent motive. What can he be after, however he accomplishes it, inducing children to kill themselves?" Doc was puzzled. "What does he stand to gain by it?"
"Maybe he's a nut," Leo Bernstein put in. Wide-eyed, excited, he had been listening to this colloquy between his elders. "Maybe he just gets a kick out of us kids killin' ourselves." Doc had thought it best that the boy be told all that had happened to him—as the best safeguard against a repetition of his attempt at suicide.
The old pharmacist shook his head. "No, Leo. It isn't likely. Jack and I have been up against many schemes that looked as if the only explanation of them could be that the man behind them was crazy. But, always, it has turned out that he had a perfectly sane, if evil, motive for what he did. When we caught him..."
"That's it," Ransom interrupted. "What the hell's the use of our standing here worrying about how or why this thing's going on? We know it's happening, and we know we've got to stop it. The only way we can stop it is to catch the devil who's working it. The rest will come out, when we do that. We're wasting time."
"What's your idea, Jack?" Doc asked.
"The kids around here play in the streets till all hours of the night. That's a good time for this bloke to be talking to them. He can get them off in the dark and nobody would notice him." Jack frowned. "My hunch is that, if Leo and I ride around the district in my fliver, we're likely to spot him, and the kid will know him. If you know something better, all right. If not, I say let's get going."
"In other words, I'm getting to be a doddering old fool," Doc admitted. "Perhaps, you're right. Go get your roadster from the garage and come back here for us. I'll get ready to close up, in the meantime."
"Hell, Doc, there's no need for your going along," Jack protested.
"Nevertheless," the pharmacist said, "I am going along. I may be old and a fool, but I'm not old enough or foolish enough to be put on a shelf. Not yet."
JACK RANSOM shrugged and strode through the store into Morris
Street. He knew the futility of arguing with Doc Turner, or of
telling him to stay out of danger. For there was danger in the
hunt for the man who, somehow, by some strange magic, was
inducing little children to kill themselves one by one. What
could be that strange reason buried deep in the black soul?
The smells and sounds of Morris Street beat in on Jack. Lights suspended over the pushcarts threw glare down on the scarlet of tomatoes, the bright green of lettuce and kohlrabi, the purple of eggplant. The cries of the peddlers vied raucously with one another for attention, and the chatter of the shawled housewives was shrill in Ransom's ears. Little children played in the gutter, shrieking with merriment at each hair-breadth escape from the pouring traffic.
Above the children brooded the black shadow of the "El," like the shadow of doom hanging over them.
There was also danger for Jack now. The lead that would have shattered Jack's spine had been stayed only momentarily. The unknown man was dangerous as a snake, lethal as a viper. When they came upon him, whispering somewhere to his next victim, he would know that only by striking first could he save himself. He would strike, all right.
Jack strode around the corner into Hogbund Lane. The narrow, tenement-lined street was not dim-lit as was customary. It was filled with a dancing, lurid light. Resinous torches blazed far down the block before a great grey tent pitched in a vacant lot. The wooden platform in front of the tent was empty as yet, but a canvas banner fluttered above the entrance. Enormous letters were daubed in scarlet on that banner, forming the words—
MISSION OF HOPE
ASTARIS, VOICE OF GOD
The tent had been there a week now. Its torches had flared
nightly, yet the people of Morris Street had not crowded through
its doors. They were tired of missions—which they had come
to regard as rackets. There was always a collection taken up and,
once caught by the spell of some skilled harangue, hard-earned,
badly needed quarters and half-dollars would rattle into the
passing plates. Morris Street figured it was better to stay out
of the tents, and save its money.
A blue-uniformed policeman swung his club, leaning against the platform the evangelist would soon mount. Disappointed spellbinders were sometimes known to hurl abuse at the curious who gaped at them but would not enter their tents. Sometimes spoiled vegetables would fly, and the volatile aliens begin fighting among themselves. The presence of an officer would forestall that.
JACK went through the big open doors of the garage where he
worked. He waved a "hello" to the night man, strode back between
rows of shining hoods to the undesirable space at the very rear
where his battered flivver was stored.
"You've got a flat," the night man called to him. "Slow leak, I guess."
Ransom's oath resounded under the garage's high roof. There was nothing to do but change the tire. That took five minutes. Then the gas tank had to be filled, which occupied a minute or two more. It was perhaps a quarter hour from the time he had left it, before he rattled up in front of Turner's drugstore. It was not surprising that the windows were now already lightless, the shop dark.
What was surprising was that Doc and Leo were not waiting on the sidewalk for him.
Jack's fist pounded his horn button. A huckster jumped a foot in the air, startled by the sudden blast just behind him. But the drugstore door did not open. The old man and the boy did not come out.
Skin tightened across the back of Jack Ransom's neck. He heaved out of his seat, strode across the sidewalk to the pharmacy's door. He grabbed the brass handle, thumbed down the little lever that should open it. It did not. The door was locked!
The door was locked, and only darkness met Jack's eyes, peering through its plate glass. There was no movement within—no sound.
Maybe he'd misunderstood Doc. Maybe Doc had said he'd meet him around the corner, at the side door that opened right into the prescription-room. Ransom's knees were stiff, as he pounded around there, his lips tight. He got to the little door in the bare brick wall that made the side of the drugstore. His hands were cold on the handle of that door.
It was also tightly locked—and neither Doc nor Leo were anywhere around.
A loud voice sounded down the block, from the platform in front of the mission tent. People were stopping, crowding toward the platform. There was a new banner behind the man who had now mounted the platform. It had words on it, but Jack could not read them from here.
"You lookin' for Mr. Toiner?" It was a boy who asked that, coming over from a group that were playing prisoner's base in the gutter. "Are you?"
"Yes," Jack blurted. Doc had been called away for some reason, but had left word for him. The fingers, that had been squeezing Jack's heart, eased a little.
"He ain't here," the boy said. "I seen him come outa dis door about ten minutes ago—him an' Leo Bernstein an' anudder guy. They went acrost the gutter an' down Morris Street."
The fingers were tight again on Jack's heart. "This other man," he managed to say calmly enough. "Who was he?"
"I dunno, said the boy. "He was walkin' a little behind Mr. Toiner an' Leo an' him had his hat pulled down over his face so's I couldn't see it. All I could see was some black hair stickin' out from under the hat."
"Black hair!" Leo had said the man had black hair, a thin face, and a scar on his hand! "Did he have a scar on his hand, like somebody once tried to cut off his thumb?"
The urchin shook his head. "I dunno. He had his hand in the pocket of his coat, so I couldn't see. It must have been a pretty big hand—the way the pocket stuck out."
He was walking behind Doc and his hand was in his pocket! The picture was clear. It wasn't a hand that made the pocket bulge, but the gun that had skidded out of the alley.
"Ten minutes ago, you said?" Jack panted.
"Yeah."
Ten minutes ago they had walked away from here like that, down Morris Street. They couldn't have gotten far in ten minutes. Maybe they were still walking. If the cops sent out an alarm right away, they might still be picked up.
Jack recalled the cop, down there at the mission tent. He started to run toward him. The red torch fire danced on the new banner behind the man who was yelling on its platform. The words on the banner became clear—
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME
"The little children," the evangelist was ranting, as he
tossed long black hair about a pallid, narrow face. "They die!
They die tonight. I bring you hope for them—the only hope
you have for them. I bring you salvation for them.
"Your child, and yours—" he pointed a warning finger at the faces in the crowd before him—"may be the next to die, unless you hear the message I have for you tonight. Your son—" he indicated another—"may follow Jimmie Gast into the perdition of the self-destroyed. Your daughter may follow Martha Englander. Your..."
That hand, that pointing hand, was marked by a long white scar. The scar circled the base of the thumb, as if, at some time, it had been almost severed.
THE blackness pressed against Doc Turner's eyes, as if it had
tangible weight. His arms were numbed by the hard, straight
boards that pressed them against his sides, so that, even if
there had been no rope wound about his body and his legs, he
could not have moved them. The rag, stuffed in his mouth for a
gag, had dried it, so that he was choking with thirst.
But physical discomfort was nothing to what went on in his mind. He had been trapped so damnably easily. Hat and overcoat already on, he had gone to lock the front door and switch off the lights. Leo, left behind in the back room, had cried out an instant, after darkness had invaded the store. Thinking it was only because of the dark, Doc had called reassuringly to him. He had walked back past the sales counter and through the curtained doorway.
He had halted, hands lifting at a low-toned command. The intruder had been about midway of the little prescription-room. He was a dark, shapeless bulk, but there had been nothing shapeless about the gun that had snouted at Doc, covering both him and Leo so that a move or cry from either of them would have meant death.
"Put your hands down," the man had said. "I know you don't carry a gun, but keep your hands away from your pockets, anyway. Walk out of that door, the two of you, and act natural. Remember, I'm right behind you. I don't much care whether I have to shoot you down or not."
Andrew Turner might have tried to fight, might have refused flatly to obey, challenging what might have been a bluff—if he had been alone. But there was the little boy to consider. He had no right to wager the child's life on the chance that the threat might be a bluff. So he had walked out of the side door with Leo at his side. He heard the door's spring-lock click shut, and then went obediently across Hogbund Lane and down Morris Street.
The man with the gun had made them turn the next corner, go down Revere Street to the vacant lot that came through to it from Hogbund. He sent them into the tall weeds of that lot. Here, where the night was darker by the shadow of the mission tent against its dancing red flares, blackness had been smashed into the old druggist's skull by a sudden blow from behind.
When he had awakened, he found himself hog-tied, and prisoned in some kind of box that was too much like a coffin for comfort.
Muffled sounds came in to him—a loud voice whose words he could not make out, a moaning refrain soughing from many throats, the dull thud of countless feet. The smell of damp earth was in his nostrils, like the smell of the grave...
"THEY despair and they die, your children." The evangelist
was on the platform inside his tent now, tall and cadaverous
against the canvas wall that cut off a small space at its farther
end. "By their own hands, they seek death rather than live the
life in death to which you condemn them—you who have
forgotten the faith of your fathers, the God of your ancestors."
He was panting.
"Your God has deserted you, you cry—and so you desert Him. Wrathful and angry, he withholds His saving hand from you, and so it is they who must sacrifice themselves to save you—your children. You can save them. Only by renewing your faith, can you save them. Tomorrow and tomorrow, your children die unless thus you save them—by prostrating yourself before Him, by doing obeisance to Him, and to me who am his voice on Earth, crying out in the wilderness..."
On and on the voice went, and the close-packed throng within the tent moaned with the beat of that voice, shuddered with it. They poured their hard-earned dimes, quarters and dollars into the baskets that were slowly making their way about the tent.
Jack Ransom, white-faced, burning-eyed, went slowly through the throng. The evangelist's voice, the hysteric shouts of the congregation, was heard only dully. His goal was the canvas wall behind the platform—the wall that cut off a space at the further end of the tent.
He had said nothing to the policeman outside—or anyone else. He had not one iota of evidence against Astaris. But he was certain that the evangelist was the man who had whispered death into the ears of Tony, Jimmy, Martha—Leo. Leo, the only one who could testify against Astaris, might not be alive now. If he were still alive, he was in deadly peril.
And Doc was with the boy!
Sliding through the half-mad throng, along the tent's sidewall—and thus hidden from Astaris—Jack reached the partition curtain at last. To his surprise, it was not fastened at its juncture with the wall. He slipped easily into the space it cut off.
He halted, darted eager eyes around. He saw a tarpaulin-covered floor, cot, rude table and chairs, book-stand filled with books and newspapers. In the center, was a square plate of sheet iron on which stood a fat-bellied stove, red-hot with the coal-fire within. There was nothing else—nothing to tell whether Doc and Leo had been brought here or what had happened to them.
Yet they could not be far away. The time between when Astaris had been seen taking them away, and when he had appeared on the outside platform, was too short.
"Go now, my people," the voice of the evangelist shouted outside. "Go now and pray for guidance, and return tomorrow night to seek once more for hope. I promise you that your children are safe tonight—the children of those of you who have seen the light and set the first foot on the path to redemption."
There sounded the chink of silver, as the baskets were brought back to Astaris—the silver that supplied the very motive about which Jack and Doc had puzzled. Now came the trample of many feet, as the crowd broke up. There was the scrape of Astaris' fingers on the canvas partition wall...
IN his coffin-like prison, Doc Turner heard the trample of
those same feet, like fading thunder. After awhile there came the
faint chink of silver... and then silence.
The silence did not last long. Something scraped on wood, above him and fingers fumbled there. Light dazzled Doc's eyes, suddenly, coming down from above. Then a narrow, pallid face peered down at him—a face framed in straggling black hair, and out of which black, burning eyes stared—evil triumph glittering within their depths.
"That's over," Astaris announced. "Now I can finish up with you and the kid."
There was unexpected strength in the slim-fingered hands. The thin arms reached down, and lifted Doc out of the box in which he had lain so long. They carried him to a chair near a red-glowing, pot-bellied stove. Doc saw that he was in the cut-off rear space of the mission tent. The canvas flooring had been rolled back to reveal a depression in which two long wooden boxes lay.
The lid of one box lay open. It was that out of which Doc had been taken. The evangelist was bending over the other one now.
"Queer," he was gloating, "how things worked out. I put these boxes, in which the tent canvas belongs, in here, just to even out some old pipe trench. I wanted my floor level, but now those boxes made a good place to stow you until the services were over."
He lifted Leo Bernstein in his arms, not bound or gagged. He set the boy on his feet. Leo stood quite still, a weird rigidity about him, as if he were asleep on his feet, with his eyes open.
Astaris' thin lips moved in a humorless smile. "Hypnotized, my dear Doctor Turner. A word from me, and he went into the trance. Post-suggestion, you understand. I hypnotized him yesterday, when I gave him the knife."
He went across to the book-stand, took a handful of newspapers from them, bent and placed a thick padding of these on the floor in front of Doc. "You ruined that one," he went on in that slow musing purr of his, "but I have another. See?" He took out of his pocket a replica of Leo's knife, opened its long, keen blade. "Unfortunately, I shall have to use it on you myself, because no hypnotic suggestion could make the boy kill you. You know that, of course."
He lifted Turner from the chair, laid him on the ground so that newspapers were under his head and the back of his shoulders. "No," he went on. "Leo would not cut your throat, thoroughly mesmerized though he is, but he will cut his own. You see, that is not against his nature. I convinced him—as I convinced the little Italian boy and the one they called Gast, and the German girl, that, alive, he is a handicap to the family he loves, and they would be better off if he were dead."
Doc gurgled against his gag. That was the explanation of how the children had been hypnotized into suicide!
"So I shall cut your throat," Astaris went on, "and the newspapers will keep the blood from my floor. I will take the gag and the ropes from you, and the boy will help me carry your body out into the lot. Then I shall hand the knife to him and he will cut his own throat. I will burn the newspapers in this stove. When you are found together, out there, tomorrow morning, the police will know exactly what happened—murder and suicide. And tomorrow night my baskets will be fuller than this evening for his people were not here tonight."
The knife was in his hand again. He was bending over Doc, the gleaming blade slowly lifting. The piercing eyes were on the old man's wrinkled throat. "Action now—"
Behind Astaris, the cot heaved upward. A red-headed thunderbolt catapulted from the floor beneath it. Some sixth sense twisted Astaris around, catlike, to meet that charge. Jack's fist slugged past the flailing knife, landed flush on the narrow, pallid face.
The gaunt body arced over Doc, slammed down on the other side. A scream gushed from the man's thin-lipped mouth, and blood gushed with it. An out-flung hand beat dully against the canvas—then was abruptly still.
"God," Jack grunted, white-faced. "He fell on his own knife. It went right into his lungs."
JACK turned slowly to Doc Turner, lying bound on the floor.
Gagged, Doc could not speak. But there was that in his faded-blue
eyes that brought a flush to Jack's cheeks.
"Hell, Doc," he said, as he knelt by the old man and started to work loose the rope knots, "maybe I wasn't too dumb hiding under the cot so's I could watch what the guy would do after he got rid of the crowd. But it was you who first figured out what he was up to."
The redhead grinned. "But the notes the kids were leaving should have been the tip-off that it might be hypnotism. One thing—it just goes to show you. They was only slum kids but they were ready to go the limit to help their folks. Who was it said something like, 'Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for those he loves'?"